Project 50 With a Friend: How to Set It Up So You Finish

Project 50 is a 50-day challenge built on a list of daily rules. To finish it, keep only the rules that matter most to you, do it with a friend who shows up next to you, and agree on some slack for missed days before you start. And remember: 50 days is a strong start, not a finished habit.

Project 50 is a self-improvement challenge that spread on social media: you follow a set of daily rules for 50 days in a row. We couldn't find a reliable source for who started it, and versions vary. A 2022 episode of The Scope, the University of Utah Health podcast, walked through the seven rules most people use.

Here they are: wake up before 8 a.m., spend the first hour on a morning routine with no phone, exercise for an hour, read 10 pages, put an hour into a new skill, follow a healthy diet, and track your progress every day.

Add it up and that's more than three hours a day, every day, before school, work or anything else. One of the podcast hosts asked the obvious question: who has this amount of time? That's not a reason to skip it. It's a reason to set it up well, and a friend is a big part of that.

More isn't better when it comes to changing behavior. A 2015 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin pooled 150 reports and compared programs by how many changes they asked for. One change had a small effect (0.11), two or three had the largest (0.29), and four or more fell back to 0.14. The drop was steeper for people whose motivation was low.

Planning a long list can backfire too. In a 2012 paper in the Journal of Consumer Research, titled 'Too Much of a Good Thing', Amy Dalton and Stephen Spiller found that detailed plans (how, when and where) help with a single goal, but usually not with several. Planning many goals made people notice how hard it would be, and their commitment dropped. What helped was framing the list as manageable.

Then there's the math. Say you hit each rule on 80% of days, which is solid, and your misses fall on different days. With five rules, all of them line up only about a third of the time. With seven, it's about one day in five. An all-or-nothing count can turn a good week into a failed one. So pick the two or three rules that matter most, or make each one smaller, and save the rest for your next round.

Having someone next to you changes how long you last. A 2023 meta-analysis in Kinesiology Review looked at 19 studies with 1,912 people on what's called the Köhler effect: when people exercised with a slightly stronger partner and the team's result depended on them, they kept going much longer than alone. The effect was large (0.91). A 2014 study in Games for Health Journal found human partners worked better than software ones.

The partner doesn't even have to be in the room. In a 2012 trial in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 58 women cycled either alone or next to a virtual partner on a screen, each riding on their own. With the partner, they rode 19.8 minutes on average. Alone, 10.6.

The honest caveat: these were lab tasks, like planks and cycling, measured in minutes, mostly with students. They tell you about effort in the moment, not about 50 days. Still, the direction is consistent: a partner who shows up makes it easier for you to show up.

Show up. In a 2016 randomized trial in Preventive Medicine Reports, 790 graduate students were placed in small online groups for 11 weeks. Those who could see how often their peers went to exercise classes attended almost twice as often as the control group. Those who only got support and chat, without seeing what peers did, went less than the control group.

So the most useful thing your Project 50 partner can do is visibly do it too. A 'you got this' message is nice. Seeing that your friend already did today's workout is the part the evidence backs.

One more thing: don't make the kickoff the big moment. In four experiments published in Psychological Science in 2009, when other people took notice of a goal about who someone wanted to become, the most committed people then worked on it less, as if saying it out loud already counted. The studies were small, but the lesson is cheap to follow: celebrate the daily proof, not the day you signed up.

Streaks help until they break. In a 2023 paper in the Journal of Consumer Research, Silverman and Barasch ran seven studies on streaks. In one, with 601 people, 93% kept going while their streak was intact. Right after it broke, that fell to 69%. When the broken streak could be repaired, 85% kept going. The drop was biggest when people blamed themselves.

Built-in slack helps. In a 2021 field study of 273 students over four weeks, published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, a goal of 7 days out of 7 was met on 2.83 days a week. An easier goal of 5 out of 7 got 3.11. The winner was 7 out of 7 plus two emergency skips a week: 4.00 days, and the best rate of getting back on track the day after a miss.

For Project 50, that means agreeing with your friend before day one: how many skip days each of you gets, and what counts as making up a day. And if one of you misses, no blame. A miss tells you something about the setup, not about you.

Probably not for everything, and that's fine. In the study behind the famous 66-day figure, published in 2010 in the European Journal of Social Psychology, 96 volunteers each did one daily habit. The median time until it felt automatic was 66 days, ranging from 18 to 254 depending on the person. Fifty days is shorter than that median.

A 2024 review in the journal Healthcare found similar medians, 59 to 66 days, and averages of 106 to 154. The 2010 study also found that missing one day didn't materially affect habit formation. So the goal on day 50 isn't a finished habit. It's a routine you can keep going on day 51, maybe with one rule instead of seven.

Kairo is a free iPhone app for building daily habits with your friends. You can start a challenge from the Project 50 trend, alone or with a friend, with 1 to 5 habits a day. Given the research, consider starting with fewer habits, or use Easy mode, which counts a day when at least one habit is done. Strict counts it only when every habit is.

If a full challenge feels like too much, sign a pact instead: you and one friend put your names on the same habit for a set number of days and see each other show up until the last day. Your friends see your proof, most of it a photo taken in the moment, and you see theirs.