Why I Started ProvenHabits — And Why Most Habit Advice Kept Failing Me
I have a Google Doc from November 2020. It’s titled “New System — For Real This Time.”
847 words. A whole philosophy. Morning routine broken into 15-minute blocks, a workout schedule, a reading goal, a journaling habit, a screen cutoff time. Color-coded. Timestamped. Completely sincere.
I followed it for eleven days.
The Part I’m a Little Embarrassed About
I’m Shaon. I’m a product manager — which means my entire job is building systems that help people execute reliably. I’m decent at it. At work, I know how to break a goal into pieces, spot where things will break under pressure, and build checkpoints so nothing quietly falls apart.
For most of my twenties, I could not do any of that for my own life.
2020 gave me something I’d always said I needed: time. Actual, unscheduled time. And I still couldn’t hold a habit together for longer than two weeks.
I wasn’t lazy. I want to be clear about that — because if you’re reading this, you’re probably not lazy either. I was working a demanding job and reading about productivity constantly. I had genuine intentions every single time I started over.
And yet: the gym habit started and stopped four times. The reading goal I set on January 1st had me at zero books by April. The journaling practice had a fresh “Day 1” entry roughly every three weeks.
At some point in late 2020, I sat down and made a list — just to actually face it — of every habit I’d tried and abandoned in the previous two years.
Nineteen items.
Not nineteen attempts. Nineteen different habits.
That list is when the embarrassment turned into real curiosity. Not “what’s wrong with me” — but “what is actually going on here, mechanically?”
What I Found Out (And Why It Was Annoying)
I stopped collecting new habit ideas and started reading about why habits break down.
Atomic Habits by James Clear. Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg. The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. Then the less popular stuff — research on implementation intentions, studies on decision fatigue, papers on what actually predicts long-term habit maintenance versus short-term motivation spikes.
What I found was both a relief and genuinely frustrating: almost everything I’d been doing was wrong in specific, documented, fixable ways.
My habits were too big. They were attached to motivation instead of triggers. I was measuring how I felt about doing something instead of whether I actually did it. And I was using streak-based apps that made missing a day feel like starting from zero — which, it turns out, is one of the most psychologically damaging patterns in habit formation, and also exactly what most popular tracking apps encourage.
So I rebuilt from scratch. One habit at a time. Smaller than felt meaningful — embarrassingly small at first. Clear trigger. No motivation required to get started.
The results weren’t cinematic. No transformation montage. But eighteen months later: 34 books read, running three times a week for over a year, seven months of unbroken weekly reviews. And the thing I’m most proud of — I’d fallen off a habit and come back to it six times without treating the gap as proof I’d failed.
That last part, the coming-back, turned out to matter more than the consistency itself.
Why I Couldn’t Just Find This Somewhere
Here’s the part that frustrated me most while I was figuring all of this out.
The information existed. The science was solid. But the surface of the internet on this topic is almost entirely useless. 5 Habits of Highly Successful People. Try This 30-Day Challenge. Just Wake Up at 5am.
These articles are everywhere. They rank well on Google. And they are written by people who have clearly never tried to maintain a habit through a week where work is on fire, you haven’t slept properly, you’re behind on everything, and the last thing you want to do is the thing you promised yourself you’d do.
What I kept looking for — and couldn’t find — was something written from inside that week. From someone who knew the research but had also failed, specifically, in the ways I was failing. Not inspiration. Not a listicle. An honest account of what it actually takes to keep a habit alive when your week doesn’t go as planned.
I couldn’t find it. So I decided to write it.
What ProvenHabits Is
ProvenHabits is where I write about habit formation and productivity systems for people whose lives don’t pause while they’re trying to improve them.
One rule governs everything I publish here: I don’t write about anything I haven’t tested on myself, against a real job and a real schedule. I write about the failures as clearly as the wins — because the failures are where all the useful information actually lives. A successful streak doesn’t teach you much. The day you broke the streak, what happened next, and how you came back — that’s the part worth understanding.
Here’s what you’ll find on this site:
Habit systems that survive ordinary life
Not motivational frameworks, but mechanical ones. How to design a habit with a real chance of making it through a bad week. How to pick the right trigger. How to start small enough to actually build momentum. How to come back after a gap without making it a bigger deal than it is.
Productivity frameworks tested against reality
Time blocking, deep work, the Pomodoro method, GTD, weekly reviews. I’ve used all of them. I’ll tell you what each one actually costs to maintain, what kind of schedule it works for, and where it quietly breaks down.
Honest tool reviews
Habit tracker apps, planners, journals, Notion templates. Some are genuinely useful. Some are beautifully designed ways to feel productive while avoiding the actual work. I’ll tell you which is which.
Morning and evening routines that don’t require rebuilding your life
What actually matters in a morning routine, what’s just aesthetics, and how to build one around the schedule you have rather than the one you wish you had.
New guides go up at least once a week. Everything is long, specific, and written as if I’m explaining it to someone who’s already tried the short version and it didn’t work.
Who This Is For
You already know what you should be doing. That’s not the problem.
The problem is the gap between knowing and actually doing it consistently — and specifically, that the gap keeps reopening no matter how many times you close it.
That’s who I write for.
The nineteen-item list is still sitting in that Google Doc. I keep it there on purpose. It reminds me that the problem was never effort. It was always the system.
If you want to start somewhere, my first guide walks through exactly what I changed after making that list — and why the changes that actually worked were nothing like what I expected.
Have a habit you’ve been trying to build (or rebuild)? Tell me in the comments. I read them all, and I reply.
— Shaon
Founder, ProvenHabits.com