If you read this post on the web, you’ll see an “Archives” section in the sidebar, where you can select any month and see the posts that I made that month. If you look closely, you’ll see that I’ve now posted at least once a month for 62 consecutive months. That’s been my goal for years, and I try really hard to have something worthwhile to say every month so I don’t break the streak.

Before the streak, there were only three months with posts between September 2017 and February 2020, including none in 2018. But before that, I think the streak goes all the way back to December 2005 (I haven’t actually checked). That would be something like 140 consecutive months with at least one post. If you’re wondering how deep the rabbit hole goes, this is post #548, and there are more than 375,000 words here. That’s a lot of blah-blah-blah. But back to the streak:

I’m motivated by momentum. When I was in 7th grade, I started a “going to school” streak. I went every day, without fail. As the years went on, I had to go to school because I couldn’t break the streak. The first day I missed was in the second semester of my junior year in college, eight years after the streak started. In the years when I had streaks of 10,000 steps per day, there were many nights when I’d walk around the house at bedtime to get those last couple hundred steps in so I didn’t break the streak. Reddit does a great job of reminding you to interact with the platform every day by keeping track of your streak. Duolingo does the same thing, to the point of obnoxious reminders when you don’t check in with the app. I remember my wife and daughter working hard years ago to maintain their Snapchat streak. There’s something intensely motivating about not stopping the thing you’ve been doing for a long time.

From a customer engagement perspective, streaks are hard to beat. They keep people coming back. They form routines, so returning to the service becomes a habit. They give people a sense of accomplishment. And they create a sense of loss aversion. People don’t want to see that streak number go back to one, even if it doesn’t really mean anything.

From an instructional perspective, streaks are one way to gamify practice. For routine things — spelling practice, multiplication tables, typing practice — this approach is very effective. But even the self-discipline of doing something every day makes you better. If you write a poem every evening before bed, your poems will get better. The same is true if you practice the piano or shoot 20 free throws or intentially practice mindfulness. Consistency and repetition is the key to getting better, and streaks help us do that.

But we have to be careful that the streak isn’t our only motivation. When I was playing Wordle, my streak was somewhere around 500 when I finally failed to solve one of the puzzles. Once the streak was broken, I never played again I didn’t care about the game. I just cared about the streak. When I gave up Reddit (and all social media) for Lent, I lost my streak. I haven’t been tempted to go back. My motivation wasn’t coming from engaging with those services. The motivation was just trying to maintain the streak.

We used to use Accelerated Reader to get kids to read more. They’d read books and take quizzes and get points and win certificates and free pizza and other prizes. It worked really well. Our kids read a lot of books. But as soon as the pizza went away, so did their motivation to read. Research ended up showing that the long-term effect of programs like these was to decrease pleasure reading over the long term. That’s because we rarely made the transition from “reading for points” to “reading because I love to read”. The streak is a bridge to encourage habits, but the real motivation has to come from the activity itself.

I hate exercise. So I can streak my way into a month of fitness, or 100 days of increased movement, or (God help me) a couch to 5K. But unless I grow to love the activity, I’m going to stop as soon as the streak inevitably breaks. And that starts a new streak, a streak of inactivity. And that one is just as powerful.