Jerry Seinfeld used a simple but effective trick to keep himself motivated, productive and prolific.

He put a huge calender on the wall and drew a huge X on everyday he wrote new material. After a while he didn't want to break the chain of Xs and found himself working everyday. (1)

I've been using the iphone app streaks to do this with Skritter with quite good results. everyday I practice I tick off on my calender.

How about including this as a feature everyday I study you put a big X or 成功了 or 好 or whatever on my frontpage.

I think it would improve customer retention also.

On contrast, making goals public via twitter or whatever might not be such a great idea after all (2)

sources

(1)
http://lifehacker.com/#!281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-secret

(2)
http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_keep_your_goals_to_yourself.html

Support for Don't-Break-The-Chain-style reminders has been on the list for a long time, but we havent gotten to it, mostly because we want to make it part of a broader goal/reminder/achievement/leaderboard system of some sorts, and it's a big project to try to get those right. We are looking forward to getting some time to work on those.

Interesting Derek Sivers talk there; thanks for that. Social binding vs. goal substitution, hmm. Interesting challenge. For our Twitter posts, though, I wonder if it's a strong substitution effect, since it posts out automatically rather than you getting the pleasure and immediate feedback of saying it and hearing your friends respond?