Shift work, so there is no fixed morning and no reliable evening either. I want three things to stick: ten minutes of stretching, twenty minutes of language practice, and not taking my phone to bed. I have tried three apps, kept each for two to five weeks, and abandoned all of them the first week I worked nights. Describe your actual system, including what it looks like on a bad week.
Shift worker here, and the specific fix for shifts is to anchor habits to events rather than clock times. Not stretch at 7am, but stretch after I hang my badge on the hook. Not language at 8pm, but language while the kettle boils on the first drink after waking, whenever waking happens.
My three anchors are the badge hook, the kettle, and putting my phone on the charger in the kitchen, which is the third habit rather than an anchor for it. Clock based habits die the first week your clock changes, which for us is every fortnight.
This transfers to anyone with an irregular life, not just shift workers. Parents of small children in particular. The clock is a fiction, the sequence of events is real.
One habit, one cue, one page. Add the second when the first happens without you deciding.
Index card. One card per week, in my pocket, with three rows and seven boxes. That is the whole system.
The part that makes it work is the Sunday five minutes where I look at last week's card and write the next one. Not a review in the productivity sense, just: which of these actually happened, and what do I want on the card this week. Sometimes a row gets dropped. Sometimes a row gets smaller.
Apps failed me for the reason they failed you. They are excellent at recording that you failed and they have no mechanism for renegotiating. A card you rewrite weekly is a system that renegotiates by default.
Renegotiating by default is the phrase I have been missing. The apps made the target permanent and me the variable.
The weekly rewrite is doing more work than the tracking. I stopped tracking entirely for six months and kept only the Sunday page and the habits survived fine.
Eight habits at once in a beautifully constructed dashboard, with rollups and streak counters and a weekly automation. Kept it for six weeks. Zero of the eight habits survived, and I could tell you precisely how many I had failed. The system was the hobby.
Mild heresy: I stopped tracking altogether and it was the thing that finally worked. Tracking became its own habit, and the satisfying part became the ticking rather than the doing, which is why missing two days felt like the project was over.
What replaced it was moving objects. The mat stays unrolled on the floor. The phone charger lives in the kitchen and there is no cable in the bedroom. The language app is the only thing on my home screen. There is nothing to abandon because there is nothing to maintain.
@notetaking_ivo · 7mo ago
Fourteen months of a two column notebook, so here is what the data actually looked like. Left column what I intended, right column what happened. Completion was about 80 percent on regular weeks and around 45 percent on weeks with travel or illness, and the thing that predicted whether a habit survived a bad week was not motivation, it was whether the smallest version of it was written down. Ten minutes of stretching has a two minute version. Twenty minutes of language has a single lesson version. Nights I only did the small version still counted, and that is why nothing ever hit zero.
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