The Most Important Thing Is Not To Break The Chain

It's Sunday, and I'm sitting at my laptop. When I quit my job to write, I swore to myself that I would never work on the weekend.

In more than ninety percent of the cases, I keep to that. Weekends are essential for recharging the batteries and clearing your head.

I usually write more during the week so that I don't have to do anything on weekends. Between Monday and Friday, I simply write a few more articles and then automatically have them published on the weekend.

Many authors have promised themselves to write every day. If you commit yourself to do something every day, it becomes harder to break this promise every day.

If you've written a hundred days in a row, it's tough to suddenly stop a day, because breaking such a long chain feels like a heavy defeat.

The law of the chain says that the longer it becomes, the more stable it becomes.

Authors who write every day have a massive advantage over those who only write once in a while. Through constant practice, they sharpen their skills and quickly become better and better at what they do.

I do not write every day. The chain I work on has to do with publishing. I do not write every day, but I publish every day.

My chain is now sixty-three days long. Today is sixty-four days in my chain.

It is Sunday, and the week has been turbulent. Despite the Corona lockdown, I had rather too much to do than too little. That's why I couldn't produce any extra articles during the week for the weekend.

My vow never to work on the weekend was always important to me, but now there is something that has become even more important to me - never to break the chain.

Why is that so? What would be so bad about skipping a day and not publishing anything? I could just continue tomorrow, and no one would notice that I skipped a day.

None of my readers would indeed notice. But that's not important. What's important is that I would know. A break in the chain would feel, I admit it, like a defeat.

But even that's not the real reason. Whether I consider a break, a defeat is up to me. I could be generous to myself and forgive myself if I don't publish anything. That would undoubtedly work because I'm actually pretty good at forgiving myself for mistakes.

No, it's not about prestige or false ambition or self-imposed pressure.

The danger of a broken chain runs in our subconscious.

If we break a promise we made to ourselves and then rationalize it by saying that it was not bad at all, our brain remembers it. Breaking the chain then works as a dam burst. The second breaking of the rules becomes much easier than the first.

So the problem with a broken chain is not the one time you slip, but the fact that the next one is suddenly much more likely to happen.

Everyone knows this from the resolutions with which we start a new year. In the first days or weeks, we are highly motivated and do what we set out to do. But then at some point, everyday life comes along, and one day for some reason, it seems impossible for us to keep our promise.

We don't go to the gym for one day, smoke a cigarette at a party, or yell at our child again instead of discussing things objectively with him or her because we had a lot of stress today.

Such days, on which we make an exception, are usually the beginning of the end of a new habit.

You have to experience this many times in life to understand the perfidious mechanism behind it. Only when we have fully understood the danger of the broken chain can we resist the urge to make an exception.

It has happened to me very often in my life that I wanted to take on a new, good habit, but then I failed for the reasons described. This has already happened to me so often that I am fed up with it. I have sworn to myself not to repeat this mistake anymore.

Never to work on weekends was a promise I made to myself. But it turned out to be a naive promise. If I wanted to keep that promise blindly, I would have to subordinate everything else to it.

That's why I'm writing this week on Sunday instead of lying on the couch watching Netflix.

My subconscious has to learn that I take the chain seriously.

No matter what happens - never break the chain.