Monthly Archives: July 2019

The HabitBull App for Your Smartphone

Goal Achievement, Habits

HabitBull

“If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude.” ―Colin Powell

HabitBull & Habits

In this article I want to discuss this brilliant app that I have started using on my smartphone.  The app is called HabitBull and is available on Android and iOS.  I have used apps like this before to track my performance each day but this is the best one I have come across to date.  The app is very intuitive and has a very nice design.  The app is very customisable and allows you to track your daily habits in a way that suits you.  I have just started using the app in the past few days and already I am comfortable using it and I am excited about it.

Habits are key to Success

There can be no doubt about the fact that habits are key to our success.  As quoted above from Colin Powell excellence is about the little things that make up our lives.  What time do you get up in the morning?  Do you make your bed?  Do you brush your teeth? What do you eat for breakfast?  These are all small actions in themselves but at the end of the day these small actions build up to determine who we are.  In the last post I talked about planning and setting goals for the next 6 months to the end of 2019.  Habits are what will determine  whether or not you will achieve your goals.  As I finish writing this post I get to tick off on HabitBull my daily habit of spending one hour on doing something creative.  Let’s see where that habit takes me by the end of 2019!

Find out more

If you would like to learn more about HabitBull then please check out their website here.   You can track up to 5 habits using the free version of the app. so you have nothing to lose.  The premium version is less than $10 and so is inexpensive.   If you want to learn more about habits in general , how they are formed and broken etc then I cover the topic in detail in my course ‘Reinvent yourself: 30 Experiments in Personal Change‘.  Please click the above link to get the course for the discounted price of €12.99.  You can take the free course preview.  The course comes with a 100% money back guarantee if you are not satisfied.  

Best wishes,

Tom

PS  I have a limited number of FREE promo codes for the audio version of my book ‘Experiments in Personal Change’ on Audible.  If you would like a free audio book please email me – tcarroll ‘at’ lifeisalaboratory.com and I will send you a code to access the book.

Time to Reflect and Plan

Planning

Reflect and Plan

As I write this post today is 3rd July 2019.  The first half of 2019 is over and it’s a great time to reflect and plan ahead. I hope you had a successful first 6 months of 2019! Perhaps you set some goals at the beginning of 2019 or made some new year’s resolutions.  How has that worked out for you?

Time does fly!  In my part of the world we have turned the corner of the year – the Summer Solstice (longest day of the year) was on June the 21st and now each day gets slightly shorter.  This process will continue until we are at December 22nd and the shortest day of the year.  It’s a good time now to pause and reflect, review goals and set new ones.  In this article I want to describe how I go about planning the next 6 months and hopefully you will also pick up some useful pointers on how to improve your own planning.

Action research

The first thing I want to say is that planning is a cyclical process of Planning – Action and Reflection.  This cyclical process is know as action research.  We learn by doing but in a systematic way.  I first came across action research when I was a PhD student and it is a simple but powerful process.  When I say simple I mean simple to understand but not necessarily to put into practice!  We have a tendency to want to rush to planning and action before taking the time to reflect properly.   It’s natural. Many people have action bias: a predisposition to do in an effort to have control over a situation.

After reflection we then make new plans based on what we have learned from our reflection.  This approach leads to cycles of continuous improvement.  Using this model of planning we have to go back to our existing plans and see what worked and what did not work and make adjustments.  Therefore planning the next 6 months starts with Reflection and a review of the last 6 months and extracting the lessons from there.

Reflection

Time now to re-visit your goals at the start of 2019.  Perhaps you have been adjusting your goals since then?  In fact if you have been adjusting and refining your goals as you went along then that is great – well done.   A weekly reflection and planning session is ideal.

Reflect on your current active goals and ask yourself the following questions:

  1. What did you set out to achieve over the past 6 months?
  2. What actually happened – what were your results?
  3. Why did it happen?
  4. What are you going to do differently next time?

In doing the above process we are not interested in judgement of success or failure or beating ourselves up.  We are interested only in lessons learned.

I am assuming that you did have some goals!  I think it is very beneficial to have goals as they provide you with future direction and motivation.  However the trap with goals is being too rigid.  Be ready to adjust goals as you go along.  Be ready to throw out goals that are not serving you and be ready to adopt new goals as new horizons and opportunities open up before you.

Planning

I keep all my tasks and projects/goals in a Microsoft Outlook file.  A task is different from a project because a project has multiple steps or tasks which are required to achieve it.  I keep a category in Outlook called ‘Projects’ and also another category called ‘This Quarters Key Goals’.  As I write I have 15 projects listed and only 3 goals in this ‘This Quarters Key Goals’.  At any one time I have no more than three goals maximum that I am working on.  This quarter is July/August/September and referring to my larger list of projects I will set 3 goals to work on for this quarter.  When formulating my goals I will of course take into account the results of my reflection.  Therefore I expect my goals and results this quarter to be better than last quarter!  At the end of September I will reflect again and set 3 new goals for the remaining quarter of 2019.  We have six months left in 2019 and lets commit now together to making these 6 months life-changing!

Need New Ideas?

If you are looking for new ideas or information to take your life in a new and exciting direction over the next 6 months then have a look at my course ‘Reinvent yourself: 30 Experiments in Personal Change‘.  The course deals with planning and goal setting in much more detail.  Learn how to visualise your ideal future and set great goals.  Click the link below to get the course for the discounted price of €12.99.  You can take the free course preview.  The course comes with a 100% money back guarantee if you are not satisfied.  Please click the link below for further details:  

https://www.udemy.com/transform-your-life-experiments-in-personal-change/?couponCode=DISCOUNT1299

Best wishes,

Tom