🌱Minimum viable habit

The smallest version of a habit that still counts as doing it: the version that fits a bad day. It is decided in advance and written down, so that at 22:40 there is nothing to negotiate.

The idea is common habit advice and has no single author I can point to. What made me take it seriously is one result in 🔬 How are habits formed - Modelling habit formation in the real world: missing a single opportunity did not measurably set back how automatic a behaviour became. A habit is built from repetitions in a stable context. A small repetition is still a repetition, and a kept context is worth more than a heroic session.

• It protects the cue, not the output.
• It is a floor. It is not the plan.

Often confused with: lowering the goal. The ordinary amount stays the ordinary amount. Also with never miss twice, which is a rule about recovery. This is a rule about what counts.

Where I have seen it

🔹 Write 300 words. The minimum version is one sentence. It is why the habit survived the week of the slip in February in any form at all.

The cost, honestly: it has produced sentences written at ten to eleven at night, for no reader, to keep a box from staying empty. A floor can turn into a way of gaming my own tracker.

My rule about the misses themselves is a separate note, 💎 One missed day does not break a habit: one is noise, two are a decision.