My Duolingo streak is currently at 23701 days. I’m not proud of how much that number runs my life2 and there have been nights I’ve done a lesson at 11:58pm, half asleep, purely so a small cartoon flame doesn’t go out.
So why do streaks work so well? Partly because they turn a pile of unremarkable days into a single object you can lose. Behavioural economists call this loss aversion; losing something hurts roughly twice as much as gaining the same thing feels good. Once days 1 to 40 become “a streak”, skipping day 41 feels like the destruction of forty days of work.
Say you’re 95% reliable on any given day, which sounds excellent. The chance of a 365 day streak is or about 7 in a billion. To have even a coin flip chance of a full year, you need to be about 99.8% reliable, so missing roughly one day in 500. And if you do the thing on 90% of days, the longest streak you should expect across a whole year is only about five to six weeks.
Hence a streak is rare even for someone who is mostly consistent. But that’s the daily version. The streak I actually have on this blog is monthly3; at least one post per calendar month. That’s a completely different object and only needs one post somewhere inside a 28 to 31 day window, which means I could post on the 1st of one month and the 30th of the next and never break it.
Any regular reader of my blog can argue that this is a bit awkward since I’ve previously told you I don’t write on a schedule4 and that I’ve stopped apologising for it. But daily streaks suit things that need rhythm whereas monthly ones leave room to be spontaneous inside them. Having said that, the spontaneity was never in the timing but in the topic. More often than not my ideas come from conversations and I can’t schedule those. What I apparently can do is keep a loose pulse underneath them that doesn’t feel like a schedule because I never choose what goes in it.
As it’s Diwali today, the lamp is a better streak metaphor than the cartoon flame. A diya doesn’t have to burn brightly or burn forever and the point5 of the festival isn’t that nothing ever goes completely dark. My first post here was called Rekindling after all 🙂
🪔 Shubh Deepawali to all those celebrating today 🪔
- I have claimed various times in the past that I will stop once I’ve personally spoken to someone who’s got a higher streak than me ↩︎
- It’s roughly 6.5 years ↩︎
- I wanted to be fortnightly, but there exists other commitments so I must (learn to) priorities ↩︎
- You can cross-check the reference here: 31 Posts and a Violin I Haven’t Learned to Play ↩︎
- Or at least, one of the points of Diwali ↩︎
