Optimal challenge means facing demands that most often one can master, rather than ones at the leading edge of one’s capabilities….high-difficulty challenge should, however, be an intermittent element, in which case it can enhance and heighten intrinsic motivation [emphasis ours].

I’m changing her ill-fated yoga goal in three ways. First, I’m making it a goal to just show up for yoga at the start of every work day. It can be as little as five minutes, but the important thing is to roll out my mat, turn on my yoga app, and do it. Too often last year, I got derailed because I felt like I didn’t have 90 minutes to spare for yoga, and hitting my goal required longer sessions. This year, I’m aiming for consistency, and giving myself credit for just getting started.

Second, instead of relying solely on a big, chunky 2022 yoga goal, I’m formulating my goal as a weekly target. What I’m trying to do there is combat the fourth quarter phenomenon where I lost all motivation for yoga because the goal was so out of reach. Every Monday, I’ll get a clean slate and hopefully a new optimal challenge.

But I am still keeping an annual total minutes goal — my third change is to aim for a more lower total of 2,760 cumulative minutes of yoga in 20224. I’m hoping that this is where the SDT intermittent challenge will come in. I can satisfy my weekly goal with five minutes a day or 25 minutes a week. To get to 2,760, I need to average about an hour a week5. I’m hoping that by having both a daily habit goal and a cumulative annual goal, I will be more motivated to sometimes do a longer practice. I have no idea if that will work, but we’ll see how it goes through the year.

‘Seeing how it goes through the year’ is the most important part of my goals routine. Once upon a time, I used to do a quarterly check-in, but the usual pattern was I had made progress on a handful of the most salient goals, and all the rest garnered, “Oh yeah. I wanted to do that,” followed by continuing neglect.

Over the last year, I’ve gotten religious about checking in on my goals frequently. Anything I only look at once a quarter is actually on my “Someday Maybe” list, and I’m only reviewing it to make sure I’m still okay with making zero progress6. I check into most of my goals daily or weekly, with a few lower-frequency items that I only check into once a month.

I manage all these goals with an app called Strides. It is eye-wateringly expensive as apps go7, but it makes that daily and weekly tracking frictionless. I invest about 30 seconds a day, and perhaps another 2-3 minutes on Sundays, and it keeps all my goals top-of-mind, and all my progress (or lack thereof) tracked and quantified.

I credit daily check-ins for my greatest goal triumph in 2021: walking 10,000 steps every single day. I have worn an activity tracker daily since 2015, and it’s been set with a nominal goal of 10,000 steps that whole time. The result of that passive monitoring was that I achieved my steps goal approximately never. Since switching to daily check-ins in 2021, I have become a dedicated daily walker. Per my step tracker, I walked 50% more than I had in years past, jumping from 2.7-million annual steps to more than 4-million steps.

For me, that happened because those daily app check-ins kept me accountable: I couldn’t fool myself that I was hitting my step goal ‘most of the time.’ Then, once I got on a streak, the steps goal morphed into an optimal challenge. Most days, I find walking for an hour easy and pleasant. But on days when it was -20, or pouring rain, or I was on holiday or on deadline, it was a challenge. Walking consistently when it was easy fuelled motivation when it was hard. Walking on the hard days motivated consistency when it was easy. And now, I guess, I’m a daily walker.

Identity-based habits is basically encouraging you to start instead of thinking about the result that you want, or the outcome that you’re trying to achieve, start with the type of person that you wish to become.

I also love how this framing encourages me to have a wider variety of targets. I’m a fairly goal-oriented person,9 and the trap I fall prey to is feeling the antsiness of inefficiency if I’m not pursuing some goal, any goal. A less pathological solution would be to just not care so much about the damn goals, but historically, I’ve not had much success with that. By contrast, having goals for things like ‘take my children on outings’ or ‘watch TV,’ or ‘put your phone away for 2 hours at the end of the day’ helps keep some of my Type A-ness at bay. This sounds ridiculous, but what happens is I check in with my goals, see that I’ve made no progress on watching Ted Lasso, and then I go do that. The desire to get the gold star for not looking at my phone (sometimes) overpowers my desire to get a gold star by answering an email.