Katy Milkman: Jerry Seinfeld created one of the most memorable and hilarious TV sitcoms of all time. He's also one of the most successful standup comedians of all time. And while there are many different factors that contribute to his success, one is undoubtedly his dedication to writing. In fact, one of the most famous productivity hacks, which is attributed to Seinfeld, is the "Don't break the chain" technique. The story goes that as a young aspiring comedian, Seinfeld had a goal to write every day. He had a calendar in his apartment, and every single day, no matter how he was feeling, he would write. When he was done, he'd mark a big red X on that date on his calendar. Soon he had a chain of red Xs on this calendar that served as a reminder of the effort he had put in and the motivation to keep going. His mantra became "Don't break the chain."
In a 2020 New York Times profile, Seinfeld talked about how he still writes every day. In this episode, we're going to explore the motivational power of tactics like Seinfeld's, which are most often called streaks. And we'll look at ways to alleviate the demotivating effects of breaking a streak. I'm Dr. Katy Milkman, and this is Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. It's a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. We bring you true and surprising stories about real choices, and then we examine how these stories connect to the latest research in behavioral science. We do it all to help you make better judgments and avoid costly mistakes.
Tom Vickery: When you upload it to Strava, you'll see a little red line that traces out the root that the person's taken. So that's why it's a bit unusual when you run in the middle of the sea.
Katy Milkman: This is Tom Vickery.
Tom Vickery: I'm based in Cambridge in the U.K., and I run every day.
Katy Milkman: Tom logs his daily runs in Strava, the fitness mapping app. And he really does run every single day, even on vacations.
Tom Vickery: So yeah, I was taking a holiday to Portugal. I chose to take the two-day ferry from England all the way down to the top of Spain. I realized that, within that journey, I was going to have to try and get a run on the ferry, and there's no treadmills or things like that, so I scouted out the top deck, so it's exposed to the elements on the top deck. You get outside, and there was a U-shaped loop that I looked at, and thought I could run down there, and there's probably 150 to 200 meters. So I thought I'd best do that early in the morning when there's nobody around.
Fortunately, the weather, it wasn't raining, but it was quite cold out there. It wasn't particularly pleasant. It was in the middle of winter, so there's no people out sightseeing. I just got up in the morning, ran loops of the deck for half an hour, which is always the minimum. I set myself for half an hour. You're doing 50 meters running into the wind because of the boat's going forward, and then 50 meters running back to the wind. So I had a very interesting dynamic of running. And you've got the sway of the boat a little bit as well.
Katy Milkman: You can imagine how odd this run looked to friends and followers when it was logged and mapped out in the Strava running app. Both the shape of it …
Tom Vickery: It looks like someone's running in the sea in spirals.
Katy Milkman: And the pace.
Tom Vickery: They had combined speed of the ferry and me, even though sometimes I'm running against the ferry, which levels it a little bit.
Katy Milkman: And even though this run was probably the oddest one for its location, it's nowhere near the most challenging one Tom has set out to do.
Tom Vickery: I've done multiple Ironmans and ultra runs. I did a 100-mile race about a month ago, and that in itself is quite crazy. But then the next day you're trying to run, but your legs have just been utterly destroyed. They've been some of the most extreme ones, day after big days.
Katy Milkman: The reason Tom runs on ferries and right after he's done ultra marathons, the reason he runs every day regardless of illness or injury, is to maintain a streak. Tom's been running every single day since August 11th, 2019, logging his runs in Strava each time. It started as a personal challenge during a difficult time in his life, and it was only supposed to be one month of daily running.
Tom Vickery: And that just led to two months and three months and four months, and then I was like, I might do it for the whole year, and then it spiraled out. It's very hard to stop once you get past a year.
Katy Milkman: Tom isn't alone in his commitment to a streak. Whether running or playing online games, lots of people become very attached to logging their daily habits.
