The powerful trick I use to accomplish my goals

There are two things I am proud of accomplishing in my life. The first, learning to program, took several years. The second, writing and publishing a book, took over a year. Both required hard work, but the biggest challenge was avoiding giving up on the tasks I had to complete every day, for months and years, to achieve my objective. The hardest part about picking up a new skill like programming isn’t the difficulty of the material: it is sticking with it. Sticking with it is something I struggled with for years until I finally learned a trick called Don’t Break the Chain. Now, I use Don’t Break the Chain to achieve long-term goals, like learning a new skill or writing a new book, and short-term ones like drinking more water.

Enter Don’t Break the Chain

Don’t Break the Chain was invented by Jerry Seinfeld. He came up with it when he was crafting his first stand-up comedy routine. First, he hung a calendar up in his room. Then, at the end of each day, if he wrote a joke, he would give himself a green check mark (actually it was a red x, but I like green checkmarks better) on the calendar for that day. That’s it. That is the entire trick, and it is incredibly powerful. Once you start a chain (two or more green check marks in a row), you will not want to break it. Two green check marks in a row become five green check marks in a row. Then ten. Twenty. The longer your streak gets, the harder it will be for you to break it. Imagine it is the end of the month, and you are looking at your calendar. You have twenty-nine green checkmarks. You only need one more for a perfect month. There is no way you won’t accomplish your task that day. Or as Jerry Seinfeld describes it,

“After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain."

My dedication to preserving one of my chains has led me to do crazy things, like going to the gym in the middle of the night, just to keep it intact. There is no better feeling than looking back at the calendar page containing your first perfect month and seeing thirty or more green checkmarks. If you are ever in a rut, you can always look back at that page, and think about the month where you did everything right.

Motivation is Overrated

The key to sticking with anything is to develop habits. Olympic medalist Jim Ryun best described this with,

“Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.”

You can only expect motivation to carry you so far, but habits can last a lifetime. If you want to accomplish long-term goals, you need to excel at developing new habits, and Don’t Break the Chain is the best system for nurturing new habits into ones that will last forever.

Take it to the Next Level

Using a paper calendar for Don’t Break the Chain is fine, but if you want to step your game up, you can keep track of your streaks with an app called Productive (or Loop if you are on Android). I use it every day, and it has changed my life. Productive allows you to set daily, weekly, and monthly habits. When you’ve completed all of your habits for the day, it rewards you with a green circle. It also keeps track of your current streak.

You will have to try the app yourself to experience how satisfying building a chain of these green circles is.

Being able to set weekly and monthly goals is a huge advantage over using a paper calendar. Before I started using Productive, I was able to pick up new daily habits using Don’t Break the Chain, but I always struggled with weekly or monthly habits. For example, with a paper calendar, don’t Break the Chain won’t help you pick up a monthly habit like going to the sauna or taking an ice bath. The productive app, however, let’s you create new monthly habits, and at the end of each month, you won’t get a perfect day unless you complete them all. This small change makes a big different. Now I can pick up weekly and monthly habits just as quickly as daily habits, and having weekly and monthly habits is just as important as having daily ones.

Give it a Try

Next time you need to accomplish a goal, here is how to approach it using Don’t Break the Chain. First, break the goal into the daily, weekly, and monthly tasks you need to complete to achieve it. If you are learning to program, for example, your habits might look like this:

Daily

1. Read a technical book for one hour.

2. Practice solving problems for thirty minutes.

Weekly

1. Work on building a side project for two hours.
2. Ask questions about anything you are confused about on StackOverflow or in the Self-Taught Programmers Facebook group.

Monthly

1. Do a code review with a more experienced programmer.

Next, input all of your daily, weekly, and monthly habits into the Productive app. That’s all there is to it. Now you only need to do one thing to succeed: execute all of the tasks in your productive app, every day. Whenever I set a new goal, I always do something that day to make it happen, so if you have a goal in mind, try to get your first perfect day today. Don’t procrastinate. Once you’ve entered your habits, you can start racking up perfect days and building your chains. Every day your chain grows in length will give you more momentum. Before you know it, you will have accomplished your goal.

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