I told you to build a streak. I was wrong.
Small steps are useful. A counter that turns 83 days into zero because Tuesday went wrong is not.
Last October I wrote an article called Starting small is better than never starting at all . Most of it came from something very real. I’d spent years believing I would never own a home , eventually started saving £50 a month and, five years later, had the keys to one. I still believe the main point. Starting with something small is infinitely more useful than waiting for the magical future month when you have plenty of time, spare money and nothing inconvenient happening. Buried halfway through the article, though, I gave one bit of advice I no longer like. Track your progress, I said. Put ticks on a calendar. Watch the streak build. The first half still stands. The streak bit can go in the bin. Streaks make an untidy life look beautifully obedient. You did the thing yesterday, the day before and for the previous 81 days. The number keeps rising and everything feels very impressive. Then Tuesday goes wrong. The boiler stops working, a child is ill, the train sits motionless outside Clapham Junction or you simply cannot be bothered. You miss one day and the counter falls back to zero, apparently making you exactly as successful as somebody who never started. That is obviously nonsense. The previous 83 days still happened. Life has a habit of interrupting the neatest plan. Photo: Sir. Simo on Unsplash . It is particularly silly for 42 Things To Do. We aren’t trying to make people complete a bucket-list activity before midnight every day. Some experiences take months to organise. Some happen once in a lifetime. Others are worth repeating whenever the opportunity appears, which may be next Saturday or three years from now. You shouldn’t have to go bungee jumping on a wet Wednesday evening because an app is worried about its engagement figures. 42 Things To Do is meant to help you do things. It should not become another thing you have to maintain. The point is doing something, not maintaining a number. Photo: Mikhail Mamaev on Unsplash . That doesn’t mean every number is bad. We record completions because they matter, Challenges can have targets, and some people enjoy an optional leaderboard. If you deliberately choose that sort of challenge, go for it. The important word there is choose, because there is a large difference between joining a competition and discovering that your ordinary life has quietly been entered into one. The same applies to reminders. A useful nudge says: you told us this mattered; would some help getting started be useful? A bad one says: return immediately or the little flame dies. One respects the reason you added the activity, while the other is trying to frighten you into opening an app. If somebody comes back to 42 Things after six months, I want their list to be waiting for them. The things they completed should still count, their plans should still make sense and nothing should imply that they have failed because life became busy for a while. There should be no shame screen or enormous zero waiting for them. There should definitely not be a passive-aggressive message from an algorithm that has apparently taken their absence personally. 42 Things To Do should help people live more interesting lives. It should not become a Tamagotchi that needs feeding before bed. So yes, start small: save the first £50, make one plan, keep a record of what you have done and celebrate the things that genuinely mattered. But don’t confuse consistency with worth, because missing Tuesday does not erase Monday and taking six months away does not invalidate everything that happened before it. If you want a next step today, open your My 42 List and choose one thing because you still want to do it—not because a counter wants its number to increase. I was right about small steps. I was wrong about streaks. The list should wait for you. You should not have to report for duty to it. Header photograph: Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash .