Why we removed streaks
An early version of Okay Day had streaks, as most habit apps do. A streak counts how many days in a row you’ve done something. Exercise twelve days running and you have a twelve-day streak; miss a day and it goes back to zero. Streaks work, too. A number that grows every day is a good reason to come back tomorrow. We took them out anyway, because of what they do to the day you miss.
A missed day breaks the streak
Without a streak, missing Tuesday means you didn’t do the thing on Tuesday. With one, Tuesday also wipes out every day before it. If you did your routine on 99 of the last 100 days, you did it 99% of the time, and your streak says zero. That’s correct, and it’s a poor account of those hundred days.
Missing one day doesn’t undo a habit
A 2010 study from University College London looked at how habits form in everyday life. The researchers asked 96 volunteers to pick one thing to eat, drink or do every day in the same setting, and followed them for twelve weeks. How long a habit took to become automatic varied a lot, from 18 days to 254. Missing a single day, they found, made no real difference to how the habit formed.
That matches ordinary life. Sooner or later there’s a week with a cold in it, or a trip, and the habit you had before is still there when it’s over.
Streaks make you protect a number
Part of why streaks work is that people hate losing things. In their 1979 paper on prospect theory, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky put it in five words: “losses loom larger than gains”. A long streak is something to lose, and it gets heavier with every day you add. After a while you can find yourself going for the run mostly to keep the number alive. We’d rather you went because you wanted to.
Okay Day counts okay days instead
Each day gets its own ticket, with a hole for each thing you mean to do, up to five. You punch what you did. Tomorrow’s ticket starts clean, and nothing from today carries over as a debt.
A day when you punch everything on your ticket is an okay day, and the small print at the foot of the ticket keeps count: 47 Okay Days, say. A day you miss adds nothing to that number and takes nothing away.