Small Habits Last Longer

New Year's resolutions are always big. Two hours of exercise a day, one piece of writing a day. Then a week passes and usually nothing remains. The problem was not willpower but size. A big resolution demands the whole day. If one day goes slightly off, the entire resolution collapses.

Small habits are different. Three lines a day, one line a day, one photo a day. Make them small enough that you cannot fail, and there will be almost no day you fail to keep them. Even on a day you miss, the next day still has room to start again.

Lower the cost of failure

A habit usually breaks not on the first missed day but on the second. Once "I missed yesterday, so today too" takes hold, the habit is over. Lowering the cost of failure weakens that loop. If you write even one line today, the habit survives. One line lowers the threshold for starting again.

Looking at the consistent people I have met on site, the ones who lasted were not the ones with dramatic resolutions but the ones who repeated the same boring thing. Repetition is not dramatic, so it does not catch the eye, but after a few years the difference shows.

Applying it to a record

A daily record works on the same principle. Trying to write a finished piece every day will not last. Note down one thing you saw and one thing you learned, and on the weekend shape one of those into a short post. Reducing the size of each entry extends its life.

Small, often, long. Those three words are most of what a habit is.