#goals, streaks and my #motivation

Goals are fun. Streaks are not. Here’s why!

As some people may know, I have a fitness tracker strapped on my wrist. I sync it up with the vendor’s app that sends data to Google Fit. Both vendor’s app and Google have some motivation features built into their apps, like goals and such. Some work on me, some don’t.

An example of a great goal is Google Fit. It has both daily and weekly activity goals. Daily ones you set yourself (the app sometimes recommends to adjust them based on statistics), weekly goals are 150 minutes of moderate intensity activity, quantified as Heart Points. This goal is fairly easy to reach if you’re poor like me (I try to save money on share taxis, of all things - less than 50¢ per ride but adds up pretty quickly) but maybe have a gym membership (student discounts!).

A bad type of a motivational feature in my opinion is a streak. Don’t reach your goal - the streak resets. This makes me stressed out about having a break on some days because streaks are way too unforgiving for my lifestyle. For example, I mostly did housekeeping tasks this day, they don’t involve a lot of physical activity (not the kind that can burn a lot of energy) but are still important.

This unforgiveness demotivates me. Why push hard if it’s all gonna be wasted in the end? Even Duolingo probably pushes a bit too hard (I have some experience with the app), though for a reason - learning or repeating something in a different language every day may help you learn that language.

Motivation is a weird thing. And it’s probably very personal to an individual. Mine may be extra weird due to the fact that I’m weird. What works for you may not work for me and vice versa, but maybe something works for us all?