Consistency has a shape

A checkbox can tell you what happened on Tuesday. It cannot tell you what you are like. Consistency is a property of a stretch of time, not of a day, so it should be drawn as a stretch of time: one continuous shape rather than thirty separate marks.

What a checkbox can’t say

A checkbox answers a yes-or-no question, and it answers it well. Did you walk on Tuesday? Yes. That is a fact, and a tidy one.

But the question you actually care about is a different kind of question. Are you someone who walks? That has no yes-or-no answer. It has a texture: mostly, with a gap in the middle, picking up again after. A tick has no room for texture. Line up thirty of them and you get a column of verdicts, each one passed on its own, and you are left to do the arithmetic in your head.

The arithmetic usually goes wrong in a predictable way. The eye lands on the gaps. A month with 26 ticks and 4 empty boxes reads as 4 failures, when it is better described as a month in which you walked on most days.

Distance

Anything that is hard to judge up close gets easier from further back. A painting dissolves into marks at arm’s length and into a face at the end of the room. Dots in a newspaper photograph only become a photograph when you stop reading the dots.

A month of days works the same way. At the scale of one day you are judging a single event. Step back to the whole month and the question changes: not “did it happen today?” but “what is the pattern?” The point of distance is that it lets you ask the second question at all.

So the first design decision is how much to show at once. A week is too short, since one bad Thursday dominates it. A year is too long to take in by eye. A month is about right: long enough to hold a rhythm, short enough to look at in one go.

Bands, not dots

Once you have a month in view, the next decision is the mark. Thirty dots in a row are still thirty separate things. The eye has to join them up.

Draw them as a band instead. A rhythm that was kept every day becomes one long bar with no joins in it, and what you see is a form, in the way you see a road rather than its paving stones. In the figure below, the grid is the month, empty and faint, and each band is one habit running across it.

Thirty days as a grid, three habits as bands: the walk runs 18 days and ends, the writing thins and pales for 6 days and then carries on, and the piano runs all 30. Marigold marks a kept rhythm, and the writing keeps its colour through the quiet week.

Notice what the band does that the dots don’t. It tells you the scale of the thing before you read any detail. You see at once which habit ran the whole month, which one stopped, and which one wavered.

A dip isn’t a verdict

That brings us to the middle band. Its thin stretch is the interesting part of the picture, and it is drawn on purpose with no alarm in it. The band narrows and lightens, and then it comes back to full width. There is no red, no crossed-out box, no empty hole, and the band keeps its colour the whole way through.

A dip drawn this way is honest. Six slow days in a row of thirty are visible, and they look like what they were: a slow patch inside a longer rhythm. A column of ticks with a run of blanks makes the same six days look like six separate failures. The facts are identical. Only the drawing changes, and with it the conclusion you draw about yourself.

This is also why the colour has to stay quiet. A band that turns red when it dips has stopped describing the month and started scolding it. Here the dip is told by shape and lightness alone, and a plain word under the picture says what it shows, so nothing depends on being able to tell two hues apart. If you want the longer argument about what a count of consecutive days does to people, it is in why streaks make you quit.

One caution runs the other way. Bands suit rhythms, the things you do again and again. A one-off task has no month to draw: it is done or it isn’t, and a checkbox is exactly the right mark for it. That weekly task is a habit in a costume is about telling the two apart.

Draw your last month

You need paper, a pen and about five minutes.

1. Draw a grid of 30 small squares, one per day, in rows of 7 or in one long row. Whichever you pick, keep it the same every time.
2. Choose one thing you did, or meant to do, in the last month. Anything: a walk, practice, calls to your mother, watering the plants.
3. Shade it as one bar. Where you did it, fill the bar in. Where you didn’t, make the bar thinner or lighter, but don’t break it.
4. Step back to arm’s length and look at the shape.

Then ask the question a checkbox could never answer: what is this one like? Solid, rhythmic, bursty, front-loaded, fading? Whatever it is, you now have a description of yourself that is better than “did it” or “didn’t”.