Using Streaks for Motivation

by | Sep 21, 2017

This past week, I bought an app called Streaks. It cost $4.99 and, so far, it’s worth every penny.

The purpose of the app is to help you complete goals that you want to accomplish on a regular basis (most of mine are daily, but you can also do weekly as well).

Then you log the regularity of your habits and create “streaks” that you can track over time. The app allows you to create up to 12 habits to track — I bet you can guess how many I’m tracking.

Here’s my list:

  • 10k steps a day
  • 64 oz of water a day
  • brushing my teeth twice a day (this is especially useful on weekends when I don’t have a regular schedule)
  • taking medicine twice a day (a very helpful reminder for me when traveling)
  • posting to Instagram stories at least once a day (something I’m trying to do more of)
  • eating a salad or drinking a green smoothie at least once a day (to get in my veggies)
  • reading from a book once per day
  • going to bed by 9pm each night
  • stretching/foam rolling daily
  • practicing gratitude at least once per day (for me, this means verbalizing gratitude to another person in an intentional way)
  • vacuuming once per week
  • folding and putting away clean laundry once per week

So far, this has been a super helpful exercise in a few ways:

  1. The app forces me to choose. I have to decide the thing that I care the most about tracking. There were definitely more than 12, but these were the ones I wanted to prioritize the most
  2. The app helps me to see breakdowns. I can easily recognize the habits I have the most trouble with on a daily basis — in the last week, it’s been the Instagram posting and the book reading.
  3. The app serves as a reminder. Now, I’m not forgetting the things I want to prioritize. Since they are all listed in the app, I just check it a couple times a day to remind myself and see if I’m on track to meet my goals.
  4. The app holds me accountable. Numbers don’t lie — if I’m not meeting my goals for multiple days in a row, then I either need to adjust my schedule or change my goals.

I always like to reserve the majority of my brain space for creating, so when apps like this help me to track things simply and easily, I’m all-in.

To think on:

  • What apps have been helping you lately?
  • What habits would you track on the Streaks app?