I can still picture the notebooks. Each one started the same way. Clean cover, first page full of energy. Writing every day felt easy at first. After a while I'd notice I hadn't missed a day. That's when things usually broke.

The practice stopped being something I did and turned into something I tracked. Once that happened, the notebook was already finished. It just took a few more weeks to admit it.

For a long time I blamed the obvious things. Bigger goals, better systems, more discipline. When none of that worked I told myself I was too busy or badly organized.

The problem was simpler. I was waiting to feel like doing the work. And I treated that feeling like proof. If it was there, I showed up. If it wasn't, I hesitated. Over time, the habit learned the rule. It only survived when conditions were right.

Here's the mechanism I missed across a dozen abandoned notebooks. The streak becomes the product. You start tracking consistency, and the tracking hijacks the motivation. You're no longer writing because you have something to say. You're writing to keep the number alive. The day you miss, the number dies, and so does the reason to continue. You built the habit on a scaffolding that collapses the first time it's interrupted.

But there's a deeper layer. Waiting for motivation before you sit down sounds reasonable. It feels like self-awareness. "I'm not in the right headspace today." "I'll do it when I have more energy." What's actually happening is you've made the feeling a prerequisite for the action. Which means the feeling is running the show. It decides when you work and when you don't. You think you're being honest with yourself. You're being governed.

That's why discipline alone doesn't fix it. Discipline fights the feeling. What works is removing the feeling from the equation entirely. Not overriding it. Ignoring its vote.

Eventually I lowered the bar. Not as a strategy. More out of fatigue. One sentence counted. Any time of day counted. Missing a day wasn't failure. Protecting contact with the work mattered more than protecting the streak.

That changed something. The writing stopped feeling like performance and started feeling like showing up. Some days it was short. Some days it felt pointless. Nothing came together. I stayed anyway. Not to improve myself, not to feel productive, just to not disappear the moment it got dull.

Most things that matter feel like that. Not exciting, not rewarding, just plain enough that you have to decide whether you're coming back without a reason to. The notebooks taught me that. Not through the pages I filled but through all the ones I didn't.

The move I use now is to strip the practice down to something too small to resist and too boring to track. For writing, it's one sentence. Not a page, not a session, not a word count. One sentence. If more comes, fine. If it doesn't, the sentence was the practice. No app, no streak counter, no checkmark. The moment I track it, I've given the scoreboard authority over the work.

Some days the one sentence turns into a thousand words. Some days it stays one sentence. Both count the same. The only question is whether I sat down. Everything else is decoration.