Bad Day Goal-Setting

For a long time I struggled to hit my goals. I would start off some new exercise regime or take up eating whatever healthier food I felt would improve my life but I never managed to keep it up. My goals were S.M.A.R.T. but they weren’t having the impact I hoped for. This year I’ve been making a lot of smaller bets. Little tweaks to my lifestyle. Way more of these have stuck, and they’ve had a huge compounding benefit.

One Simple Trick

The key is to set a goal that you can stick to every day, not just on your best days.

Some days you’re a bit tired, or swamped with work, or just not feeling it. These are the days you should be planning for, not the days where you’re full of beans and super motivated to get going. The initial burst of motivation that you have for the first couple of weeks? Sure, it’ll get you started, but it won’t keep you going for months or years.

That’s what I’ve done with this month’s blogging challenge. I knew that if I said I had to hit 30 days out of 30 that I just wouldn’t manage it. It might have pushed me to work really hard in those first 10 days but by day 27 I would be fried and have likely given up. By cutting myself some slack, by saying it’s 20 days out of 30, I’ve set an ambitious target that is still achievable, even with a few gaps here and there.

Go ahead, break the chain

Yesterday I didn’t post anything. It wasn’t a particularly busy day, and it wasn’t like I was super bummed out, but I just felt like doing other things. It was nice not to have that pressure to publish and to have the ability to knowingly take a day off.

Today, though, I did feel a bit more pressure. Today that pressure is really helpful. Because if I want to form a habit, it doesn’t matter that I skipped one day. Bad days happen. The chain gets broken. Skipping two days in a row? That’s the start of a new chain, one that takes me back to where I started. James Clear calls this “The Second Mistake”.

Normal isn’t static

There are always going to be stretches of time where you’re busy or ill or seeing family or taking a holiday. And those exception periods need to get factored in. You need to decide what success looks like during those periods. It’s a question of trust. Do you trust that you will come back to the habit when you’re back in your normal situation. But then again, what is “normal”?

Your “normal” situation will change over time, and change more than you expect. During the pandemic, if you gave yourself permission to pause a habit until lockdown was over, chances are you would never go back to that habit. After a period of change you will eventually find your way back to a stable point. But that stable point probably isn’t the same place you started from. “The new normal” isn’t only a point we reach after a pandemic. This concept is called “allostasis”, and it’s something I’m looking forward to reading more about in Brad Stulberg’s new book, Master of Change.

You are flawed (don’t worry, I am too)

By acknowledging your own flaws and your own fallibility, you massively increase your chances of forming a habit that sticks. If you buy into the idea that “You are what you repeatedly do”, it’s important to decide what it is that you want to do repeatedly. The best time to make a change is right now.

The deepest change you can make in your life is a change to your identity. Rather than changing what you do, change who you are. Rather than saying “I go for a run twice a week”, say “I am a runner”. A runner doesn’t necessarily go for a run twice a week every single week, but you know they’ll always come back to running fairly often most weeks.

So this is what I do now, and this who I strive to be. I am writing and publishing 20 posts this month. But more than that, I am a writer with the confidence to press publish.