Making Habits Measurable

Creating Short-Term Goals AKA Habits

So, once you have some reasonable, specific 12-month goals, you want to break them down into 30 days goals. Remember, your key to success is 30 days of training a habit.

This is where you break down your goals into monthly ones that will help you create daily habits. Remember, the goals themselves are simply a destination. Now, you have to create action to go along with these goals.

Sometimes, you can create smaller goals that give you a much more manageable short-term achievement within a 30 day period. For example, if you were to use the goal to create more web traffic for example, you might have a goal during the first 30 days to evaluate your current web traffic, search keywords and the like. You can also set goals to research methods for increasing traffic.

In some cases, however, this is counterproductive. For example, if you set a goal to increase your Spanish fluency by 20% in a 12 month period, you can’t really break it down into more manageable goals unless you plan out which lessons you want to tackle each month and this often backfires because some lessons are much harder than others and people get frustrated when they cannot reach their goal.

The bottom line here is that you basically want to look at each goal individually and figure out how you are going to break it down. The YEAR-MONTH-DAY system is great for using habits to reach goals, but just be aware that you don’t have to worry too much if all you have is a destination goal – one that is specific and measurable – and some habits that will take you there.