How it works

The method behind Noa, our co-op game for building habits, is simple. You pick a habit. You report every day whether it happened or not. And once a week you talk briefly with your group about how it's going. That's all, on the surface. Underneath there are a few deliberate choices, and they're worth understanding.

You're not bad at habits.

Building a new habit feels heavy. It's supposed to. A habit is a physical pathway in the brain, and until the pathway is built, every repetition takes extra energy. It has nothing to do with your character or discipline. That's how the human brain is built, no matter who we are or where we're from.

As long as you keep building it gets lighter. And after about two months the habit becomes automatic.

The blue box: what's happening inside your skull meanwhile

Every time you report on your habit, nerve cells wire together a little stronger, and a layer of myelin gets wrapped around the connection. It's a kind of fat, and its job is to let the signal travel more easily next time. The first weeks you're pushing a shopping cart down a forest trail. After two months it's a road bike on freshly dried asphalt.

Research lands at a median of 59 to 66 days before a habit becomes automatic. That's why the game is built in two-month cycles. And that's why the guide in the game, Noa, is a neuron. He knows what it's like to be a weak connection.

Report yes or no. Even no.

Every weekday you answer one question: did it happen today? It takes a second, "Yes" or "No", and you're done. Weekends are free, and if you forget a day you can report afterwards for 48 hours.

Handwritten whiteboard with nine habits in rows and dates in columns, filled in with crosses for the days it happened and dashes for the days it did not — Fredrik's own habit board from 2017, before there was an app. A cross for the days it happened, a dash for the days it didn't.

And here's the important part: a no is not a failure. By reporting no you keep the habit in your awareness, and that's where the building happens. If you avoid reporting, though, the odds are high that the new habit slowly slips out of awareness and you fall back into old patterns.

"It creates a safe space to fail. It breaks the taboo that failure is bad."Gokul, ENV Media

The group is the engine.

You're around five people. You tell each other what you're building and why. Then each of you reports on your own, and once a week you meet for about 20 minutes. One at a time, you share how it went, and why it went the way it did.

No pressure beyond what you create yourself. It usually takes a few meetings before the first person dares to admit a "failure" to the group, and then it loosens up for everyone.

Some of the people who were part of the calls at ENV Media. The fifth seat is yours.

What happens in those short calls is hard to sell with words, but that's where the game does its work. It becomes clear that the "discipline problem" most people think is deeply personal turns out to be a universal one. You see that even the people who seem to have it all together have days that fall apart. In the end you come to the calls to see how the others are doing.

The research behind it.

The method leans on things that are properly established. That self-chosen goals last longer than imposed ones (Deci & Ryan, self-determination theory). That groups where it's safe to fail perform better (Edmondson, psychological safety). That tracking your progress raises the odds of reaching the goal, most of all when it's written down and others can see it (Harkin et al. 2016, 138 experiments). And that a habit takes a median of 59 to 66 days to automate (Singh et al. 2024).

We didn't invent any of this. We put it together into something people can actually keep doing.

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