Turn your goals into habits with Actions

Did you know that you are 1.2 to 1.4 times more likely to achieve your goals if you write them down in detail? True story. It doesn’t sound like much, but once you add it up, it can help you reach your goals much faster than if you didn’t write them down.

There are dozens of ways to format your goal setting and subsequent habit achievement, but here’s a system that’s working for the Bonobo team. We use Actions to categorise and schedule while making our goals fun and satisfying to achieve.

Here’s how we do it.

Categorize

Every habits expert with a self-help bestseller to their name will tell you to concentrate on one thing at a time. Excellent advice. However, we are living, breathing, growing humans, and we generally have to focus on multiple things to function. So how to juggle all of this without getting overwhelmed? Use Actions lists to create goal categories—health, Career, Home, Money, Relationships - whatever categories make sense to you. Then you can brain-dump any goals, ambitions or ideas into that category.

Did you know you can add notes to your Actions? Just hit ‘tap to add’ when you’re entering an Action, and you can add detailed notes to your goal and increase your chances of actually achieving it.

Schedule

Now is the time to pick one thing to concentrate on and schedule it! Drinking water, daily exercise, daily meditation, practising a skill… choose your habit and schedule it in Actions.

Hot tip: You can repeat Actions when you create them. If you want to do a 30-minute walk every day, make an Action that says ‘30 minute walk’ and set it to repeat every day. You can either set it to repeat based on time or completion. So that means you can schedule a task every day, and it will appear whether you complete it or not… or you can set it to repeat on completion. Like watering your plants - you only want to do that if it needs doing, not just because it popped up in your Actions. Don’t want to drown the poor things!

Make it fun

And give yourself rewards! If you exercise for 30 mins every day for a month celebrate with a fancy hot dog from that trendy food cart you love, a book you’ve wanted to buy or an afternoon off to do whatever you like. Rewards activate our pleasure centres and give us an incentive to continue with good habits.

What good habits are you trying to create? Eating more nourishing foods? Moving more? Learning a new skill?