I like to take long walks for exercise, I think it contributes to my physical and mental health. Even though it's something I generally like to do, it's not something that's always easy to do. So I like to have psychological reinforcers built in to my routine that help me keep doing it even when I'm tempted not to. One of these is to try to maintain a streak of getting an “Automatic Win” every day.
The #AutomaticWin initiative is something started by @wil.metcalfe / @adventureready that works sort of like an add-on to an Actifit posting: If you get more than 10k steps worth of activity before 10am your time, you take a screenshot of your Actifit screen and include that image in your Actifit post, and you include the #AutomaticWin tag, then you get an upvote and a nice congratulatory message from the @adventureready account (as I understand things Wil reads the posts and initiates the process somewhat manually). The idea is that if you accomplish this amount of physical activity by that time you've already registered a good accomplishment for the day, and anything else you do is an extra accomplishment on top of that.
Part of what I find helpful about this is that it's a concrete, measurable, achievable goal, and it lets me have at least some sense of accomplishment early in the day. Humans are social animals, and knowing that other people care about a goal makes it a lot easier to treat it as something worthwhile. Sure, I could create my own stepcount goal, but I would always know in the back of my mind that I was the one that came up with it, it would always feel a little bit artificial. When someone else comes puts forward a goal, or even better institutionalizes it, it feels much more “real”. Someone else can carry the weight of saying “Yes, this is a good and valuable goal to have”, and you can focus on just achieving it.
I first started with AutomaticWins in mid October 2008, when the daily achievement aspect of it was cooked into a larger contest where your total stepcount for the day was also a factor. At first I was a bit dubious, but since I was taking long walks in the morning anyway I took an “I'm not going to say no to a free upvote” attitude and started using the tag and including the screenshot of my stepcount with my Actifit posts. Eventually it became a habit, and then once something is a habit it can help motivate behavior – for example, when the weather makes walking challenging from a motivation perspective the thought “but I want to get my 10k steps by 10am for my Actifit post” helps push me to actually get my steps in. It has also had the unexpected side-effect of getting me to up my photography game for my Actifit posts – because I know I'm going to be including an app screenshot at the end I know that I'll also want to have a nice image to include before that since the first image in a post gets used as the thumbnail, and I'd rather have a nice thumbnail than a screenshot of the Actifit app. Also, although I'm not great at engaging with people socially, I do get a sense of solidarity knowing that there are other people out there also pursuing Automatic Wins for their Actifit posts, and that's a nice feeling.
I've missed a few days here or there, sometimes for technical reasons like the blockchain being down or maybe issues with my phone preventing me from posting, or sometimes because “real life” stuff interfered, but I try to be pretty consistent about it by treating it as something I do every day. I've found that daily habits are a lot easier for me to maintain than things that I do intermittently or on a more complicated schedule, for me "every day" is something that I can get to stick. Consistently getting the physical and mental health benefits of exercise seems like a wise thing to me, so I think the practice of getting Automatic Wins has been a good habit for me to have.