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Question
Can I keep my streak if I don't post on weekends?
Is it necessary to post on a Saturday or Sunday to keep my streak going? Seems useless to sign in to post a todo that doesn't matter just to keep my streak.
Every time I start to build momentum I forget to post on a Sunday and then lose my streak, it is pretty annoying. I don't work that day and try to stay away from the computer.
Every time I start to build momentum I forget to post on a Sunday and then lose my streak, it is pretty annoying. I don't work that day and try to stay away from the computer.
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I ran into this as well. ie, I don't really want to post on off days just to keep streaks.
What I'm doing these days is watch a good videos related to product development/ programming and add it to WIP if I'm not planning to do much work.
But I think this is a hard problem to solve. Many including myself take off on weekdays and not weekends. Sometimes the off day changes. So I don't see a way how this can be tackled other than posting a task.
Tagging @marc here for his thoughts as well.
I typically post to my #swimsandlife project at the weekend to keep the streak going - keeping the streak is addictive!
I enjoy this quite a lot - I think members seem to enjoy posting about some non-work things, but whilst still keeping it focused mainly on work. I'd be interested to hear Marc's thoughts on this as well.
Yes great question. It's a topic we've covered a few times before, but haven't found a great solution yet.
Some people feel like a streak should be about doing something every single day (even if it's something small) while others believe you should be able to take a day or two off without breaking the streak. There's differences of opinion on how many "free" days you'd allowed to have (2 free days per calendar week that expire when the week ends, an incrementing number of free days you can save up over time, etc).
Then there's different views on the importance of streaks. Personally I don't put too much thought on them as I only use them when I feel like I'm in a rut and want to get some additional motivation to get out of them. But other people have 1+ year streaks and hate to lose them.
I like to keep the feature straight forward so it remains easy to understand.
My favorite potential solution so far is to give users a limited number of "streak freezes" that automatically get applied when you miss a day. Duolong has this feature. For that missed day your streak would not be incremented, but it wouldn't reset either.
Of course then the next question is how you get these streak freezes, how often, etc.
Curious to hear what you all think!
I understand the desire to keep it simple - it's a lot easier to ask for such changes when you're the one that doesn't have to implement them!
A steak freeze could be a good solution. Whatever Duolingo has done with their gamification, they've nailed it.
But I guess the question for you is if it is really broken, and if it should be "fixed".
Another side of of the current streak is that it keeps you coming back no matter what, and now keeping my steak has become such a habit - who knows if I would still be doing it if I had a streak freeze? It's hard to know, so there are consequence to that as well.
Yes one of the reasons to keep it simple is for technical reasons, but also from a user's perspective things can get complicated very quickly.
And indeed it's hard to predict how any changes to the streak functionality could negatively impact its usefulness. Although I guess we could just try it out for a while, emphasise it's a beta and might be reverted, etc.
Maybe this could be a configuration option. I would prefer if I could take "vacations" from the hustle and pause the streak for a while.
When I am on vacation, I may be with friends etc and there could be no time for working. Maybe I am at a place with no internet connection hiking etc.
Since people "game" the system anyway, like posting to
#life it doesn't really matter if you can pause it. The system is good for keeping motivation going but it shouldn't make one stressed when you have days off IMO.
I'd prefer to be able to nominate which days I'm working, and have those days count towards streaks only. I like the streak, but don't want to work 7 days a week.
I feel like setting the amount of days you want to get stuff done on in advance and then using the streaks as a way to stick to that. So like you say you want to get things down 5/7 days and then your streak continues unless you miss three days in one week. I tried to keep up a streak initially, but with a baby there were days when it simply was not possible to even get near my laptop.