The typical understanding of a “habit,” when I hear about them in the lives of others, is that these are things you do ‘on autopilot’; because you have gotten used to doing them regularly, you simply do them without having to think about it or make careful plans. Things like brushing your teeth, eating breakfast/lunch, etc.
@kenoubi articulated this definition of a habit really well earlier in the thread:
I, personally, do not brush my teeth or eat meals with anything approaching regularity! (I average 1.5 tooth-brushes per day but they can happen at any time.) I don’t even necessarily wake and then sleep every single day. But there are many things (including eating and sleeping!) that I’d like to, generically, do regularly, but which can happen at any time during the day.
If a habit could be established just by practice, regardless of cues, it would be worth, e.g., trying to build up streaks in order to build practice. But if a habit requires reliable cues, I have to approach habits completely differently-- which is a little demoralizing, because I have almost no cues ready-made. Maybe I should read the book!
(I realise that “I have no reliable cues” is a bold claim, but I really mean it: I am rarely in the same place for more than three weeks in a row, so none of my physical environment can serve as a cue; I don’t feel hunger pangs when I need to eat, so eating is a habit I’d like to form; my sleep schedule is dramatically erratic; the only thing it seems like I can count on is alerts on my phone, but there’s a limit to how many of those I can set up before notification fatigue sets in!)
Frankly, I think I love beeminder so much because “checking Beeminder” has become the only habit-cue I have – it’s the only thing where I’m surprised if I don’t do it (because I get so many reminders & I know it costs me money to ignore them). This works for me as long as I keep all my Beeminder goals calibrated to where I can dispatch all of them with an hour or two of effort as soon as I remember them, but there are limits to this approach.