Connoisseurs of productivity porn, which we’re afraid to say this blog may count as, probably know about the Seinfeld Hack, also known as Don’t Break The Chain. The idea’s so simple (in a good way) that you don’t even need to follow the link to LifeHacker [UPDATE: Jerry Seinfeld has disavowed this so boo LifeHacker for spreading lies!] where the idea originated. It’s merely the psychological trick of getting yourself to do something every day by looking at the chain of X’s for the days in a row you’ve done it so far. If you build up a nice streak then it would feel like a shame to break it. So you don’t.
We agree that Don’t Break The Chain can be remarkably powerful — but only once you have a long chain to not break. Until then there’s a catch-22: you can sometimes keep failing again and again indefinitely, never building up the motivating chain. And that problem repeats every time the chain breaks. So you’re always in a precarious situation where one bad day can precipitate many more bad days, where you go down a slippery slope of “one more day won’t hurt; I’ll get a new chain started tomorrow”.
The Seinfeld hack’s greatest strength is also its fatal flaw. Once you do break the chain, all the motivation it provided bursts like a bubble.
There’s also the problem of inflexibility. What if you need to do something consistently but not literally daily? At least one Don’t Break The Chain app we know of mitigates this problem by letting you specify days of the week that don’t count and showing you your chain as unbroken as long as you do the thing on all the days that do count.
Beeminder simultaneously turns the flexibility to 11 and magnifies the subtle psychological pull of the Seinfeld hack into raw unassailable motivation.
With Beeminder you can commit to maintaining a certain average, like 3.5 workouts per week (or 3 blog posts per month — see the sidebar of this blog). It doesn’t matter what days of the week, and, critically, you can build up a safety buffer and then take some time off, without the danger that that will lead you down a slippery slope of sloth. With Beeminder’s yellow brick road you’ve precommitted to not let your overall average dip too far. (If you do, we literally charge your credit card. [1])
If the rate you want to maintain is exactly 7 per week — 6.9 is unacceptable — and if you can sustain that long term, then Don’t Break The Chain may be perfect. Everything else you should beemind!
Footnote
[1] Did you just mouth “what??” and rush to this footnote to see if we’re serious? Then welcome, Newbee, to the Beeminder blog. We’re totally serious! It’s initially $0 at risk but the second time you fail to keep all your datapoints on the yellow brick road to your goal, we charge you real money. For some people, avoiding putting money at risk is itself powerful motivation. That’s fine with us. If Beeminder is as life-changing for you as it is for some of our users we figure you’ll find a way to pay us eventually. Probably by beeminding more and more things more and more ambitiously, to the point where occasional derailments are no big deal and are worth it.
[UPDATE 2018: We originally put it like this, before deciding to require a payment method from the start: “We’re totally serious! Although you don’t have to put in a credit card until the first time you fail to keep all your datapoints on the yellow brick road to your goal. For some people, avoiding giving Beeminder their credit card is itself powerful motivation.”]