Jamie Murphy

Jamie Murphy is the founder and lead writer of Habit Cycles. He has tracked his own habits for the better part of six years, watched the same pattern surface across cycle after cycle of building and breaking, and built the method around what was already working in his own practice.

The framework crystallised after enough cycles to see the shape underneath them. Months of building, where streaks climb and the practice feels alive. A plateau, where the numbers keep rising and the energy quietly drains. Then a slip, then another, and a crash that can last as long as the climb. Jamie called it the streak wave, and the rest of the method — bounded cycles, habit groups, awareness habits, the four decisions at the end — is the structure he built to steady the practice through it.

Outside Habit Cycles, Jamie is a senior product manager at Language Drops, where he helps people build connection through better language. The craft he uses there — discipline, research, defining what’s worth building, and building things that genuinely improve people’s lives — is the same one that shapes Habit Cycles. The framework grew out of his own habit-tracking practice and the patterns that surfaced after enough cycles.

Friends and family used the method next. They told him where it broke. He coached others through their cycles, watched the framework survive contact with lives that weren’t his, and refined it run after run. Most of what’s documented on this site came out of those conversations. The method isn’t theory he sat with on his own; it’s been lived by other people too.

Alongside Habit Cycles, Jamie also builds StillMind, a meditation journal app, and writes occasionally at jamie-murphy.com. The work runs on the same instinct underneath: small daily practices that, given the right structure, change how you live.

On Habit Cycles he writes about habit formation, behaviour change, and the practical mechanics of running habits at scale: structured reviews, exit conditions, awareness habits, and the four canonical decisions at the end of a cycle. He cites BJ Fogg, James Clear, and the broader behavioural-science literature where the work earned the citation, and stays close to lived experience the rest of the time.

The full first-person story of how Habit Cycles started is on the about page. For a weekly email on the practice, The Wave Newsletter goes out every Monday: one prompt about habits, one borrowed quote, and a note from whichever cycle Jamie is running this week.

How Habit Cycles writes, sources, and updates content is documented on the editorial standards page.