Don't Break the Chain
Mark each day you do a habit, and let the growing visible chain motivate you to keep going.
Helps with: “I feel no progress”, “I can't start”
How it works
Pick one habit. Every day you do it, mark the day. After a few days you have a chain of marks, and you start to want to protect it. The visible record turns an invisible habit into something you can see growing.
Make the daily version small enough that you can do it on a bad day — “write 50 words”, not “write 1,000”. A small habit done most days beats a big one done occasionally.
Chains will break. That’s expected and it doesn’t erase what you built. This site shows your best chain prominently, so a gap is never the headline.
Try it now
- Choose one small daily habit.
- Set it as your habit in the chain tracker below.
- If you’ve done it today, mark today.
- Come back tomorrow and mark it again.
Chains
Best chain
0 days
Current 0
Total days 0
When it does not work
- If a broken chain makes you want to quit entirely. Missing a day is normal — look at your best chain, not the break.
- Habits that shouldn't be daily (hard training, rest-dependent work). Track "planned days" instead.
- When the streak becomes the goal and you do a hollow version just to tick the box.
Evidence
Evidence: Some evidenceThe chain method itself is anecdotal (it's often attributed to comedian Jerry Seinfeld). Two better-studied ideas support it. First, tracking your progress towards a goal tends to help you reach it. Second, in a well-known 2010 study by Phillippa Lally and colleagues, habits took anywhere from about 18 to 254 days to become automatic, and missing a single day didn't meaningfully set people back. So keep going, but don't panic about gaps.
Some evidence: Some studies support it, or it rests on well-studied ideas, but direct evidence is limited.