I completely agree. If you just look at it as a system, it’s completely unstable. When do I most need support in my habits? When something goes wrong and I miss a day. When does a streak system completely remove all support and pile on a bunch of negativity? When something goes wrong and I miss a day.

Streaks seem to be good at taking you from 99% compliance to 100%, but that’s not the problem most people face.

What has worked way better for me is to take the world a week at a time. I track my compliance across all of my habits. It’s usually only like 75%, but I bet you most people aren’t hitting that. Then I meet someone for up to 30 minutes once a week. She’s not an accountability buddy (also an unstable system). She’s a project manager. We talk about what’s going wrong and how to fix it, or what’s going well and how to keep it. Done it all year and it has helped tremendously.

Back to streaks, I had an idea for streaks that still give you a goal, but they’re not so huge. So you reach for the next number in the powers of 2 or Fibonacci sequence, and your streak counter starts over when you hit it. Then you’re not trying to preserve your one precious streak, you’re just setting a new record. “I did 128, let’s see if I can hit 256!”.

A system that relies on things being ideal is likely to fail indeed. An alternative that works better than "Don't break the chain" is "Start again with the smallest and easiest step you can think of".

Hypothetical example: If you were working on running 21km and worked your way up to 14km but stopped for some reason. You could get started again with a short walk or just getting dressed to go for a walk.

For daily habits, I often deliberately exclude one day of the week so I have practice picking up the habit again after a missed day.

That's why I like weekly goals. Fuck up one week? Doesn't matter, once Monday hits, everything resets and you start over.

Agreed, it leads to defeatist approach. Had that with my streak on Duolingo.