Bad-day habit protocol

The bad-day version is what makes a habit survive years. Write it down once, before you need it — your future self will not have the executive function to design it on the worst day of the year.

Related micro-course

When to use this

You have habits you can maintain on good days but lose on bad ones.
After a streak break, before you abandon the whole habit out of disgust.
When you notice the pattern that your habits collapse around predictable triggers (travel, illness, conflict, deadline weeks).

How to complete it

Define your 5% version: what would count as the habit when everything is going wrong. Three minutes, not thirty.
Write the explicit decision rules: in case of A, I will do B. Not aspirations — instructions.
Pick the one trigger most likely to break the habit this month and rehearse the protocol against it once before you need it.

Common mistakes

Setting the 5% version too ambitious — if it isn't trivially doable on the worst day, it isn't a bad-day version.
Treating the protocol as failure rather than design. The whole point is you keep the habit on bad days.
Skipping the trigger inventory. Without a list of likely-breaking scenarios, the rules don't fire.

Bad-day habit protocol

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1. The habit you're trying to keep.

2. The full version (what you do on a good day).

3. The 50% version (what you do on a tired day).

4. The 10% version (what you do on the worst day).

Smaller than you think. One push-up. One sentence. One page. If you can't do it sick, drunk, jet-lagged, and heartbroken, it's still too big.

5. What triggers each version.

Trigger	Version
Normal day
Late evening, tired
Sick
Travelling
Emotional load

6. Rule: missing a day doesn't mean stopping. What does “resume” look like?