In my last post about my daily GitHub commits, I left out one point. If you look at my commits right now, you'll notice something:
Youuuuuuu LIAR.
...you might be saying.
Well, let me explain... It's exactly what it looks like.
I missed a couple days, and then a week. If you could see farther back, you'd see the same thing happened a little more than a year before.
Let's rewind. I was on a roll, I had racked up about 6 months of my green wall. We were going on vacation and I was planning to cut back to the minimum but still keep my streak going.
And then... well, there we were in Paris. It was our first trip with the little guy. Morning to night we were walking from quartier to quartier, stuffing ourselves with baguettes and crepes, re-caffeinating every few hours, carrying a stroller up and down hundreds of Metro stairs...
Before I realized it, two days had passed. I opened GitHub and had two gray squares staring me in the face. No turning back the time, no turning them green. I was crestfallen. I had let myself down, and so far into the experiment! All those months wasted.
But then I looked at where I was: in a beautiful foreign city with my wonderful family, with looks in their eyes that said "we're ready for more croissants."
I said to myself: "Eh. It's fine. I'll just pick it back up when I get home."
And I did.
And those gray squares were a reminder of a great trip. But also a reminder to not take these habits too seriously, a reminder that there are more important things.
As for the habit, they were a reminder that I could take a break and still keep it up! That time wasn't wasted at all, the waste would be if I let a few missed days stop me.
As the months went on, the gray squares worked their way westward. And when they finally rode off into the sunset, I had my field of green.
So give yourself a break every once in a while. Not when you're just starting out, but if you've built a habit and you're not worried about it going away, cut yourself some slack. It keeps you from holding on too tight and risking burnout. It helps remind you why you're doing it in the first place.
