I'm a computer science student with too many hobbies.
I play guitar. I do portrait sketches. I play table tennis. I play football. I write. I play video games. I work out, I go on runs, and the list genuinely keeps going.
I love all of it. And for years, I kept losing the thread on all of it.
If you searched something like "why can't I stick to one hobby" and ended up here — welcome. I've typed those exact words into Google more times than I want to admit. This post is the answer I wish I'd found, written by someone who actually lived inside that question for years.
Why I Couldn't Stick to a Single Hobby
The standard advice for people like us is: focus. Pick one thing. Go deep. Quit the others.
I tried that. It never worked, and over time I figured out why.
For me, the problem was never lack of discipline. It was the opposite. Every time I missed a single day of guitar practice, or skipped a workout, or didn't sketch that week, I felt the weight of it. The missed day didn't make me try harder the next day. It made me feel like I'd already failed, so why bother?
And here's the part nobody tells you about being multi-passionate. The overwhelm of trying to do everything has a specific failure mode: you don't actually do nothing. You just do the easiest, lowest-friction thing available. For me, that was my phone.
Funnily enough, I got addicted to my screen because I had too many hobbies. The little doses of dopamine from scrolling were just enough to distract me from the fact that I wasn't doing any of the things I wanted to be doing. I'd tell myself, "I'll do that tomorrow, let me just relax today and scroll some more." Tomorrow would come. Same script. Day after day.
The phone wasn't the disease. It was the symptom. The disease was the gap between everything I wanted to do and the part of me that didn't know how to hold all of it without feeling crushed.
Why Streak-Based Habit Apps Made It Worse
So I did what any reasonable person would do. I downloaded habit apps.
A lot of them. Streaks. Habitica. Done. Productive. Way of Life. Microsoft To Do stuck around the longest, but only because it didn't really try to be a habit app — it was just a todo list, which I could ignore without feeling judged.
Every dedicated habit app failed me the same way. The mechanic was always the same:
- Mark the habit done → keep your streak alive
- Miss a day → streak resets to zero
- Look at chart of all your missed days → feel like garbage
The streak is supposed to motivate you through loss aversion. Don't break the chain. The thing is, when you have eight or nine hobbies you're trying to keep alive, breaking the chain isn't a hypothetical. It's a weekly event. Sometimes a daily one.
And the moment the streak broke, the entire system collapsed for me. I'd uninstall the app angrier than before. The app didn't make me build the habit; it made me build a relationship with shame. And shame, in my experience, has never moved me an inch.
I started reading about why this kept happening, and a couple of ideas reframed the whole problem for me.
The first was priming — the idea that whatever your brain processes first sets the tone for everything that follows. The first input of my day was always my phone, which meant my mornings were always reactive. Change the first input, and you can change the day.
The second was nudge theory, Richard Thaler's idea that small, well-timed cues shift behavior more reliably than strict rules. Punishment-based systems collapse the moment you're tired or stressed. Gentle reminders, placed at the right moments, tend to survive.
Streak apps were doing the opposite of both. The first input was a chart of my failures. The motivation was punishment, not nudging. No wonder it kept failing.
What a Habit Tracker Without Streaks Actually Looks Like
So I built one. I'm a CS student. Building things is what I do. I figured if I could make the version of an app I actually wanted, it would help me, and maybe it would be useful as a portfolio project, and maybe it would help someone else along the way.
That's how Unfog started.
The first principle was the easiest one: no streaks. No charts of my failures. No scolding notifications when I missed a day. If I missed a day, the system just kept showing up the next day like nothing had happened. Because nothing had happened — I'd just had a day, the way humans have days.
The features that came out of that:
There's a bucket list, for the things you actually want to do with your life. There's a writing log, with custom spaces — one for journaling, one for app ideas, one for whatever you want. There are routines, for the rotation of hobbies and habits you're trying to keep alive. There are todos with subtasks, because the big things only ever get done when you cut them into pieces small enough to swallow.
But the feature I'm proudest of is the shouldn't list.
The shouldn't list is for habits you want to leave behind. You write the habit, and then you write reasons underneath it. So if I write "I shouldn't doomscroll," underneath it I write: you feel terrible afterwards, you waste your time, you waste your potential. Specific, in your own voice, written by you when you were thinking clearly — to be read by you when you aren't.
Then the system ties it together with three notifications a day — early morning, late afternoon, and before midnight. Each one shows me one thing from my bucket list and one thing from my shouldn't list. So when I pick up my phone in the morning, the first thing I see isn't a feed. It's a line about what I want, and a line about what I'm trying to leave behind.
The early-morning notification fires hours before I wake up. By the time I actually reach for the phone, the notification has been sitting on the lock screen for a long time, on top of everything else. It's just there. Not dramatic, not nagging. Just a tap on the shoulder reminding me what I'm doing here.
I've been using it every day for months. I haven't stuck perfectly to any single hobby, and I've stopped pretending that's the goal. What I have done is keep all of them alive, with gaps, on a longer rhythm than daily. Some weeks I sketch a lot. Some weeks I play guitar. Some weeks I run. The system doesn't punish the gaps. It just keeps showing me what I care about.
If you've also got too many hobbies, and you're tired of streak-based habit apps making you feel like you're failing at everything at once — Unfog is on Android, free to try, built by one CS student for people like himself.
You can do this without the app, too. The idea is what matters. Set up a recurring notification that fires before you wake up. Put one thing you want and one thing you're trying to leave behind in it. Watch what changes when the first thing you see in the morning isn't a feed.
The streak isn't the cure for inconsistency. The streak is what made you feel like inconsistency was a moral failure in the first place. You're not lazy. You just have a lot you want to do, and you've been using the wrong tools to hold it all.