Keeping Resolutions-Goals-Habits Visible with KanbanFlow

Who keeps their New Year’s resolutions? Hardly anybody. Sorry, but most of us are doomed to abandon our good intentions.

Willow Glen

Accomplishing new goals, breaking habits, making habits—all of these involve change. As we all know, change can be hard, even if we are the ones who wanted to make the change in the first place.

How to help ourselves?

Choose goals that you value.
Limit the number of goals. You can always add more later.
Write down your goals in a way that makes them crystal clear to you.
Figure out how you’ll track progress.
Choose goals that you believe you can attain, even if they are a stretch.
Cultivate a feeling of intensity about meeting your goals. This is one good reason for not having too many.
Keep your goals visible.

Visible Goals. There are many ways to keep your goals where you’ll see them, for example:

On a 3 x 5 card or paper calendar that you keep by your desk or carry everywhere
In Evernote or Google Drive
In a task-management system, like Trello, Asana, Nozbe, or Remember the Milk

My solution for visible goals is to include them in the left-most column in KanbanFlow. The specific, measurable version is in my Life Plan document, but I review this shorthand version at least once a day. Reviewing them takes 30 seconds, and it’s easy to do, especially if you make reading them part of your daily planning.

Here’s an example of how this might look:

If you are new to KanbanFlow, the collapsed columns to the right of the Life Plan Goals can be expanded. Each one represents a focus area (yours will vary), and that’s where specific projects and next actions go.

In addition to many other ways to improve motivation for doing something new, one great way is to make your goals visible. This keeps them on your mind, which means you’re more likely make time to work on them.