PEAK: Build a Habit by Starting a Streak

Cal Ripken Jr. holds a Major League Baseball (MLB) record for playing in 2,632 consecutive games between 1982 and 1998. It is hard to imagine Ripken would never have missed a game during those seventeen seasons without everyone monitoring how many he had played in a row. 

Cal’s example provides a powerful lesson. One of the best ways to reinforce a behavior that you want to start or stop doing is to start a streak of your own.

Think of the psychology involved with a streak. As your streak gets longer, you build more momentum. The price for stopping also gets larger.

Let me share a personal example. In May 2014, I had an idea for a book about the connection between stronger habits and higher performance at work. This idea eventually became my 2018 book titled Work Stronger: Habits for More Energy, Less Stress, and Higher Performance at Work. 

At that time, I was not writing consistently. I was working around fifty hours each week at Heidrick & Struggles, a global management consulting firm, and did not feel like doing more work in my free time outside of my full-time job. 

I wanted to write more, though, so I started a writing streak and committed to writing for thirty minutes every day for thirty straight days. 

Why thirty minutes a day? It felt right to me. More than that felt overwhelming, given my other commitments at the time. Less than that felt insignificant.

My writing streak began on Monday, June 2, 2014. It was not easy, but I wrote for thirty minutes every day for the next thirty days. The result at the end of the month was more than 15,900 words. This output was far superior to the previous months and much higher than if my goal had simply been to write more.

One of the main reasons most goals and change efforts fail is that people set vague objectives. People say they want to write more, be healthier, enjoy life more, or work less. 

While these are worthy pursuits, these objectives are unlikely to materialize because they are too ambiguous. In contrast, starting a streak for a specific behavior is a tangible, much more effective way to accelerate your progress.

Streaks can be intentionally brief and used to accelerate progress for a short period, like my June 2014 writing streak. Alternatively, streaks can be designed to permanently change your behavior and sustain high performance. 

Here are three tips for starting streaks:

1. Establish clear rules for your streak before you begin. 

Give yourself permission to decide after thirty days (or some other amount of time) if you want to continue your streak. That way, you will not feel like a failure if you decide later to stop. 

You should also decide whether your streak will be for every day or only for certain days. A daily streak is the cleanest approach, but yours could be for all weekdays or all weekend days. 

Another option is to start a weekly streak. For example, I once had a weekly streak of more than 250 straight weeks of publishing one new article. Without starting and tracking this streak, there is no way my weekly writing habit would have lasted so long.

2. Start your day by extending your streak. 

If you want to start a streak for a behavior that you will do (as opposed to one that you will avoid), complete the behavior as early in the day as possible. If you wait until later in the day, you are more likely to forget about it, run into a conflict, or lose motivation to keep it going. 

3. Keep the behavior to thirty minutes or less.

Thirty minutes felt like the right amount of time for my June 2014 writing streak. Still, you could start a streak for a behavior that takes only a few minutes each day. You could also start a streak unrelated to a period of time. For example, you could start a streak to plan each workday in advance.

Streaks hold you accountable, help you build new habits, and achieve better results faster.

What behavior could you start a streak for?

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