No Zero Days: Why Daily Consistency Beats Intensity

I work on Edicek almost every day. Five to six days per week, minimum.

I started on March 20 this year. Today, as I'm writing this, I've made 1,184 changes and improvements to the project.

Some days it's ten minutes. Some days I just think about it while falling asleep. Most days I put in one or two solid hours.

The amount doesn't matter. What matters is that I show up every single day.

This is the "no zero days" principle: do something, anything, every day. Even if it's small. Even if it feels insignificant. Just don't have a day where you did nothing.

The Math of Daily Consistency

Here's what most people think: "I'll work on my project this weekend when I have 8 hours."

Then the weekend comes. You're tired. Life happens. The 8 hours never materialize. Zero progress.

Here's the alternative: work on it every day. Don't care about the time. The real advantage is momentum.

When you work on something every day, you never lose context. You don't spend the first hour remembering where you left off. You don't rebuild motivation from scratch. You just continue.

And here's the thing: when you think about the project daily, you're always planning. You're running through different options in your head. Testing ideas. By the time you sit down to work, you already know exactly what to do next. You don't need to open a todo list (though it doesn't hurt). You just know what today's work is.

1,184 changes in 8 months. That's an average of 5 changes per day. Some days I did one. Some days I did twenty. But I kept showing up.

Most of those changes are tiny. Really tiny. Changed text on the landing page. Moved a button. Improved navigation. Fixed a small bug. Nothing heroic. Just small improvements, every single day.

How It Actually Works

I don't wait for perfect conditions. I don't wait for a free afternoon. I don't wait until I feel motivated.

Some days it's a real work session. I sit down, write code, solve problems, ship features.

Some days it's ten minutes. I fix a small bug. I update documentation. I refactor one function.

Some days I'm too tired to open my laptop. So I think about the project while falling asleep. I sketch ideas on paper. I plan what I'll build tomorrow.

All of those count. None of them are zero.

The trick is removing the barrier. If I told myself "I need 2 hours to make it worth it," I'd skip most days. But 10 minutes? I can always find 10 minutes.

And here's what happens: most days, those 10 minutes turn into 30. Then an hour. Then two. Because starting is the hard part. Once you're in, momentum takes over.

Daily Beats Intensive

You might think: "But wouldn't it be better to dedicate full weekends? Get into deep work?"

Maybe. In theory.

In practice, I've tried both. Weekend marathons feel productive in the moment. But then Monday comes and the project feels distant. By the time the next weekend arrives, I've lost the thread.

Daily work keeps the project alive in your head. You go to bed thinking about it. You wake up with solutions. Your brain works on it in the background because it never fully logs out.

That background processing is where a lot of the work happens. But it only works if you feed it daily input.

What This Looks Like Over Time

• Day 1: First commit. The project is just an idea.
• Week 1: Barely functional. Lots of bugs. I'm learning as I go.
• Month 1: It starts to take shape. Still rough, but I can see where it's going.
• Month 3: Features I didn't plan are emerging. The project is evolving.
• Month 8: 1,184 improvements later. The thing I started is barely recognizable. It's real now. Other people can use it, not just me.

None of those milestones came from heroic 12-hour coding sessions. They came from showing up. Every single day. Even when it was just ten minutes.

The Compound Effect

Ten minutes feels insignificant. What can you really accomplish in ten minutes?

Not much. On day one.

But ten minutes × 260 days? That's 43 hours. Except it's not. Because the work compounds.

The function you write on day 10 uses the foundation you built on day 5. The feature you ship on day 100 wouldn't exist without the infrastructure from day 50. Everything builds on everything else.

That's why daily consistency beats intensive spurts. You're not just accumulating hours. You're accumulating context, momentum, and compounding progress.

1,184 changes didn't happen because I worked harder. They happened because I worked daily.

Start Today

You don't need the perfect setup. You don't need 4 hours. You don't need to feel ready.

You need 10 minutes. Today.

Then 10 minutes tomorrow. And the day after that.

Most days, it'll turn into more. Some days, it won't. That's fine. The goal is no zero days.

A year from now, you won't believe how far daily consistency took you. Not because any single day was impressive. Because 365 days of small progress adds up to something you can't achieve any other way.

No zero days. That's it.