What are your top 5 best habits to form with Beeminder?

(A) The best habits are the ones that you want to cultivate, so there’s no universal list.

(B) You noted this fact in your post.

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(C ) You’re asking for input to help spark your own ideas.

In that light, here are some of my most rewarding habit-cultivating goals:

  • Brush my teeth every night. I had a Beeminder goal for this until it became a habit; then I archived the BM goal. I still brush my teeth every night, two years on.

  • Daily steps. I started tracking these in January 2019 and have consistently raised my daily average from a slothful 2k to a decent 6k a day. (For all of 2019 it was even higher—more on why that was so successful here.) This is probably a “habit” closer to Zed’s description; I’m pretty sure I’d lapse if I stopped using my tracking tools.

  • Reading. I don’t need a goal for the actual reading; I’ve always read lots. The habit I’ve cultivated is keeping track of what I read. Thanks to Beeminder, I now have a list going back almost three years.

In terms of philosophizing about what best habits I could cultivate… well, take a look at my goal gallery. Actually, that’s a great idea to answer your question, I think—browse through other people’s goals. Start at the Featured page, and you can click through to any person’s gallery page. That should give you a wealth of ideas, plus if you tally the repeats, an idea of how common some potential habits are (which is one possible metric for evaluating “best”).

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