Everyone I have watched abandon a practice abandoned it in the same week — the one where doing it properly stopped being possible.
So build it to be done badly. Not as a fallback. As the actual design.
Mine is ten minutes and three lines in a notebook: what I did, what I avoided, and what I will start with tomorrow. On a good evening it runs to twenty minutes and I write about why I avoided the thing. On a bad one it is three fragments and the pen goes down. Both count.
The bar is the point
What makes this work is that there is no version of it I can fail. The bar sits low enough that skipping it would take a deliberate decision, and deliberate decisions are far easier to notice than drift.
The instinct is to design for your best self. Your best self does not need the practice. Build it for the version of you at nine o’clock on a Thursday in February, and it will still be there in the spring.
