One of the most important parts of creating a new habit – whether it be running more, eating healthy, or forming better writing skills – is to reward yourself when you accomplish the task. That's why we often set milestones for our selves like running a race. There's actually a lot of value in creating these meaningful milestones / goals for your self. They help motivate you push yourself just a little harder and once it's accomplished you'll feel proud of your achievement and you can share the experience with others to relive some of that joy which is very rewarding.

Programming Rewards

So when you're trying to create a better habit like programming more often, sending more pull requests, or learning a new programming language you should try to set up some rewards for yourself.

Signup for a Contest

I signed up for 24 Pull Requests this year. I made 12/24 pull requests and would love to do more next year. It was fun to motivate my self to do just a few more pull requests than I would normally do. And trying to get the maximum number of 24 pull requests is a very fun challenge.

Blogging for Benjamin it self is a contest and it's quite fun to try to work for $100 over the course of a month. Not to mention I'm having a lovely time competing with some fellow WooThemes employees. I honestly doubt if I ever would have been able to blog for 31 straight days (just two more to go!) without some sort of reward involved.

Set Milestones for Downloads / Purchases

It's also fun to set milestones for total number of downloads or purchases. The whole WooThemes team had a fun time making a video celebrating WooCommerce hitting the 2,000,000 download mark. If you can also set up another rewards (ex. monetary) that would be even more helpful.

Set Daily Goals

If you're selling a product reward yourself every time someone buys one of your products. You could go the coffee shop and buy a treat if someone buys your product before noon.

My Ninja Forms Rewards

I get an email notification whenever any one of my Ninja Forms extensions are purchased and that's already a great start. But I wanted to take it one step further so I created a label for all of these purchases in gmail. I did this partially for searchability but also because I could then connect it to a custom IFTTT recipe I made.

I bought one of my favorite ring tones so now whenever I get a message from that number I hear this song and do a little dance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W25_jgiY51I

Is this embarrassing? Yes totally! But celebrating my little successes is totally worth it!

Photo Credit: Office of Governor Patrick via Compfight cc