Why do I quit the logbook after two weeks?

I quit my third logbook in week two, like the first two. First days full, then blank pages. I called it willpower.

The fourth time I measured the path: unlocking the phone, finding the app, waiting for the keyboard. Past thirty seconds, I put it off. My threshold, not a measured rule.

In a study, 96 mostly postgraduate volunteers chose a daily eating, drinking or activity behavior to carry out in one context for 12 weeks; logging is none of these. For curves that fit well, the modelled median time to reach 95% of a participant’s own automaticity plateau was 66 days, ranging from 18 to 254 days (Lally et al., 2010).

In the same study, though motivated, about half the participants never performed consistently enough to reach habit status. That figure does not explain my week two; it only stopped me reading quitting in week two as a character trait.

In the glucose entry screen I replaced the system keyboard with my own number pad and preselected the context by the hour. After the trial, without a subscription, a lock card replaces that form on new entries. The number pad and preselection worked for me.

The ADA and AADE report addresses health care professionals and others who speak about diabetes; it says language can strongly affect perception and behavior, and states it is not meant to suggest how people living with diabetes talk or write about themselves (Dickinson et al., 2017). Applying that to my own blank pages is entirely my call; I stopped calling them failure.

How often to measure, which contexts matter and the target range are individual questions for a care team. I take one to my appointment: does my difficulty logging change my monitoring plan?