Amelia Greenhall

Habit Formation Data Model

I’ve become really interested in the part of habit forming where you do something in increasing amounts, until you find the amount and timing that makes you feel amazing.

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Intention 

Doing something 1x 

Doing something in increasing amounts

Doing something regularly, at your minimum effective dose 

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“In increasing amounts” can mean different things, depending on the type of action.

There are unit actions that you only need to do once or twice a day, like weighing yourself or flossing. The law of decreasing returns kicks quickly. If  you weigh yourself once a day, eventually you’ll start to learn about your body and change your behavior accordingly. But if you weigh yourself ten times a day, you’ll probably get really anxious. Likewise for flossing - once a day and you’ll have pretty teeth, fifteen times a day and you’ll have bloody gums. So for unit actions, we are counting the number of units on a time scale of days or weeks. Flossing 10 days of the last 14 days is great!  

There are incremental actions, that you do a certain amount of per day (or week, or month). These things tend to have some minimum effective dose, which changes over time as you get more used to the action. Think pushups. Perhaps at first doing 8 per day is a challenge for you, but not for long. People using Budge have been moving up pretty quickly, and the general feeling is that it is surprising how many you can work up to after a few weeks. How do you plot that curve, to individualize the growth to a person? Setting the right starting point is important, but getting the slope of the curve correct is also crucial. You’ll quickly get bored or frustrated when either of those is wrong.