I ended my day with a penalty of 765 USD for misunderstanding a self-study program (more on this another day). Carrying the frustration, literally sleeping over it, I woke up to an email notifying me I had just missed a 454-day streak and was back to square one!

I’m frustrated to the hilt, and not knowing what to do with the overload of irritability, I break down and cry.

Staring at my Noble Quran streak status, which now shows 1 after the previous day’s 454, the very sight of it demotivated me so much that I changed the settings in my profile and said, “Iam done with this,” which is more judgmental than motivating.

I wonder what the purpose of having a streak embedded in a customer’s profile is?

Maybe a need to build a habit or monitor progress

Which is, in a way, a very smart way of small nudges to motivate and ensure continuity

However, when life happens, which it usually does, one may not be able to maintain the streak and here’s where it all starts.

I have various apps, but among the long list, there are three I have used daily for more than a decade: Bend, Calm, and The Noble Quran. Bend for fitness, Calm for Meditation and mindfulness practice and the Noble Quran for daily Quran recitation.

I curse the day when I changed the settings from my manual discipline to let the app monitor my usage

The streaks at the beginning gave me a push; slowly, that push became competitive, and the competition gave rise to compliance. When I could not comply, I started to cheat.

Yes, especially on Bend, when one day, after 70 plus days, I missed a day, I knew I would be pushed back to square one, so I would simply open the app and let it run while I was busy somewhere else.

That day, I realised how an app had changed my values, was making me behave in ways very unlikely for me, and was part of an invisible competition that served no one.

I asked myself what I was up to and who I was trying to deceive by skipping my daily stretching exercises.

The answer was myself.

The same experience repeated with My Noble Quran, which had a 454-day streak; a day gone meant back to square one.

The Calm app, among all, is the best; it is for mindfulness and meditation, and, true to its service, it never judges.

There is applause for a continuous streak, polite reminders, but there are days when I don’t find my way to the app; for such, they simply check my profile as non-working days, and it reflects in the calendar, and they continue the count, which now runs in thousands of days of streak.

Using Calm, I find myself enveloped in kindness, which is what makes me return to it almost every day, while the other two and my loss of streak are so demotivating that I’ve written to their respective customer support teams and may be discontinuing their use soon.

As I reflect deeply and study the usage of each, I wonder how apps have become a significant part of our daily routine without even noticing it.

Like a silent intruder that slowly captures space, seldom noticed.

The usage and year-on-year approval of the autopay subscriptions stand testimony to it.

With usage comes the formation of habits built in the silent moments, especially those I use daily, which are so powerful they now drive my motivation levels and behaviour.

A missed streak brought so much to the surface, but was it just that, or a deep reflection? For now, I do not have a clear answer.

Until then

Warmly,

Mehnaz Amjad