Work Your Behaviors

I’ll assume that you have already set some goals for yourself as I talk about in the Set Goals article. If you haven’t, you can still read this article and get some value from it, but realize that goals and behaviors work very well together. If you’re going to work on building good habits, it’s very useful to have an eye on where you’re trying to go.  In truth, goals are more reliant on behaviors than the other way around. If you set goals and don’t do any behaviors, all you have is a list of wishes. On the other hand, if you just realize that it would be a good idea to start exercising more, so you do it, that will be good for your life. Nonetheless, as I say in Set Goals, I think creating goal lists is a very useful practice—you can’t design your life or achieve your highest potential without it—and I will write this article as though you have a one year list in hand.

Remember the straightforward (though not necessarily easy) three step process for success: set a goal, start the behaviors you need to achieve it, and stick with those behaviors until you get there. We’re working on part two here and this is where the rubber meets the road. James Clear is the author of the very successful book Atomic Habits. He says that people tend to talk a lot about goals and little about behaviors, when really the behaviors are the most important thing. I agree. I’m a big fan of setting goals, but, as I said in Set Goals, I think two fifteen-minute sessions each week is enough time to review (by writing out) your life, five year, and one year goals. The rest of the 167.5 hours per week are spent doing behaviors of one kind or another, so we should put a good amount of effort into making those hours useful.

One of the first things to understand, and this is important, is that you won’t become a perfectly motivated machine with tremendous willpower because you read this article—or any article or book on personal development. While it is possible to become a new you in that you are capable, with time and effort, of significantly changing your behaviors, you’re not going to become inhuman. You’re not going to banish temptations or always resist them when they appear. I personally don’t work to set up a system because I always make good choices, but rather because it’s so easy for me not to. In ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy), they say you can do Toward actions that move you toward the person you’d like to be and the life you’d like to have or Away actions that move you further from those goals. You and I are trying to get ourselves to do more Toward actions and fewer Away actions without thinking that we will ever become perfect or need to.

The next thing to get into your head before we start get into the details is that realism is a key to this process. If you have “Save $100,000” on your one year list, that’s ridiculous unless your annual income is about $1M. Similarly, if you have “Exercise twenty hours per week” on your list, that’s ridiculous unless you have a remarkable amount of free time and motivation for physical activity. You have to be realistic about how many big goals you can work on this year, what other big projects will take up your time, and how many hours each week are committed to obligations that you can’t drop. So if you think that you are going to get in shape and run a marathon, finally start playing piano, take two classes in night school, and learn Spanish, all in a year when you also need to help your mom renovate and sell her house, at a time in your life when you work full time and are raising two small kids, you’re crazy. Or rather, you’re not demonstrating the maturity required to do this work. You can make huge changes in your life, but no one gets to have thirty hours in a day or eight days in a week.

I recommend you work with a weekly calendar to block out your time. I’m not a time management guru and there’s no specific time management system that I’m creating or endorsing here. I do like David Allen’s (Getting Things Done) ideas that 1) you should write down every single task, big or small, that you need to do rather than trying to keep them in your head, and 2) you must do regular (at least weekly) reviews of your tasks. But I don’t use the full GTD system or any other well-known system. I believe that the advice I give is compatible with any system that you may swear by. So I’ll teach what I do and you can adapt it as you see fit.

Okay, let’s take your one year goal list and start some planning. As you may recall from Set Goals, our life and five year lists help us create useful one year lists, which then helps guide our daily and weekly behaviors. First we’re going to make a To Do list for this month. Go through your one year list and, with each item, ask yourself if you need or want to start working on it this month. Prioritize urgency first. If moving to a new city is on your one year list and that move needs to happen in two months, preparing for the move definitely needs to go on this month’s To Do list. In fact, that work might well push aside other one year goals that you’d prefer to work on. Or if your finances are falling apart, it is urgent that you prioritize “Start using a budgeting system” (which hopefully is already on your one year list). Next, choose goals that make you feel enthusiastic, like going to the gym or reading every night before going to bed. So create a To Do list for this month from your one year goal list. Realize, though, that you might not get to all of these items: we’ll have to see what our weekly calendar tells us.

