Set it up in ten minutes
Do not spend an evening designing this. The design is not the hard part and time spent on it is time spent avoiding starting.
- Pick two or three apps. Not all of them, and not the ones you need.
- Pick the hours. Evenings are where the volume is for nearly everybody.
- Agree what you will each say when the other asks to get out early.
- Agree a time each day when you both say how it went. Two lines, not a debrief.
Days one and two
Easy and slightly smug. Novelty is doing the work and neither of you will need much from the other.
Do not conclude anything from this part. Everybody manages days one and two, which is why so many challenges are designed to be two days long.
Day three, where it breaks
Consistently the hardest, for both of you, and usually at the same hour. The novelty is gone and nothing has replaced it yet.
This is the day the other person matters. Not for encouragement, which does nothing, but because asking to get out is a message to somebody rather than a tap. Expect at least one request on day three, and expect to want to grant it.
Days four to seven
It gets noticeably easier, and the easiness is the actual finding: the discomfort was temporary and it was shorter than you thought.
Use the back half to notice what you did instead. That list is more useful than the week itself.
What to do on day eight
The mistake is to finish and go back. The week generated information and the information is the product.
Keep exactly one thing: one app that does not come back, or the evening window, permanently. And keep the other person, because the part of this that worked was them, not the seven days.
Common questions
Does it have to be seven days?
No, but it should have an end. An open ended attempt has no day eight, which is the day the decision that matters gets made.
What if one of us drops out on day three?
Extremely common and not a failure. Agree in advance that dropping out is allowed and the other person carries on, otherwise one wobble ends it for both.