How To Start A Small Habit You Can Repeat

If there is no trial to tell you the right dose, the next best thing is a set of heuristics you can apply in ten seconds. These are heuristics, not findings.

• One decision, not a chain. Fifty sit-ups is one action. "Go to the gym" is a change of clothes, a journey, a locker, and a plan, any of which can be the thing that fails.
• Count the setup as part of the behaviour. If the drink of water takes three seconds and filling the bottle takes four minutes, the habit you are actually forming is four minutes long.
• Pick something you can do in the clothes you are wearing, at the point in the day you have chosen, without anyone else's cooperation.
• Ask what happens on the worst day of the month. If the answer is that the target is impossible, the target is wrong, not the day.

The last one is the one this app can help with, because the target is a number you set and can change.

Gardner, Lally and Wardle summarised the habit-formation work for general practitioners in 2012. Two of the three had run the study everyone cites. Their line on complexity is the quotable one: "Automaticity strength peaked more quickly for simple actions (for example, drinking water) than for more elaborate routines (for example, doing 50 sit-ups)."

That is the claim. Simpler behaviours reached their plateau sooner. It is a sentence from the people who collected the data, which makes it about as good as this literature gets.

The underlying comparison was small and inconclusive. In Lally's study, the median estimates were 65 days for eating, 59 for drinking and 91 for exercise, in groups of only 10 to 15 people. The difference was not statistically significant.

Those observations suggest a question worth testing; they do not establish that simpler actions always become automatic faster. How long habit formation takes explains the full study and why estimates varied.

Advice to begin with two push-ups or one page may be useful, but the studies cited here do not directly test that exact prescription or show that the behaviour will grow on its own. They also do not establish that celebrating immediately after an action is necessary for forming a habit.

Treat the starting dose as an experiment. If you keep missing it, change the cue, reduce the setup or choose a smaller action. If you repeat it comfortably and want to do more, increase it deliberately.

For a habit you want to build, choose Yes / No under Tracking if one check is enough. Define a small action in the name or description, such as reading one page, and check it off when you do it. A small target is easier to fit into a difficult day, even though no target guarantees that you will do it.

Choose Count to record several repetitions, or Measure to log an amount with a unit. Those tracking types expose Daily Goal. Start with a target you can usually reach rather than the most you can manage on a good day.

Changing Daily Goal or Streak Goal applies the new target from today. Earlier days keep their previous goals; there is no choice to rescore your whole history. Today's tile can change because today uses the new goal. Set daily goals and multiple completions covers the current controls.

The other lever is the shape of the goal itself. A Streak Goal set to Week with a target below seven leaves room for days off. It counts distinct days when you meet the daily goal, so three completions on one day cannot stand in for three successful days. Four out of seven can survive a bad Tuesday, provided you still reach four successful days that week. Take a day off without breaking your streak explains what the weekly goal absorbs and what it does not.

The demo's weekly goal requires three distinct days meeting the daily goal, leaving room for days off.

If the habit is new and you have not set any of this yet, install HabitKit and create your first habit walks through where these fields live.

Research on progress monitoring provides a reason to keep a record, without establishing that any particular app is effective.

Harkin and colleagues found 138 studies, 19,951 people in total, in which participants were randomly assigned either to an intervention that made them monitor their progress toward a goal or to a control condition. Monitoring interventions raised how often people checked their progress, d+ = 1.98, and raised goal attainment itself, d+ = 0.40, with a confidence interval of 0.32 to 0.48. The change in monitoring frequency mediated the effect, which is consistent with monitoring being part of the mechanism.

Two of their moderators are the reason a grid on a phone is not a silly object. Effects on goal attainment were larger when outcomes were reported or made public, and larger when the information was physically recorded.

The number to carry away is 0.40. That is a small to moderate effect, not a life rebuilt. The average result supports progress monitoring across the interventions studied. It is not an effect size for HabitKit, and it does not tell you which target to choose.

The practical argument for starting small is that it gives you more chances to repeat the action. Record what you actually do. Partial progress still belongs in the record, even when it falls short of the daily goal.

• Gardner, B., Lally, P., & Wardle, J. (2012). Making health habitual: the psychology of habit-formation and general practice. British Journal of General Practice, 62(605), 664-666. 10.3399/bjgp12X659466
• Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998-1009. 10.1002/ejsp.674
• Harkin, B., Webb, T. L., Chang, B. P. I., Prestwich, A., Conner, M., Kellar, I., Benn, Y., & Sheeran, P. (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 142(2), 198-229. 10.1037/bul0000025