Chloë Hamilton: This was one story where I really felt like I got a reaction from everyone. Everyone was really interested or had their own story of a streak. So it elicited ideas and emotions and opinions in ways that other articles that I've done haven't.
Katy Milkman: Chloë Hamilton is a freelance journalist. And in September of last year, she wrote an article about streaks for The Guardian newspaper in the U.K.
Chloë Hamilton: What really struck me, and what I thought was really interesting, is that there was streaks from Wordle, Duolingo, Snapchat, meditation streaks, journaling streaks. There was someone who had kissed her husband every day for a decade or so. There was a real range, a broad spectrum of people that used streaks in some way in their life.
Katy Milkman: Chloë spoke with almost 50 people about their streak behavior. Many stories were positive. People loved the motivation and routine. She spoke with one woman who logged a daily journal.
Chloë Hamilton: At the time I spoke to her, it was 1,541 days she'd been writing in her journal. And she said that she found her journal really helpful. She loved it. She said it was her choice to do it. She gets loads from it. She really likes looking back on what she's done, and it gives her this sense of purpose.
Katy Milkman: Other people Chloë interviewed started their streaks by doing something they wanted to every day. But before long, maintaining the streak itself became the focus.
Chloë Hamilton: Sometimes it's the streak itself, the dopamine hit of maintaining the streak, that is the bit that people love. And sometimes it's just because they really enjoy the thing that they're doing.
Katy Milkman: Some people took their streaks very seriously, even when the habit itself was not terribly important.
Chloë Hamilton: One person that I spoke to went to some quite extreme lengths to maintain a Wordle streak that she was on.
Katy Milkman: Wordle, if you're not familiar, is a word puzzle game where you have six chances to try to guess a five-letter word with no initial clues.
Chloë Hamilton: She loved it. But she once drove a mile out of her village during a power cut just so she could get the signal so that she could do the word game and hold onto her streak. She'd worked so hard to get it. And even she said that she thought that she was a bit mad at the time when she was doing it, but it didn't stop her doing it.
Katy Milkman: Digital apps make it easy to track streaks. They're social. You can share your progress with friends, and they're designed to keep you coming back.
Alison Nicholson: If you haven't used it by a certain time, you get a notification from the little Duo owl.
Katy Milkman: This is Alison Nicholson. She moved to Spain in 2018 for her husband's job.
Alison Nicholson: When I moved to Spain, I knew absolutely no Spanish whatsoever. So that's one reason why I started with Duolingo.
Katy Milkman: Duolingo is a well-known language learning app. I use it myself, and I'm happy to report my current streak stands at 1,065 days in counting. Duolingo offers bite-sized language lessons and encourages you to return every day to work on the next set of exercises. Alison used it every now and then when she first moved to Spain, but when the pandemic began in 2020, she really leaned into using the app.
Alison Nicholson: And it's only when lockdown started and I had a lot more time on my hands, and that's when I started using it every day. And that's when I got into the, well, the streak habit really.
Katy Milkman: That's a key point, there's the motivation to learn the language, and then there's the motivation to keep up the streak.
Alison Nicholson: There've been a few times where I've suddenly thought, "Oh my God, it's quarter to midnight. I haven't done it today," And I've had to just rush a quick lesson in to keep it.
Katy Milkman: Alison kept that streak going and finished the entire Spanish course. Interestingly, she keeps at it—partly for the practice but partly just for the streak.
Alison Nicholson: Because my streak when I finished the whole course was well over 1,000 days, I kind of kept on with the practice sessions because I just felt so hard of losing the streak at that stage.
Katy Milkman: Adding to her motivation and her fear of breaking her streak are the notifications from Duolingo's mascot, a little owl named Duo.
Alison Nicholson: … saying something along the lines of, "Oh, it would be a shame to lose that streak." And then it kind of makes you think, "Oh, I better go on and do my lesson because I don't want to upset the owl." It's a love-hate relationship with that owl, I have to say.
