✦
Experiments

Habit builderThe habit is not the problem.
The design is.

Habits do not fail from lack of willpower, they fail from missing parts. Four things reliably decide whether a new behaviour survives: whether it is attached to something you already do, whether it has a version small enough for a bad day, whether it lives at a specific time and place, and whether you have decided in advance what happens when you miss.

Free, no sign-up. Worked out in your browser, nothing sent anywhere, and the result imports into EvyOS.

Name the habit.

Everything is worked out in this page and saved in this browser only. Nothing is sent anywhere.

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✦ How to use it

Three things that make it work.

1
Attach it to something that already happens

An existing habit is a reliable cue. An intention is not.

2
Set the floor absurdly low

The minimum version is what carries the habit through illness and travel. One page. Five minutes.

3
Decide the recovery rule now

Not if you miss — when. Habits die at the second consecutive miss, not the first.

Almost every abandoned habit is missing at least two of those, and the person concludes they are not disciplined. They were not un-disciplined; they were running an under-specified plan.

This assembles the four and tells you which are still missing. It is not motivational — it is closer to a checklist, and that is what makes it useful.

✦ The limit

An answer is not a record.

This works something out and then forgets it. It cannot tell you whether the number moved, because it has no memory of the last time you ran it and no idea what you did in between. Every calculator on the internet has that limit, and if it has never bothered you then this one is yours for free for good.

EvyOS is the same structure with the work recorded against it. Send the result across and it becomes real goals, tasks or habits with their dates — then the next answer is computed from what actually happened rather than from what you remember typing.

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✦ Questions

Habit builder, answered.

Four things: an existing cue it attaches to, a version small enough for a bad day, a specific time and place, and a decided-in-advance rule for what happens when you miss. Most abandoned habits were missing at least two, and the person concluded they lacked discipline.
Attaching a new behaviour to one that already happens reliably — after I put my phone on charge, I read a page. The existing habit supplies the cue, which is the part an intention cannot provide.
Because streaks break on the day you were ill or travelling. A habit with a defined floor survives those days; one without a floor ends on them, and the ending is almost always framed afterwards as a personal failure.
The median is about 66 days with a very wide range depending on how demanding the behaviour is. The 21-day figure comes from a 1960 observation about amputees adjusting to prosthetics and was never about habits at all.
Never miss twice. One miss is a day; two consecutive misses is where the pattern reverts. If you take one thing from the page, take that.

Keep the answer.
And the record of doing it.

Goals, projects, tasks, habits and skills in one system, with the work logged against what it belonged to.

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