Get a weekly calendar in front of you. You can use a computer or tablet. (A phone isn’t forbidden, I just think it would be little hard to visualize the full week on such a small screen.) Or if you’re little old fashioned, you can, like me, use a paper version. First block out the time that is already booked in your life: the hours you go to work or school, the hours that you drive your kids to school or sports, the hours you go to the gym, the hours you go see your parents every week, etc. Next, make some kind of estimate for things that aren’t as fixed, but that do take up your time. So if you generally spend three hours a night watching TV with your partner, put that on the calendar. If you go out with friends one night a week, put it on one of the nights on the calendar even if the actual night varies. What you’re trying to do is get an estimate of how much time you can dedicate to work on the goals that made it onto this month’s To Do list.

After you’ve blocked everything you can think of, realize that all of the blank spaces really aren’t free for use. Our lives are full of tasks like bathing and brushing our teeth, laundry, dishes, and getting gas. We’re going to spend time texting our friends or people at work, scrolling social media, and eating snacks. If you’ve taken the work of blocking out time on the calendar seriously and accounted for whatever you can think of, then you will probably be able to use a third to half of the blank spaces that are left for work toward your goals. Remember: realism, while not always fun, is our friend because it saves us from severe disappointment later when we haven’t achieved all of the things our optimism said we would.

Now start blocking out the work on your goals, using your month To Do list. As with that list, go with urgent issues first. If you have time after these urgent issues, go with what excites you. How much time you’re able to commit to working toward your goals decides how far you’ll. If you really have a remarkable amount of free time—twenty hours a week—and have the motivation to put it towards your goals, you can accomplish a lot. If you can commit no more than three hours a week, it’s going to be a slow walk to your goals. If you’re in the latter situation, it’s still better to do this work with your calendar and know it up front than to tell yourself the time will just show up.

If you find now or in three months that you just can’t seem to get at the goals that excite you because you’re spending the few free hours you can find on urgent priorities like getting your taxes done or helping your kids with school projects, you’ll have to find things to cut in your life in order to make time for the important goals. Instead of watching movies with your family three nights a week, maybe you do just one for a while. This is the classic issue of dealing what’s urgent vs what’s important (“important” meaning what lines up with what we want in life). You must make time for both.

So at the start of each week, you block out your calendar for the coming week. Then during the week, you do what your calendar says. Avoid leaving open spaces with “To Be Decided” as the label: you want to choose in advance what you’ll be doing and learn the skill of getting yourself to do what you’ve planned. At the end of the week, review how it went. Did I make a good estimate of how much time I had to work on my goals? Did I choose the right work to do? Did I actually do the work when the time was open? Planning your time is a skill and, like all skills, you’ll get better at it the more you do it. The reviews—little ones you do at the end of each night or bigger ones you do at the end of the week—are not meant to be opportunities to beat yourself up. I’ll cover this topic more in Blame the Process, but doing so is both undeserved and unhelpful. Just do a quick review to see how good or bad your planning was and then do a better job in the coming week.

Let’s talk about getting yourself to actually do the work when you get to a time on your calendar that says “Go for a run”, “Search for new job”, “Teach the kids to cook”. Doing so is easy when you’re full of enthusiasm for achieving a goal and making your life better. The challenge comes when you don’t want to do it: your enthusiasm has faded or maybe it’s a goal for which you never had much enthusiasm in the first place. I’ll talk more about getting yourself to do behaviors and build habits when you’re not excited in Stick With Things Beyond Enthusiasm, but here are a few suggestions:

Take it as easy as possible. Clear away distractions, responsibilities, and temptations. Do not try to study in a time and place where your kids are going to bother you repeatedly. Turn off televisions, computers, and phones if they are pulling you away from the work you have set for yourself. (If on the other hand, listening to music helps your motivation to run or listening to a podcast helps your motivation for cleaning the house, definitely use your phone.) If your goal is to exercise, have your workout clothes handy. If your goal is to cook dinner at home, make sure that you or someone else in the house gets the kitchen ready before it’s time for you to start. In short, do everything you can to grease the wheels and reduce obstacles.

