Daily Goals Experiment

Note: This was originally published on a different platform on 5/20/13.

For the past month, I’ve been living my life at zero — not inbox zero, but just plain zero. Mailbox app keeps my inbox completely empty without letting forget about an email or task. I’ve disabled almost all notifications and badge icons. Set my instant message status to invisible. Nothing should interrupt my focus on my current task or remind me of other tasks.

The past few days, I’ve altered this strategy slightly. There a certain things I know I need to do for my long-term health and success that I just don’t want to do. In an effort to create new habits, I decided to do these things every single day and track my success. I allow a couple different apps to display the badge icons on my home screen to remind me to do these activities (or at minimum, note that I failed today).

I use the Reminder app to ping me after every meal to track my calories (I stole this idea from a friend) and the Way of Life app to keep an overall history.

So far so good. I’ll let you know in a couple months the final verdict. I plan to change the daily tasks after they turn into habits.

You can’t change what you don’t measure.

Follow Up: This didn’t work. I don’t remember why. It’s probably worth another try. 11/2/15