Get Rid of Zero Days to Get Closer to Your Goals
It’s hard to be amazing every single day. If you started with high goals this year, you may be disappointed if you don’t keep up with them. Instead of giving up, try the forgiving philosophy of needless zero days.
The concept went viral on Reddit after u / ryans01 described it in a comment . The idea is that every day you can do something to achieve your goals, even if it is something very small. Here’s how they describe it:
No more zeros. I’m not saying that you have to write an essay every day, that’s not the point. What I’m trying to emphasize is that you have to force yourself, promise yourself that the new SYSTEM you live in is a NON-ZERO system. Didn’t do anything all fucking day, and now it’s 11:58 pm? Write one sentence. One push-up. Read one page of this chapter. One. Because one is not zero. Can you feel me?
When done right, the zero-day approach is motivating and forgiving. No day is hopeless. It’s okay to have multiple goals and work on at least one every day: I didn’t go to the gym, but wrote in my diary for ten minutes.
If you need support in completing a non-zero quest, there is now a subreddit and a cute app (free for iOS and Android ) focused on this concept.
As much as you keep track of, eliminating zero days prevents that demotivating feeling of “I haven’t done this forever,” because you have a chain of tiny commitments that you fulfill every day. You may not have had time to sit down to your Spanish textbooks, but you did Duolingo for five minutes on days when you couldn’t.
So that it doesn’t look like another source of pressure, remember that the goal is to achieve easy victories for yourself, which, like a snowball, will become even larger steps towards your goal. You may find that once you do that first push-up, you can do a few more, or that if you google for a few minutes on your next project, you’ll end up in a research rabbit hole for a few hours. But if not, that’s okay! At least you did something .