Katy Milkman: Love it or hate it, that owl can be motivating to a point.
Alison Nicholson: I am seriously giving thought to hitting 1,500 and then saying enough because I'm not learning anything new from it. I'd be better off going out and just chatting to people in my village. I can learn more from real-world interaction.
Katy Milkman: Logging daily habits can be really helpful for some people. Daily exercise is great, unless you're hurting yourself. Practicing a new language is great, unless you're not actually learning anything new. Streaks are great until they're not. And Chloë Hamilton discovered that they're not for everyone, and they're probably not for her.
Chloë Hamilton: I think I have far too much of an obsessive personality to engage with streaks at all. Having looked into it more, I now know for sure that it probably isn't something that would be a good idea for me because I think I would become obsessive. I think I could become addicted to it. I think it might begin to consume my life in an unhealthy way.
Katy Milkman: Chloë gained some insight into the appeal of streaks in her many conversations with people who use them, loved them, or were obsessed by them.
Chloë Hamilton: Maybe there's something about human nature that we just love that sense of competition with ourselves, and we will turn absolutely anything into a game. So the fact that you can turn meditation into a game or journaling into a game or learning a language into a game, the fact that anything can be gamified and turned into a kind of sport maybe suggests something about how competitive humans are.
Katy Milkman: Chloë Hamilton is a freelance journalist based in the U.K. where she happily lives a streak-free lifestyle. You can find more details about her and runner Tom Vickery in the show notes and schwab.com/podcast. The story of Tom running on the ferry to maintain his remarkable streak or the woman who drove out of town just to keep her Wordle streak or Alison's epic Duolingo run or mine demonstrate the motivating power of streaks. But there's a flip side to this coin, one that you may be familiar with. If you've ever had an unbroken chain of visits to the gym or days of reading on your ebook or healthy meals cooked, and then you broke that streak—say you got too busy or you went on vacation or you got sick—then you'll know how demotivating it can be, how hard it is to get back on that horse once you've fallen off.
My next guest has done some fascinating research around both the motivating power of streaks and the ways that we can limit the pain of a broken streak so we can get back to building the habits we want. Jackie Silverman is an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Delaware where she studies consumer behavior and streaks. Hi, Jackie. Welcome to Choiceology. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me today.
Jackie Silverman: Hi, Katy. It's great to talk to you.
Katy Milkman: Let's just start with a basic definition. What does it mean to achieve a streak?
Jackie Silverman: So a streak is any case of three or more consecutive actions or behaviors. Of course, streaks can be much longer than that, but the key is that there's at least three, and they are happening all in a row.
Katy Milkman: Great. And could you talk a little bit about your favorite research study showing how achieving a streak, or this sort of three in a row of walking 10,000 steps a day or doing your Duolingo practice, seems to affect a person's decision to keep going or to quit?
Jackie Silverman: One of the studies in a paper I have with Alix Barasch at the University of Colorado in Boulder, we find that simply showing people that they have a streak versus a broken streak got them to exercise more. So we had our participants from an online panel doing exercises at home. It was during the early stages of COVID where everyone was stuck at home anyway. And when we told them that they had a streak of doing these strength exercises at their desk, they kept going with those exercises more than when we told them that they didn't have that streak going or when they had a broken streak. So they had missed the opportunity to do a strength exercise. And so we think it's really cool that simply telling people about their past record—"Hey, you have a streak going"—can encourage them to keep it up.
Katy Milkman: I think that's really interesting too. One of the things that I love about the research you've done is that you're able to separate out the possibility that people who break streaks are different from people who don't. They've messed up, and maybe they messed up because they were less committed. Could you describe how you are able to do this experimentally and have two people who've both been equally diligent about, say, doing those exercises at home, but you simply display their behavior differently so that you can show it's the way you explain their past performance and not their commitment level that's driving this?
