Category Archives: Goal Achievement

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.

2019 goals: How my strategic planning failure is helping me set better goals

Goal Achievement, Planning

 

I want to share with you my strategic planning failure, what I learned from it and how it is helping me better plan my 2019 goals.  Back in 2015 I decided to develop a strategic plan for my life for 1 year, 3 years and 5 years.  I did this because at the time I was receiving support from a Life Coach and she suggested I needed to develop these plans.  I set goals for the following areas of my life:

  • Friends and Family
  • Career/Skills
  • Finances
  • Health and Well being
  • Significant Other/Romance
  • Personal Development
  • Fun and Recreation
  • Physical environment

This morning I was writing in my journal – something I have been doing every morning since 2010 ( I use a software called The Journal by DavidRM). What I like to do is travel back in time to see what I was doing and thinking on this day last year, two years ago etc.  When I went back to December 23rd 2015 I discovered my strategic plans.  Wow – what an eye opener!

What did I learn about Strategic Planning?

Well my one year plan made some sense.  When you think about it we can think ahead to what we will be doing in the coming year.  We can make some fairly good guesses about what we will be doing and what we can likely achieve.  When I looked at my 3 year and 5  year plans they were frankly a pile of garbage!  They had little relationship to my current life.  They were just a wish list of things it would have been great to achieve at that time (but don’t inspire me at all today!).  Another thing that I learned is that there were just too many goals.  When you have so many goals across different areas of your life you end up dissipating your energy and have no focus.

Problems with 3-5 Year Planning

What I can see is that the plans were unable to take into account changes.  The world is changing around us in unpredictable ways.  There are also unpredictable events in our own lives.   We are also changing and growing as people.  When I look at some of the career goals I set myself 3 years ago they look totally uninteresting to me now.  I have changed and I have developed new skills and interests which were unknowable to me three years ago.  A key skill to develop for the 4th Industrial Revolution is Life Long Learning.  If you engage in Life Long Learning you will be a different person in a year or two.  These new skills and interests that you develop will open up new opportunities to you that you cannot foresee.  Your 3-5 year goals will not reflect the person you have changed into.

Lessons I have learned from my strategic planning

There are a number of lessons that I have learned from my strategic planning exercise.

  1.  Planning too far out (3-5 year+ horizon) is not much use.  The world is changing around us and we are changing in unpredictable ways.
  2. If fact you should be changing as you learn new skills and develop new interests – Life Long Learning is a key skill to develop in a fast changing world.  If you don’t change you will become outdated very fast.
  3. A one year horizon is valuable but beyond that it starts to become foggy and vague.
  4. Setting too many goals is confusing.  Set a small number of achievable goals with a one year horizon.  I like to set three goals for the year.  Break these three goals into quarterly goals.  Again I like to set no more than three quarterly goals.
  5. Goals become outdated as the world changes and as we change.  We need to to constantly review and tweek them, change them, discard them and add new goals.
  6. Keep a diary – you can learn a lot by reflecting back on past planning exercises and reviewing past goals.

Planning 2019

Set your 2019 goals

Select three key transformative goals that you want to achieve for yourself in 2019.  Three goals that will change your life for the better.  Don’t think beyond 2019 – keep your time horizon where you can make realistic goals.  Based on your three 2019 goals set three sub-goals for the first quarter of 2019.  That is from January 1st 2019 up to March 31st 2019.  Write those three quarterly goals down and place them where you can see them.  Each week set weekly goals based on your quarterly goals.  Every day make sure you set actions to achieve those weekly goals.  At the end of the 1st quarter review progress and set three goals for the second quarter 2019.  Don’t be surprised if goals from the first quarter roll into the second quarter.   That is because we are often overoptimistic in what we can achieve.  This is know as the planning fallacy.   If new opportunities come up during the year then don’t be afraid to change your goals or incorporate new goals.  This is a fast changing world and we need the flexibility to change as well.  Goals are not a straight jacket!

I hope my reflections help you make better and more realistic plans for 2019.

Best wishes,

Tom

P.S. To get lots more ideas and information on goal setting, visioning and planning check out my course 30 Experiments in personal change.  Get the course at the special price of $9.99 for readers of this blog.