streaks
Three days ago, I reached a 100-day streak on Duolingo and hit the highest division on the leaderboard. As far as I know, this is the second time I’ve done something that wasn’t required of me consistently for 100 days (the other being Snapchat streaks with my ex). There seems to be something quite profound about sticking to an activity that makes you better. Something-something, tech bro speak, the compounding effect, yada, yada.
The day after, I looked at my GitHub profile, and the last 6 days had green squares. For the unaware, GitHub is a platform where programmers upload, preserve, and tweak their code. Think of it as a Google Docs for files. When GitHub tracks an activity from you, it colours that day in green. The more activities it detects, the darker the shade of green. Seeing a GitHub “streak” on my profile, especially after hitting 100 days on Duolingo, felt good.
I wasn’t exactly sure why I felt the way I did. After all, both streaks are not particularly useful (I mean, I can barely speak or read a simple Japanese sentence). But after reflecting for a bit, I came up with a hypothesis: It felt good because hitting these milestones (I never set) meant I could be consistent.
It might be news to some, but I’ve never been known for consistency or reliability. I lose the enthusiasm to act quickly, get derailed and make little to no progress, and I’ve let some people down by not following through on promises. This flaky, unsteady behaviour is really something I’ve worked hard to get rid of, and when it rears its head, I feel awful. Like I’ve failed myself. And I lose the drive for everything.
Right now, I can’t tell if I’ll stay on track and keep up with my Duolingo or programming streak, but I thought I’d document this feeling for my future self to return to. There still exist a lot of holes in my day-to-day, attention deficiency, inefficiencies, half-baked projects, wasted time blocks, et cetera, but, hey, at least this counts for something. Right?