Jackie Silverman: Yeah, that's a great question and something that Alix and I in particular have grappled with a lot when thinking about streaks, because like you just said, in the real world when someone breaks their streak, you don't know why that's happening. Maybe they choose to just not want to run anymore if they have a running streak, or they broke their foot, and then of course they're not going to keep running. So there's this sort of relationship between that recency and what people choose to do next. So what we do in our experiments where we look at real behavior, to remove that issue, we randomly assign people to different conditions. Of course that's paramount in experiments. Then we also look at manipulating their streaks and their patterns in different ways.
So one way is that everyone does the exact same thing, so they all do four exercises, for instance. And we either frame that as an intact streak saying, "Yay, you did four exercises. You have an intact streak." Or we say it's a broken streak by saying, "Well, you had three strength exercises, but your fourth exercise was a stretching exercise. And so you actually have a broken streak of strength exercises done." And so even though everyone's done the exact same thing, just the way that we've portrayed that information and categorized what counts in the streak, then actually affects what they choose to do next. People continue with the behavior more when they say that exact same sequence is intact versus when it's broken.
Katy Milkman: Yeah, I really love the clever way that you deal with this issue. And I think it's really important to highlight because in the real world, as you said, most of the time if we see someone who's broken a streak, there may be a fundamental reason they did. I decided this wasn't as important to me. And you show that seeing contiguous streaks of behavior in our past and having that highlighted to us regardless of how motivated we are, that changes what we do next. It's really interesting. Could you talk a little bit about why it seems to be the case that achieving a streak of three or more seems to change our behavior and why breaking a streak matters so much?
Jackie Silverman: Yeah, absolutely. So we find that streaks are encouraging to people to get them to keep doing that repeated behavior or repeatedly engage with an app, etc. Because the streak itself is a source of motivation, and keeping that streak alive is seen as a goal for a lot of consumers. So essentially when you give people the feedback of, "Hey, you've got a streak going." They then adopt this new goal above and beyond any other sort of goal they might have in the first place to keep that streak going. So maybe they started exercising and using an app to record their runs because they wanted to get in shape or they wanted a better mile time. And then when that app tells them, "Hey, you've gone for a run three days in a row. You have a streak." They adopt this new goal of keeping that streak going, which then motivates them to keep doing that behavior and logging it.
So keep running and making sure the app is turned on and their phone is with them when they go on that run. So then conversely, when people inevitably break their streaks for whatever reason, they forget, they ran out of time, etc., now that's seen as a goal failure. They had this goal of keeping the streak going, and now it's gone. They ruined it. And as a result, now that's especially demotivating. Even more demotivating than simply missing out on doing something. So we see this huge negative effect when people realize that they have broken streaks of various behaviors.
Katy Milkman: I really love this aspect of your research showing how bad those broken streaks are. And of course the relationship to loss aversion, which we've covered on this show before, how painful it is to lose something. So I really like the connection that you also have made in your research to the pain of losing. And I'm just curious if broken streaks are so bad for our motivation, why it is that we see video game companies and apps like Duolingo and Fitbit showing us information about our streaks all the time? So my question is, I guess, do you think they're making a mistake, or do you think that they're actually getting the psychology right?
Jackie Silverman: I think it really depends on the specific situation. So studying streaks, but even before that, I see streaks recorded everywhere. I believe in a pilot study we ran, we asked about 100 people online, how many name apps that you use that record their streaks. And they named about 200 unique apps. So this is a super common thing. And I think a lot of companies approach it in a way that follows and is in line with what we recommend based on our research, which is highlight and emphasize intact streaks when they're there, encourage people to keep those streaks going. But then if and when they break them, don't highlight that. Don't remind people that they messed up and that they're kind of falling off the wagon. But rather couch it in a way that's more positive, or just simply don't even mention that the streak is broken.
