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Comment by JackMorgan | Hacker News Reader

I know it may elicit eye rolls, but I love using Github's built in "streak" feature for this exact thing. Best of all, it is public and motivating. I agree that it is hard to do something highly valuable on a green field project everyday, so I often work through exercises from textbooks (right now I am in the middle of SICP) to fill in days when I would otherwise just be directionless. I used to feel guilty for not "doing enough" to advance my career, and would "binge code" whenever the guilt built up too much, but now I feel so much more confident and relaxed, knowing I'm putting in a sustainable amount of high quality reading and practicing every day.

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But how can we use that streak feature to do some non-programming things like exercising, flossing the tooth etc? I think it fits for our side projects a lot but nothing more than that.

There is an app in App store called 'Commit' (Nathan Barry's) which does that.

Sure, I never meant to say it works for other things outside programming. I was just pointing out a tool I have used that I felt might help out someone who was just interested in programming (this being a largely tech-centered site) and not exercising or cleaning. I also use it for writing, since my blog is backed up on github. If it doesn't meet your needs, no problem, Commit sounds great too.

I use an app called Lift (https://lift.do/). It allows you check in to habits you want to form, it notifies you if you're on a streak, and you can look at historical graphs for your weekly and monthly rates. Makes it really easy for me to see if I'm falling off (or doing well) in exercise, my side projects, etc. (I'm not affiliated with Lift)

I built a web app to do something like this for myself. Now slowly rolling it out to users other than myself.

https://jots.me

It's not as visual as the Seinfeld calendar but it works great for what I use it for. I use it to record what I've done for work, my side projects, exercise logs, etc. I even use it to roughly track expenses.

It keeps me motivated to keep adding entries for my projects, so I guess that helps with procrastination. At the least it gets me to do something daily so it can be recorded.

based on the old "calendar about nothing" site that eventually became Github's streak feature. I built http://nothingcalendar.com/ to track working on one of my goals every day. Haven't worked on it for years, but still works well for tracking simple streaks.

It's not stupid at all. I've been using three language learning apps and they all have streak features. That feature is helping me maintain a level of commitment far greater than I ever would have done if I said "well I'll just study big next time".

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