After 1,136 days, I stopped tracking my daily workout. Not doing. Tracking.
“The goal is not to run a marathon,” James Clear says, “the goal is to become a runner.”
When you pick up a new behavior, tracking keeps you accountable, but if, after three years of daily practice, you still need it to be a box on a list to get it done, perhaps it was never the right habit for you to begin with. Not a good fit for your identity.
Scientists always argue about how long it takes to build a habit. Is it 21 days? 66 days? 90 days? Well, do it for a thousand, and then you’ll know for sure. If you can do it for 1,000 days, you can do it forever — and if, by then, you’ve decided you don’t want to, no one will argue with your conclusion.