So some companies of course do highlight broken streaks like the Duolingo owl crying and being sad that your streak is broken. Perhaps trying to guilt you back into coming to the app, and that's a little bit of a different sort of psychology in play. But I think in general, a lot of companies are following what we would recommend, which is emphasizing when streaks are there for consumers and downplaying it when they are inevitably broken.
Katy Milkman: So your advice is sort of downplay the broken streak. But I'm curious if you have advice beyond that on how people can recover after a broken streak. Is there anything in particular you would suggest these apps or individuals who are trying to motivate themselves might want to do in the face of that disappointment?
Jackie Silverman: Absolutely. So from the company side, one thing they can do is change that categorization of what counts. So going back to my example before when we were talking about how do you portray the same sequence of behavior as intact or broken? Well, let's say I have a broken streak of going for runs every day, but that's because I decided to do some yoga today. Then my exercise app can tell me, "Oh, well, you have an intact streak of exercising every day just beyond running." Similarly, Peloton, they use different time units. So they highlight when you have daily streaks of getting on the app and doing fitness every day, but they also highlight weekly streaks. So getting on and doing something at least once a week. So changing that unit, you might break your daily streak, but the week streak can still be there. And that can be a source of motivation for a lot of consumers and keep them on track with their goals.
Another way you can do that is, and something we actually look at experimentally in our paper, is allowing for streak repair. So what we had participants do in that study is they were playing games on a gaming app we had built into our survey. They had either an intact or broken streak. And for those that had a broken streak, half of them we gave the opportunity to repair that broken streak by choosing to play a certain type of game again. And what we found is that providing that opportunity to repair their broken streak increased the amount of people who were re-engaging with the game and playing more. So it didn't go all the way back. It was still a little bit of a dip relative to having an intact streak, but we did see the significant increase when we gave them the opportunity for repair that got them back and doing that behavior more than when that opportunity is missing.
And so basically apps can give people this opportunity to fill in their miss and get back on track by doing a behavior, watching an ad, maybe paying with the currency on the app or real money. And can get them to re-engage and feel a little less of that goal failure and that negative demotivation.
Katy Milkman: I love that advice, and it also reminds me of our friend and collaborator Marissa Sharif's wonderful work on the idea of emergency reserves, which we've actually covered on the show before. Where if you give yourself a goal, you can actually make yourself more successful. If you give yourself a limited number of get-out-of-jail-free cards. So if we're thinking about this not only in the context of how an app designer might optimize performance, but how maybe our listeners who mostly aren't app designers may want to think about streaks, it may be useful for them to be thinking, "OK, it's going to motivate me to keep track of streaks of behaviors I want to engage in," whether that's being on time for meetings or meeting my goal of not yelling at my kid at night, or whatever it might be, cooking a fresh meal for my family. Maybe you want to keep track of a streak, and you don't have an app that's doing it for you, but you're worried based on Jackie's research that you could be demotivated when you break that.
It seems like this idea of having emergency reserves would be the equivalent of allowing yourself a streak freezer or a way of repairing. Does that feel right to you?
Jackie Silverman: Absolutely. I think there's so much great research on the importance of flexibility and grace, I guess, with goal pursuit that it's OK if you skip a day at the gym or if you have to order takeout tonight because you don't have the energy to cook for yourself. It's OK as long as you're able to get back on track going forward. And so I totally agree, whether it's emergency reserves or building in flexibility in other ways or allowing your streak to still count if you redefine it in some way. These are all really great strategies to help people get back on track, get on after falling off the wagon, and continue.
Katy Milkman: What first got you interested in studying streaks, Jackie?
Jackie Silverman: I started looking at streaks, I think, in my second year in grad school, which was about nine years ago now. And it started because my co-author Alix Barasch and I—we were PhD students together—and we went to a brewery with some friends and my husband. And we started giving my husband a hard time because he was really into craft beer at the time, and he was using an app to log all of the new beers he was trying. And we were at this great brewery in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and he wasn't logging it. And so we were like, "Why are you not recording this?" And he said, "Well, I missed it last weekend when we tried new beer. I just forgot to do it. And so I just feel like it's not really worth doing it as vigilantly as before since I already missed something."
