Set It, Forget It, Show Up — How AI Turns One Game Into a Habit | Nalya

Set It, Forget It, Show Up — How AI Turns One Game Into a Habit | Nalya | Nalya

The Problem Is Not Motivation

Most people who want to exercise more regularly are not failing because they lack motivation.

They know it makes them feel better. They know the evidence on longevity, cardiovascular health, and mental wellbeing. They have tried, genuinely, to build the habit. The failure tends to happen earlier in the chain — not at the decision to exercise, but at the decision to organize an instance of exercising.

"Who's free Thursday evening?"

"I can do 6, not 7."

"Can someone book the court this week?"

"Oh, I thought you were booking it."

The match dies in a group chat, not in a gym. The friction is not motivational — it is logistical. And logistical friction, repeated weekly, is enough to make even highly motivated people slowly stop trying.

This is not anecdotal. Researchers studying exercise adherence consistently find that perceived effort to initiate a behavior is a stronger predictor of whether people actually do it than their stated desire to do it.^[1] The activation energy required to coordinate four schedules, find a court, handle payment, and send reminders — every single week — is genuinely significant. It is invisible effort, but it accumulates.

Environmental Design, Not Willpower

The behavioral science literature offers a more useful frame than motivation.

BJ Fogg's research on behavior design, spanning two decades at Stanford, describes habits not as the product of willpower or discipline but as the product of environment. The behaviors that stick are the ones where the default conditions — what happens if you do nothing — point toward the behavior rather than away from it.^[2]

Applied to exercise, the insight is precise: if booking a court requires active effort every week, the behavior will decay under ordinary life pressure. If the court is already booked unless you actively cancel, the behavior becomes the default. The activation energy has been transferred from doing to not doing.

James Clear's Atomic Habits frames the same principle as "reducing friction": every additional step between you and a desired behavior is a decision point where the behavior can fail. Remove the steps and you remove the failure modes.^[3]

The corollary — rarely discussed — is that the most important thing you can do for a desired habit is often not to try harder but to automate the logistics so that trying harder is no longer required.

The Social Multiplier

Recurring commitments work better with other people than they do alone.

The evidence on social fitness adherence is consistent. People with exercise partners are more likely to start, more likely to continue, and more likely to return after a break than people exercising alone.^[4] The mechanism is well-understood: social commitment creates accountability. When someone else is expecting you to show up, the psychological cost of not showing up is meaningfully higher.

There is also a secondary effect that matters for padel specifically: the game itself creates social reward. The camaraderie of a regular doubles group, the familiar rhythm of playing with the same people, the texture of a shared challenge — these create positive reinforcement that solo exercise cannot replicate. This is likely part of why racket sports dominate the longevity tables in cohort data: the social layer turns exercise from a duty into something people actually want to do.^[5]

The challenge is that social coordination is the most friction-intensive part of the whole system. Your motivation to play is high. Coordinating four people's schedules, court availability, and payment every week is the part that fails.

What Autonomous Booking Removes

Recurring padel auto-booking works like this.

You tell the AI — in plain conversation — how often you want to play and roughly when you are generally free. "Three mornings a week, ideally 7am, Monday, Wednesday, Friday." The AI creates a recurring booking configuration and takes it from there.

Each week, it checks your preferences against available courts on Playtomic, assembles a squad from your regular players, sends calendar invites, and — if you have enabled auto-booking — charges the court directly from your wallet. You do not need to do anything except show up.

The important design detail is where the decisions sit. You make one decision: to set up the recurring booking. Every subsequent instance — which court, which squad, which exact time within your preference window — is handled automatically. Cancellations are possible with one tap, but the default is that the game is happening unless you say otherwise.

This week — Mon to Sun

Before: empty calendar. You told the AI you want padel three mornings a week.

Mon