Life At Slow-Mo

A few years ago, I started learning Japanese using the app Duolingo. I forgot the reason, but after three months, I stopped. I was too busy with something, I think, and I felt I didn’t have time to do the exercises. I meant to continue the lessons at the first opportunity. Days turned into weeks, weeks into months, and the opportunity never came.

A couple of months ago I watched a TED talk about making learning as addictive as social media. The speaker was one of the people who came up with the idea to encourage learning using a mobile platform. They decided to start with language learning to build the model, and thus Duolingo was born.

One reason such a learning method is successful is because of the utilization of The Streak. If you’re a sports fan, you’d know what a streak is. A sports team is on a streak when they win matches consecutively. The Duolingo builders discovered that a person would be motivated to keep learning when he/she is on a streak. They only set 15 minutes per day as the minimum amount of learning time in one day. As long as you clock in 15 minutes on the app, you are considered done for the day. The app will urge you to keep your streak, especially when you put a Duolingo widget on your mobile Home display.

People are so keen to keep their streak, they’d do anything they can to keep it. As of October 2023, a user with the handle “christi3” holds the record for the longest Duolingo streak with 3,934 days of consecutive learning. The user has been using the app daily for over 19 years since 2012 without stopping. Around the world, 3 million users have streaks of 365 days or more.

You can read about the science behind it here.

I have been facing a challenge in being consistent mainly in starting a good habit. I want everything to be perfect, and I never get to start until I feel I am ready. So I never start. From the Duolingo TED talk, I realized that it isn’t so much about being perfect, but about being consistent. Duolingo helps its users to be consistent by providing visual cues to encourage them to take 15 minutes a day to learn. Every day they complete a session, the app would add it to the streak.

I was inspired, and I decided to try it. I picked up my phone, resurrected my dead Duolingo account, and restarted my Japanese lessons. Right now, my streak is 71 days.

I want to use the streak method in other parts of my life to help me modify my behavior. Right now I have several ideas:

Reading books. I love books, and I kind of like reading them. Right now, I have rows of unread books, some still in their original plastic covers. I’d love to train myself to read again.

Keeping tab of my friends. My social media often functions only as a repository of family, friends, and acquaintances. I figure why not use it for more productive purposes?

Writing daily. I confess that I have been on and off my blogs because of the same perfectionistic attitude. Why not try to be consistent at first, and perfect it as I go?

I am thinking about leading a healthier lifestyle. That could be an area where I use this.

What area in your life do you think you can use streaks as a way to be consistent?