Just make yourself do a little piece. If you’ve booked an hour to exercise, weed your yard, clear your email inbox, study, etc., but the thought of it feels overwhelming, just make yourself do ten minutes. And mean it: set your alarm for ten minutes and tell yourself that you get to stop when it goes off if you want to. First of all, ten minutes is better than the nothing you might do if you do nothing at all. Second, we’re built so that, when we get started with an activity, we both realize it’s not as bad as we feared and we have a motivation to see it through. So it’s likely that if you only make yourself do ten minutes, you’re actually keep going for at least twenty—if not the first time, then the second and third.

Remind yourself of the goal’s importance to you. Remember that this isn’t a goal that someone else created. You decided that you want to achieve this one year goal—and maybe the five year and life goal it’s working toward. Yes, it is natural in the moment to prefer easier activities with immediate positive feedback: eating chips or sitting on the couch and binging Netflix (or both). As James Clear says, with bad habits the rewards come now and with good habits the rewards come later. But remind yourself now of how good the eventual reward of achieving your goal will feel. This could be a good time to take a few minutes to rewrite your goal lists.

Give yourself rewards. A reward one year to five years in the future not doing it for you? Fine: give yourself a reward right now for doing the work. A couple of warnings: 1) Do not be extravagant with your rewards—you can’t afford it. 2) Do not choose rewards that work against your goals (eating a bowl of ice cream because you’ve cooked yourself a healthy dinner). And remember that an acknowledged sense of achievement is as good a neurological reward—it’s as likely to promote good habit formation—as something like ice cream or a new item of clothing. We tend to think that things like putting a row of stickers across a poster is only good for motivating kids, but visual reminders that we are doing the right thing is great for adults also. I recently started using a win jar at home. It’s just a small glass jar I keep on my kitchen counter. Every time I do a behavior that is positive and moving me toward my goals, I drop in a little token. (I just use pieces from a board game that we never play.) I can give myself a reward when I fill up the jar if I want, but I don’t have to: every time I drop a piece in the jar I get a little psychological reward and every time I notice the jar and see that it’s more full I get another one. So when it’s full, I just dump it out and start again.

Moving on from motivational tricks: you must do a review at least once a week. It’s useful to do a quick review at the end of each day or a few times a week, but at the minimum do a review at the end of the week before blocking out next week’s calendar. Ask yourself if you planned your time well and if you were good at getting yourself to do the tasks you had set. It is critical to remember that the review process is not meant to be an opportunity to beat yourself up. Doing so makes you less happy and in fact less likely to succeed: you won’t want to do these reviews and you’ll diminish your belief in yourself. As I’ll talk about in Blame the Process, analyzing what’s going right and wrong without inserting self criticism is a much more fair and useful practice than telling yourself what a loser you are. (I know from personal experience that it’s quite easy to tell yourself just how much you’re failing.)

Okay, so there’s advice on setting and doing the behaviors that will get you to your goals. Let’s wrap up with a quick review of the mantra I introduced in What Is This Website: you matter, this work matters, and you can do this work. You have value right now—before you have achieved all of the goals that you want to achieve or that will make you feel that you’ve finally caught up with your friends, coworkers, etc. This work matters because it will enable you will achieve the goals that are important to you—to design your life and work toward your potential. And you really can do this work. However disorganized you are right now, and however many times you have given up on the behaviors that will improve your life, you can start to block out time and make steps forward. You can.