Chapter nineteen of James Clear’s Atomic Habits talks about how the key to maintaining habits is to have them be hard enough to not be boring but not so hard that you’re always failing. Strive to reach a Goldilocks zone with your habits, adjusting your goals to match your abilities.

You can make this process work with the Recurrer app by paying attention to how you define your tasks. When you create a new task, the default ‘time to complete’ is 30 minutes. Each time you complete the task and enter how long you took to actually complete it, this time is adjusted for the next time the task recurs.

If your task is a regular habit such as ‘doing 30 pushups’ or ‘moving 5 boxes out of the garage’ then as you improve at that habit, you’ll notice that the actual time to complete becomes consistently less than the estimate. If that’s the case, then you might want to bump the pushups to 35 and the boxes to 6. The app itself will give you feedback as to whether you’re at the limits of your abilities or not.

Alternatively, you can define the task as ‘do x minutes of exercise’ or ‘spend y minutes checking in with clients’ and, as your ability to complete the task improves, you’ll get more done in that time (be that x or y). That way, you’ll always be in the Goldilocks zone that Atomic Habits recommends.

Either works.