A new year
You have decided to get better at something this term. You feel very motivated right now.
What do you do with the motivation?
Step 1: What Would You Do?
There is often more than one good answer. Pick one and see what happens.
A missed day
You planned four days a week and you have missed two. It is Thursday.
What do you do?
Step 2: What That Was
The name for what you just worked out.
"Get better at math" is a wish. You cannot do it on Tuesday, so Tuesday comes and goes.
Make it a thing you can do
"Twenty minutes of times tables after dinner, Monday to Thursday." Now Tuesday has an instruction in it.
Put it in the week
A goal with no time attached happens at no time. Pick the day and the moment.
How will you know?
Decide in advance what better looks like. Otherwise you cannot tell whether it worked.
Step 3: Try It
These ones do have right answers.
Wish or Plan?
Sort each one.
Which of these could you actually do tomorrow?
Tap something to move it.
- Empty
- Empty
Step 4: Quick Check
Two questions, then you are done.
Question 1 of 1
What is missing from "practice the guitar more"?
Step 5: Your Life Mission
Something to do away from the screen. Nobody is checking.
One wish, made real
- Take something you wish you were better at.
- Write it as: what, how much, which days.
- Attach it to something that already happens.
Why: The attaching is the part that makes it survive the week you do not feel like it.
Step 6: What You Learned
- A wish has no day in it. A plan does.
- Say what, how much, and when.
- Decide in advance how you will know it worked.
For the grown-up
Attaching a new habit to an existing routine is far more reliable than intention, and children can apply it directly. After dinner is a time that already exists; "when I have a moment" is not.
Make the first plan smaller than seems worthwhile. A completed small plan builds the belief that plans work, which is the actual product.
Deciding in advance how you will know it worked is worth insisting on. Without it, progress is invisible and the plan gets abandoned as ineffective.