Does your streak motivate you to action?
I've seen some people posting updates and tasks like "ate a banana 🍌" or "went to restaurant 🍔" which seems silly to me.
For me, I'm motivated to keep the streak of doing something on my product every day. Not just a streak of logging anything under the sun to makerlog. I'd just keep a journal if that was my goal.
What does having a 🔥 streak motivate you to do?
Good point. Event that I also did 2-3 times posts like "Get motivation to do day job", I must fully agree with you. If the idea is to motivate, we should not add life stuff. I mean I could add also 100s of tasks I do when working in company (and not on my side project). But that's for sure not the idea. But what think guys who post such stuff about this ?
I don't enforce any kind of strict rules on the subject, but it does undermine streak effectiveness.
It's all about discipline. Some people resort to that kind of filler task to conserve their streaks, and in reality it makes Makerlog less effective for them.
The real benefit is that when people use Makerlog properly, it causes huge productivity gains. Failure to do this would simply render Makerlog ineffective and turn it into a lifelog for them.
I should probably police the subject more, and terminate unfair streaks more often… I just feel it's not really the community's loss - it's a personal loss for whoever misuses the streak. They're rendering a very powerful method of daily motivation ineffective for the sake of getting a high score.
I dont think its worth policing too hardcore, not sure how you could even do that fairly haha. But something to think about i suppose.
As someone who was once near the top of the streak list then accidently lost it, it's motivating at first and really pushed me to be productive. Once I lost the streak, I kind of don't care about it anymore, had even considered asking Sergio if there was a way to simply turn it off if you don't want to do it. Overall it probably is a good motivator for people.
One possible solution to keeping the noise down for tasks like "ate a banana" would be to only show tasks on the main log page that relate to a product. (Similar to what JP said, but his idea of always requiring a task to relate to a product is pushing it a bit to far).
The big logs that show all the Git commits and similar from 3rd party sources I tend to kind of gloss over and ignore them because there seems to be like 10-20 tasks in those pushes and just becomes noise to me.
As the site gets larger, these issues will become a bigger problem. It's not different of an issue than what Twitter and Facebook have been trying to solve as well.
This is an interesting concept, how do you maintain motivation if what was motivating you dies or breaks like the streak? Would be cool to figure out a way to recover your streak, or somehow "bust your butt" to make up for it. Makes me think about AutoSleep app I use to track my sleep, and the concept of the "Sleep Bank" and sleep debt. The idea is, if you get 8 hrs of sleep every night you never get any sleep debt. If you start dipping you accrue sleep debt, and it'll tell you how much you need to sleep to recover the debt, OR you can simply get 8hrs for 7 days in a row and your debt is cleared.
Could be an interesting principle to incorporate somehow or play off of like a "productivity bank" that you set your goal for daily tasks (maybe 1 or 5 or 10 or whatever or 2 tasks, 2 commits) If you maintain compliance to your goal its your streak, but you could build a surplus by exceeding your goal, or go into debt that is recoverable by a period of extra effort, or a length of time of consistency.
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