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Habit Change

The Simple Trick to Achieving Your Goals

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the simple trick to achieving your goals

In the last six months, I’ve experimented with a simple strategy that has improved my work and my health.

Using this one basic idea, I’ve made consistent progress on my goals every single week — without incredible doses of willpower or remarkable motivation. I want to share how I use this strategy and how you can apply it to your own life to improve your health and your work.

The Problem with How We Usually Set Goals

If you’re anything like the typical human, then you have dreams and goals in your life. In fact, there are probably many things — large and small — that you would like to accomplish. But there is one common mistake we often make when it comes to setting goals. (I know I’ve committed this error many times myself.)

The problem is this: we set a deadline, but not a schedule.

We focus on the end goal that we want to achieve and the deadline we want to do it by. We say things like, “I want to lose 20 pounds by the summer” or “I want to add 50 pounds to my bench press in the next 12 weeks.”

The problem is that if we don’t magically hit the arbitrary timeline that we set in the beginning, then we feel like a failure — even if we are better off than we were at the start. The end result, sadly, is that we often give up if we don’t reach our goal by the initial deadline.

Here’s the good news: there’s a better way and it’s simple.

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Tim Cigelske, on How to Keep Track of Interns and Think Bigger

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As the director of social media at Marquette University, beer expert, running coach, writer, husband and father, Tim Cigelske inhabits many roles, and he’s accordingly found multiple uses for iDoneThis in his personal and professional lives. While he recently started using iDoneThis with his summer interns, Tim has been a member for over a year, with a personal account for his freelance work and a team account with his wife, Jess.

Tim Cigelske

Along with Google Calendar, the couple uses iDoneThis to keep track of their household, their three-year-old daughter and her dance classes, and what’s going on in their lives. “There’s a lot going on outside of work so this helps keep tabs,” Tim says. And for his freelancing, he uses iDoneThis as a handy reminder system, recording published links, and using his iDoneThis emails to prompt him the next day or next week to promote his work on social media.

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How Pipedrive Designed a Company Habit Hack

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While it’s tough enough to get into good personal habits, how do you get your employees to adopt good company habits?

Changing your behavior starts with an intention, and when you’re herding multiple human intentions, that transformation process can become tricky.

Pipedrive, a startup that makes a simple CRM that people actually like to use, is one of our oldest team customers. As the company grew rapidly, from six to twenty people within a year, overall iDoneThis usage flagged because new people weren’t getting on board. Pipedrive found a way to turn that behavior around, hacking the iDoneThis company habit with great success.

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Change Your Life Through Habits: The Best of the Internet

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Cats at PlayHappy Friday! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week!  

Change your life with habit hacks.

You’re hiring people to think.

The 5 most dangerous creativity killers.

Software is undervalued.

Want to make some key improvements in your life? Make them the centerpiece.

Bad sleeping habits cause employers almost $2000 per employee a year.

Dundee’s Tip of the Week:  Want to make reports of your dones to show off your progress?
Click on the share button, which looks like this: .
Then choose whether you’d like a PDF, plain text, or email version of the report. Easy peasy!

 

Designing Habit Hacks to Change Your Life

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Each morning, my mother would hand me my daily Flintstones chewable vitamin before I left for school. But now that I’m an adult, she can’t tell me what to do — Mountain Dew and Starcraft all night!

Well, and less vitamins. Since moving out of my parents’ house long ago, I’ve also moved away from this healthful routine. Sometimes it takes effortful self-control to do things we know we should do. But not always. Habits can function as a force, shaping our behavior and negating the need for self-control.

So months ago, I purchased a jar of multi-vitamins and placed it in my cupboard to get back into my healthy vitamin habit.

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The Science of Resolutions

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Calvin and Hobbes on resolutions

While 75% of us keep our new year’s resolutions for two weeks, the chances are slim that we’ll make it further. Here are some tips drawn from two awesome posts by Eric Barker and Buffer’s Leo Widrich on the science of resolutions and how to make them stick.

1.   Break down the goal into baby steps. 

2.   Write it down, and keep track of your progress.  This keeps you accountable and motivates you to keep going.

3.   Dust yourself off and try again.  You can’t learn how to ride a bike without a couple falls. Don’t give up when you slip up!

(Source:  https://www.youtube.com/)

The Science of Productivity

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Productivity is really about how you and your brain work. Gregory Ciotti‘s collaboration with ASAPScience yields a fascinating video on the science of productivity, giving a quick look at willpower, energy management, and effective work habits like documenting your progress.

Productively intrigued? Check out Greg’s full post, which positively bursts with more information and work strategies, and our post about understanding the science behind to-do lists.

(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)

New Year’s Habits

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We probably didn’t need scientists to actually come up with a figure (80% failure rate!) to know that New Year’s resolutions don’t stick around. The key to change is not making some grand declaration of an ideal, that this is the year you’re going to lose x number of pounds, stop procrastinating, find Princess Charming, or any of these popular resolutions. Resolutions are often too abstract or unrealistic that they’re almost easy to ignore.

Instead, build a habit! Forming habits slowly can be much more effective. You can start with baby steps, like drinking water instead of soda, attaining small successes and rewards that will build up until voila, habit! The conscious creation of a habit also allows you to experiment to see what works best for you without feeling like you’ve failed the overall intention of, say, daily exercise if you find that running that extra quarter mile just isn’t for you.

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