A small quest, every morning
RLQuest gives you a few walking quests a day, sized to your time, and checks the steps and the route. For iPhone and Android.
Most walking habits die in week three. Week one runs on enthusiasm, week two on guilt, and then a wet Tuesday arrives and the whole thing quietly ends. The people who still walk a year later haven't got more willpower. They've set the habit up so that the wet Tuesday doesn't break it.
This page is about that setup: how small to start, where to put the walk in your day, how to keep score without lying to yourself, and what to do with the day you miss. There are no health claims here. Walking is good for whatever it's good for; the point is to still be doing it in March.
The daily dose has to be small enough that you'd do it on your worst day. Five hundred steps. To the corner and back. A lap of the block. It feels like nothing, and that's the point: a habit is built by the repetition, not by the distance. You can make it longer once it's automatic, and it won't be automatic for at least a month.
A useful test: could you do it in the rain, in the dark, in work shoes, with a cold coming on? If not, it's too big to be the baseline. The baseline is what you do every day. Anything on top of it is a bonus, and bonuses are allowed to vary.
A new habit needs an anchor, a thing you already do without deciding to. The strongest anchors are meals, the commute and the start of the working day.
Telling yourself you'll walk at 7 a.m. gives the habit one chance a day to fail. A window gives it several. 'Sometime between six and eight in the evening' survives a late train; '6:30 sharp' doesn't. Windows that work for a lot of people: the first hour awake, the lunch break, the gap between finishing work and sitting down, the half hour after dinner. Pick one and guard it. If you miss the window, the walk still counts; it's just no longer the easy version.
Streaks work. A run of twenty days in a row is a thing you don't want to lose, and that reluctance will get you out the door on a day nothing else would. Streaks also have a built-in failure mode: the first miss turns twenty days of effort into zero, and a lot of people stop right there. Two fixes. First, decide in advance what breaks the streak: a day under five hundred steps, say, not a day under your target. Second, count the week as well as the day. Five days out of seven is a good week, and a week doesn't reset because of one Wednesday.
The other honesty problem is that nobody checks a notebook. If you wrote down that you walked, you walked. A step counter or a recorded route is harder to argue with, and that's a feature, not an insult.
| Week | The daily baseline | What else |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Five hundred steps, any time of day | Nothing. Just don't miss. |
| 2 | Fifteen hundred steps, inside your chosen window | Note the days it was hard and why. |
| 3 | Three thousand steps, spread over the day if you like | One longer walk on the weekend, no target. |
| 4 | Three thousand steps, one of them on a route you've never walked | Decide whether to raise the baseline or hold it. Holding is fine. |
You will miss a day. The habit isn't the days you walked; it's what you do the day after a miss. The rule that saves most habits is short: never miss twice. A single gap is weather; two in a row is the start of stopping. On the day after, do the smallest version you've got. Five minutes. To the corner. It counts, and more importantly it keeps the next day attached to the last one.
An app can't make you walk. What it can do is remove the two decisions that kill most habits: what to do, and whether it counts. RLQuest hands you three to ten quests every morning from a library of more than 2,700, sized to the time you've said you have: a thousand steps today, two thousand before noon, a lap you've never walked, four new tiles on the way home. Then it checks: the step count, the recorded route, the new hexagons on your map. Streaks, XP and 213 achievements across 69 series keep score for you, and because the app knows what you did rather than what you said, the score means something.
It's free to download for iPhone and Android, and a Premium subscription adds more quests per day. The ladder above works with a notebook. The app is for people who know they'd stop keeping the notebook.
RLQuest gives you a few walking quests a day, sized to your time, and checks the steps and the route. For iPhone and Android.