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Habit forming is still hard

16 January, 2025

Last year I wrote about habit forming and the fact that I was going to use a physical device that used noticeable colour indicators (paper and felt tips) to keep track of one single habit - cycling every day - with the hope that making the habit tracking more obvious would help it stick.

Here's how I did (greens are "did it", reds are "didn't do it"):

photo of my year-long tracker

Pretty decent I think.

There were times when I was injured, ill or away from a bike - those all counted for "didn't do it" unless I did some other strenuous exercise that day to offset the lack of cycling (a minor cheat but OK for my purposes since cycling in the first place was to make sure I'm getting some exercise).

I'm not too bothered about streaks but in writing this blog post I worked out that my longest was 58 days - from the 20th January to the 17th March inclusive. That's much better than I expected!

The activity of colouring in my chart each day really did help cement the habit, as did the chart being visible from my office door which meant my family would comment on how well (or not!) I was doing.

I still found maintaining the habit really hard - by the time I got to my regular cycling time each day I had forgotten about it until I saw my wife starting her own exercise, which I used as the prompt to go and get on with my own. On days when she was away I did manage to keep it up from a mixture of routine and being reminded by seeing my chart during the day, but there were multiple days in 2024 when despite the hundreds of times I'd done it already, I simply forgot.

Fundamentally, this was a really good thing to do, and this is probably the most consistent I've ever been with any activity that I've chosen to do over such an extended period of time.

I was partly inspired to do all this in the first place by Simon Willison writing about streaks last year - he's just finished his 2024 streak too, so you can go check out how he did.

For reference, I got my year-long tracker printout from CalendarLabs - time to print another for 2025!

See other posts tagged with habits cycling bike and all posts made in January 2025.