The Habit Onion
- Layer 1: the habit you want to change
- Layer 2: the habit of being consistent during different emotional states and environments
- Layer 3: the habit of getting back up when you fall off the wagon
Almost all habit change philosophies focus entirely on the 1st layer of the habit onion, and assume that the other layers are healthy and thriving (and if they aren’t, just get them healthy first, silly).
A real habit change product that cares about your long-term change will focus MORE on the 2nd and 3rd layers of the habit onion than the 1st. It’s in those layers that one learns to change themselves repeatedly and sustainably.
What is Budge?
This new tour introduces you to the snail that will remind you to do stuff. Hi Budge!
Check out the tour or just jump in and pick a program!
DID YOU KNOW? Snails that respire using a lung belong to the group Pulmonata, while those with gills form a paraphyletic group; in other words, snails with gills are divided into a number of taxonomic groups that are not very closely related. Snails with lungs and with gills have diversified widely enough over geological time that a few species with gills can be found on land, numerous species with a lung can be found in freshwater, and a few species with a lung can be found in the sea.
WHOA: New Programs, Free Programs
By popular demand, today we’re releasing Stretch Animal and Plank Animal!
Pushup Animal has been so well loved - and so effective it surprised even us - that we made two of the next most requested programs ANIMAL programs as well.
In Plank Animal, first learn how to plank (we’re talking about what yoga people call “dolphin plank” - not about this kind of planking), then work your way up to three minutes (which is really hard!) Plank is better than situps or crunches because it’s easier to do right, harder to hurt yourself, and strengthens more muscles!
For example, after you graduate to Walrus (an animal that can hold still a very. long. time.) - a whole seven days of challenges get you ready to to take on the walrus in a 60 second plank-off.
Play it now (for free)!
Stretch Animal starts with Relaxing Lion and works up to to Overachieving Antelope level - but rather than ramping up the difficulty, these animals are more focused on just getting you to pause and stretch just a little bit each day! Freeform! This one’s all about consistency.
Try it out (it’s free)!
Or pick one of our other programs:
Here are the faces behind Bud.ge, Health Month, Gonna Try, and How’s My Email.
Hi!
(@ameliagreenhall, @busterbenson, @xenocid)
Here’s one of Habit Labs, Inc.’s top secret technical drawings. Look for more sloppily illustrated answers to all your “how does bud.ge work?” questions soon.
(Ok, how fast to 100,000?)
Hehe! Here’s a screenshot of some of @budge’s recent favorite tweets. Our users love us … a lot.
“@budge I love this start up! If we were dating it would be about time to give bud.ge a key.”
We pushed out a new design for items on your friends page, which we really like.
- You can now like what people are doing, Instagram-style
- You now see in a little dot matrix the consistency of your check ins for that program. It’s an easy way to see just how close you (and others) are to making this a habit.
- We roll up 30-day stats, inspiring new personal challenges like “1,000 pushups in 30 days”
Little by little, we’re getting there.
This week, we’re focused on adding a getting a few more awesome programs in the system. Any special requests? Let us know!
Today I went from doing pushups on my knees to “real” pushup!
Look at some of the conversations on my checkins from the last few days. All these budge users have been educating/encouraging me… and it’s not just me - I see talk like this all over in the stream.
It feels like a little community is growing… who are these awesome people?
(Everyone else: come play too!)
Pushup talk.
Surely you can do pushups if this guy can. Play Pushup Animal!
There have been, and are, dozens or hundreds of fitness apps, but something about the philosophy and design of this one seemed, to me, to be completely dialed in.
Budge is officially launched!
The team is exhausted and inspired from the last few days at LAUNCH conference. We didn’t win (these companies were IMPRESSIVE) but did get chosen as one of the top products of the first day by CNET writer and Launch judge, Rafe Needleman. The whole experience was quite a fun rollercoaster… and now we can start learning directly from a much larger group of people.
We’ll be writing up more of our impressions and tell you about what we learned soon. But until then we wanted to let you know that the beta is no longer private… anyone can sign in and start playing any of the 6 programs we have to start. More will be added continuously.
Get healthy, or whatever.
Help spread the word!
