The first reason is ambition. People start with big targets like an hour of exercise or thirty pages a day, which become unsustainable once the initial motivation fades. A small, almost laughably easy version almost always survives longer.
The second reason is a missing cue. Good intentions don't trigger a behavior — a concrete signal that ties it to an existing routine or a fixed time does. Without a reminder or an anchor, the new behavior slips out of mind.
The third reason is all-or-nothing thinking. A single missed day convinces people the streak is over, so they give up. But the damage isn't the missed day — it's the second missed day that follows it. One slip is statistically insignificant.
The fourth reason is a lack of visibility. An untracked habit is easy to forget, and when you can't see your progress, the urge to protect it disappears too.
Daychain targets all four traps directly. Tasks are designed to be small and completed in one tap, each one is tied to a reminder (the cue), the growing chain makes progress visible, and — most importantly — it breaks the all-or-nothing logic: when you miss a day you keep going with skip and repair credits instead of resetting the chain. That way one bad day never erases months of work.