Blog · Essay
The checkbox was making me lie to myself every night
Two years of tracking steps as done or not done, and the worst part was the argument at eleven every night about whether 9,300 counts.
Bohdan Stefaniuk · · 3 min read
For about two years my step habit lived in a checkbox. 10,000 steps, done or not done.
The part I never see anyone talk about is what happened around eleven every night. I’d open the app, see 9,300, and have a small argument with myself about whether to tick it. 9,300 is basically 10,000, right? I’d tick it. Then I’d feel a bit gross, because I’d just moved the line to wherever I happened to be standing.
Other nights it was 7,000. And 7,000 on a day where I had back-to-back calls until six and got outside exactly once, at 10pm, in the rain, is a far better day than 9,300 on a Saturday when I walked to a cafe and back twice. But 7,000 isn’t close enough to fudge. So I’d leave it blank and lose the streak.
Which means the checkbox had made me a judge, every night, and I was a bad judge. Rounding up on easy days, punishing myself on hard ones.
Exactly backwards.
What I changed: store the number, put a floor under it
I stopped storing yes/no and started storing the number, with a floor under it. The habit is now just “walk”, minimum 3,000. Anything at or above 3,000 counts as a day I showed up. 7,000 counts. 12,000 counts, and it’s obviously a better day, and I can see that in the data instead of having it flattened into the same tick mark. There’s no nightly argument anymore, because there’s nothing to decide. I just write down what happened.
The gym went the same way
The old version was an hour, four times a week. I’d miss Wednesday, then skip Thursday because the week was already ruined, then not go back for a month. The new version is “train”, minimum ten minutes. Ten minutes of pushups on the kitchen floor is a green day. It feels like cheating, and it isn’t, because the thing that keeps a habit alive is going back, not the hour.
The tidy explanation is that habits are connections between neurons, and connections get stronger from firing often rather than firing hard. I think that’s roughly right. I also notice it’s a very convenient story for a guy who wants permission to do ten minutes instead of sixty, so take it as a description of what worked for me rather than a mechanism I’ve proven.
If your tracker only knows done and not done, it will lie to you at both ends.
Pick the number you’d still hit on your worst day
Not an average day. The worst one, with the delayed flight and the sick kid. That’s your floor. Everything above it is just a better day, and your tracker should be able to tell the difference.