A lot of my friends are spending the month of January “going dry” or giving up sugar or training for marathons. I can relate. As a Type-A, goal-oriented masochist, I tend to make deeply ambitious New Year’s resolutions each year. Witness Exhibit A: My resolutions from 2016. I’m embarrassed to say that not one lasted even a month. (That’s what you get when you resolve to limit dessert in terms of “units per week.”)
So this year, I decided to give up on making resolutions altogether. Instead, I devised my own system to help me lead a life that’s in keeping with my values. I call it my Intentionality Dashboard.
I created the dashboard because I’d found that it was hard to stick to goals like “eat healthier” or “exercise more” on their own; to make these kinds of changes, I needed a specific plan of action. And as Dilbertcreator Scott Adams explains on his blog, we’re actually much more likely to succeed in changing our habits when we use systems instead of goals. After all, goals tend to be somewhat constricted—say, “lose 10 pounds” or “beat my marathon record”—when it makes more sense to focus on holistically building a better life.
So I set about creating a system, using the project management app Trello, that would give me a bigger, birds-eye view of how I live my life. To design it, I broke it into four sections: Two focused on big-picture issues, and two that dealt with concrete changes. The basic idea was that with a system that was actionable, yet not overwhelming, I could generate a lot of “small wins” on a daily basis—providing momentum for much bigger projects.
More here – Quartz
