Angela mentioned one of the best things about the 30-day program, which is that if it doesn't feel good after time then you can give it up. Having the option to quit is important as there's no sense battling on without making changes when things clearly don't work.
Tom - you mention unconscious competence but I thought that was reserved for building new skills. Building a habit and building a skill are not always one and the same. For example, most people have unconscious competence at the skill of reading but choosing to read for an hour a day is a repetitive process - which forms a habit, not a skill.
Sometimes you need a habit in order to build a skill - such as learning to play the sax. Intensive learning at the early stages of building a skill helps to go through the transition from conscious incompetence through to unconscious competence in a time effective way and is more likely to engender sufficient accomplishment, skill building and pleasure that continuation will happen by default.
Building a habit and a skill simultaneously is probably the most difficult thing to do as it demands more of us.
If you attempt to build a habit and/or skill and after 30-days find yourself still struggling and unable to accept it as an on-going routine then you either ought to give up (because trends tend to continue and a miraculous turn around won't happen if you keep on doing the same thing) or else you have to rethink about reasons, objectives, methods, interpretations and so on so that the habit becomes doable, enjoyable and relatively easy.
I have a post related to the 30-day trial here that aims to get skill building off to a much better start.
Intensive Training