And so Alix and I thought, "That's really interesting. Let's talk about this tomorrow when we're not having a beer." And so it really started us on this path of thinking about how consumers track and log their experiences, and when technology tells people about what they've done in the past, how that affects their motivation and their desire to continue to do something. And of course, when you think about continuing something, what comes up is continuity and consecutiveness and streaks. And so that was really the initial experience that we had that led us to thinking, "Wow, these streaks are part of these logs and information that consumers are getting all the time because of technology. How does it affect what they do?" And so that's really opened this whole avenue of research that I've been able to engage in, which has been super exciting.
Katy Milkman: Yeah, that's a nice connection. It seems like a lot of these different insights about what matters for a goal pursuit, and what matters to make us more effective, comes back to this idea that it's really important to give ourselves grace, as you said, and flexibility. And there are lots of different ways we can do that. That streaks help us build momentum, but that they have this ugly underbelly which is that when they're broken, we're so destroyed that we may give up on ourselves. And so we have to find ways to repair that. This was a really fun conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today, Jackie. I really appreciate it.
Jackie Silverman: Thank you, Katy. It was a blast.
Katy Milkman: Jackie Silverman is an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Delaware. You can find a link to her research with Alix Barasch around the motivating power of streaks in the episode notes and schwab.com/podcast.
A good way to maintain a beneficial streak in your financial life is to put the streak on autopilot—for instance, by setting up regular automatic contributions into a retirement fund. To hear more tips on how to mitigate the biases that could derail your financial plan, listen to the Financial Decoder podcast. You can find it at schwab.com/FinancialDecoder, or just search your favorite podcast app.
I find it truly fascinating that we're so obsessed with unbroken chains of achievement. A few years ago, along with psychologist Angela Duckworth, I ran what we call a mega study to test ideas for encouraging more gym attendance. A mega study is just a tournament for testing lots of different ideas at once. We tested 53 different approaches to encouraging exercise designed by different teams of scientists. And you know what worked the best? Giving people a little extra incentive not to miss more than one planned workout in a row. That is, not letting people build a streak of misses. While some app designers have weaponized streaks to maximize user engagement, my hope is that this episode will inspire you to find ways to use streaks to your own advantage and to ignore them when they're a nuisance. Maybe you want to build a streak of months when you review your finances with your partner or hit a savings goal.
Maybe you'd like to follow Tom Vickery's lead and build a running streak, or maybe you'd like to break your addiction to Candy Crush, but their streak-based bonus system has got you hooked. Now that you understand streaks and their power to become goals in and of themselves that you'll hate to lose, you can harness that insight. Consider taking a page out of Jerry Seinfeld's book and keeping track of the streaks you want to maintain to motivate yourself. But also try to think deliberately about which of the streaks you're chasing are actually goals you want to continue to pursue. A little reflection on whether another game of Candy Crush or Fortnite is something you truly value may help you break some unproductive streaks on purpose and with pride. Whatever else you do, I hope you'll maintain your streak of listening to this show so we can keep teaching you about the latest insights from behavioral science and helping you improve your decisions.
You've been listening to Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. If you haven't already, you can follow us for free in your favorite podcasting app. And if you've enjoyed the show, we'd be really grateful if you'd share it with a friend. Reviews are also always appreciated on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. If you want more of the kinds of insights we bring you on Choiceology about how to improve your decisions, you can also order my book, How to Change, or sign up for my monthly newsletter, Milkman Delivers, on Substack.
Next time I'll speak with the University of Chicago Professor Devin Pope about a common but surprisingly consequential error we make when judging prices, ages, and anything else we can count. I'm Dr. Katy Milkman. Talk to you soon.
Speaker 6: For important disclosures, see the show notes or visit schwab.com/podcast.
