A quieter way to think about habits.
Six years of running cycles. The method, the writing, and what it took to get here.
This all began when I read Find Your Why by Simon Sinek six years ago.
At the time I was a developer, and I had quietly stopped enjoying my work or my life. The book arrived just as I was ready to question everything. The Sinek process is a slow one. I spent weeks asking friends and colleagues what it had been like to know me, what they had ever come to me for, and what they thought I was actually good at. I took a lot of notes. Then I went on a three-hour walk with my then-girlfriend, now wife, and we tried to put it all together.
What came out of that walk was easy enough to write down and a lot harder to act on. My power, it turned out, was in connecting with people and in building systems around what I noticed. My why was to make a positive impact on the world and to help others. As for the how, the part you actually live with, I had no idea.
From software to product
Over the next several years I moved from software development into product management. I spent a long stretch working on a language-learning product, helping people build connection through better language. It was a good place to be, and it taught me what positive impact feels like inside a product. The how was still loose, though. The work I kept caring about most was happening alongside the day job, in the part of my life nobody was paying me for.
Habit tracking, the through-line
That part was habit tracking. I had been tracking my own habits for years, mostly because the work of becoming a better version of yourself is something I find genuinely interesting, and tracking is the most honest instrument I had found for it. I kept running into the same problem, though. Build, plateau, drift, crash, rebuild, start again. The streak wave, as I now call it. It is what drove me to design my way out.
Building the method
Habit Cycles is what came out of that. It's a method for habits that last, plus the writing and tools that surround it. Tracking is what builds a habit, and the streak that emerges is the most contradictory thing I've found in habit practice: when it's climbing, almost nothing feels more motivating; when it breaks, almost nothing is more demotivating. Cycles and habit groups are how the method steadies the practice underneath. A cycle is a bounded run with a real review and a deliberate decision at the end, so you're not defending an infinite count. Habit groups spread the practice across several habits, so a single bad day doesn't collapse the whole thing. The motivating side of the streak runs more of the time when the practice underneath is steady.
I started sharing it. Friends and family used it and told me where it broke. I began coaching other people through their own cycles, watched the method survive contact with lives that weren't mine, and refined it run after run. Most of what's documented here came out of those conversations. The method isn't theory I've sat with on my own; it's been lived by other people too.
What I'm building alongside
Alongside this site I also build StillMind Meditation Journal, a meditation app and journal that helps people relieve stress and find a calmer version of themselves. Different surface, same instinct: small daily practices that, over time, change how you live. Habit Cycles, StillMind, and the language work before them are all the same answer to the same question I started asking on that walk.
Six years on, the answer has sharpened. I want to help people become the person they aspire to be, through mindful, helpful products that take the daily practice seriously.
Habit tracking remade me. More than once. It is what got me to move countries and rebuild a life on the other side. It is how I learned to build relationships, and to finish products instead of just starting them. I became reliable. I stopped drinking. I became someone other people can depend on.
Habit Cycles is the most meaningful project I will ever build, and the work that feels closest to who I am. If this system can help even one other person go through changes like those, it will be the proudest thing I'll ever do.
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Elsewhere: jamie-murphy.com · StillMind · LinkedIn
No hype. No "transform your life." Just habits with edges and honest reviews. How we write, source, and update content lives on the editorial standards page. A public dated record of when each method concept was first published is at the origin record.