Start, stop, keep: review all your habits at once and decide what to carry

A start, stop, continue review helps you decide which habits to keep, which to change and which to let go of, by sorting them into bands. PiViva's New Habits uses five: Stop, Do Less, Keep, Start and Do More. The format is similar to the retrospectives that software teams have used since the early 2000s, turned towards your own life, and looking at all your habits together shows you the whole load you've been carrying.

Why does your habit list keep getting longer?

Every new year, every book and every podcast seems to add something. Journal every morning, meditate, take cold showers, read before bed, drink more water and walk ten thousand steps.

What hardly ever happens is a habit coming off the list, so it just keeps growing until it becomes far more than any one person could manage alongside work, family and the rest of life.

So you end up with a dozen things you feel you ought to be doing every day, actually managing four of them, and feeling a little bit guilty about the other eight every time you think about it. It's exhausting, and it can make even the habits you're doing well feel like a failure.

Where does start, stop, continue come from?

The format is a common one in team retrospectives, where a team looks back at a period of work and agrees what to start doing, what to stop doing and what to continue. Esther Derby and Diana Larsen's 2006 book Agile Retrospectives helped popularise structured reviews of this kind for software teams.

There's no single person who invented it, and it doesn't really need one. It works because it asks you to make a decision about every item, so nothing gets to linger unexamined at the bottom of the list.

PiViva's version adds two extra bands, Do Less and Do More, because real life is rarely a clean yes or no. You might not want to stop going to the Wednesday evening class, but doing it every other week could make the rest of the week feel far more manageable.

How does New Habits work in PiViva?

New Habits is a review of everything on your habit list at once. Each habit goes into one of the five bands: Stop, Do Less, Keep, Start or Do More.

Sorting them all together is deliberate. When you can see the whole load in one place, it becomes much easier to decide what's genuinely worth carrying and what you've been holding onto out of habit, if you'll forgive the pun.

Anything you stop or do less of is archived out of your daily tracker and kept safely in your history. Anything you start becomes a fresh habit in your Habit Tracker straight away, ready for its first tick.

If you repeat the review over time, you'll also see a Behavioural Change Index, which tracks how your habits move between the bands. It's an encouraging way to watch the shape of your life changing, a few habits at a time.

What if you can't bring yourself to stop anything?

That's very common, especially when every habit on the list feels like something a better version of you would do. A good place to start is the one you've been struggling with for a year and feeling bad about every time you see it.

Choosing to stop a habit properly is a decision you've made, and there's real relief in that. Failing at it by default, week after week, is just guilt on a loop. Try putting it in Stop, letting it be archived, and noticing how the week feels without it hanging over you.

If there's a habit you really want to keep but it keeps slipping, a Habit Audit will help you find out why. And if you'd like to replace a stopped habit with something that suits you better, you can design it in Building Habits.

A review like this works well every three months or so. It takes about ten minutes, and then you can leave your list alone until next time, knowing that everything on it is there because you chose it. A shorter list of habits you actually keep will do far more for you than a long one you only feel guilty about.