Daily goals: 50 small examples you can do every day

What makes a good daily goal?

A good one passes three plain tests.

• You can count it. “Read 10 pages” can be checked by bedtime, while “read more” never ends.
• It hangs on something fixed, like brushing your teeth or getting off the bus.
• It shrinks. There’s a smaller version for the worst days.

Lists of goals tend to skip the third test. But the busy day is where a goal usually stops, somewhere between a late train, a sick child and dinner eaten standing up at the counter.

It doesn’t send a calendar invite either.

So size the goal for an ordinary day, the kind with a bus that comes on time and an evening that’s yours, and cut it again for a bad one.

Say the goal is walking:

• Ordinary day: 20 minutes.
• Busy day: 5 minutes, to the corner and back.

Both go down as a walk.

Write the busy-day version before you need it.

If it still feels heavy, it’s probably a big goal wearing a small coat. Our guide to small goals shows how to cut one down to today’s size.

Ten goals with a busy-day version

These ten come from the ready goals in our app, with the starting size it suggests and its own busy-day step.

The last column is the sort of line a person might write afterwards. Some of them are about biscuits.

The third column is the one to read first. It’s the goal for the day when everything runs late, and those days arrive without asking.

So two minutes is still stretching. And five minutes on the step is still going outside, even if a neighbor is the only view.

On a bad day, the small version is the goal.

We make an iPhone app that works this way, so we’re not neutral here. A sticky note works just as well, as long as it sits where the goal happens:

• On the fridge, with the goal on top and the busy-day version underneath.
• On the bathroom mirror, if the goal hangs on brushing your teeth.
• Inside the book you’re reading, with both page counts on it.

In Yumemira, the small-steps journal for iPhone, today’s step sits on the Today screen above a big blue Mark done button. Under it, a line reads “Busy day?” with the smaller step.

Paper or phone, decide the small version on a calm evening. Then the busy morning has one less thing to decide.

50 daily goals examples, sorted by area

Here are 50 good ones, ten for each part of life, each with a normal size and a busy-day size.

The numbers are yours to change. Nobody’s grading this.

That’s a lot of good ideas for one evening. The best pick is usually the one you keep mentioning, the thing you’ve said “I keep meaning to do that” about.

In the app, you can set goals that count in your own units: glasses, pages, minutes or dollars.

For goals that run longer than a day, our list of examples of goals has 100 more, each with a first step.

How many daily goals is too many?

One is enough to start. A second can join once the first feels dull.

Five at once tends to turn into a to-do list that glares at you from the fridge.

Here’s a rough guide. It’s our own rule of thumb, so bend it to your weeks.

Add a second goal only after a dull, easy week.

Dull is a good sign here. It means the first goal runs without a fight, and as far as we can tell, the dull ones last longest.

When a goal does stop, it’s often because the week changed shape. Our guide on how to be consistent has a rule for the day after that: never miss twice.

Write one line after each goal

Doing the goal is half of it. The other half is one line about it, written right after.

Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer read diaries kept by people at work. In a 2011 Harvard Business Review article (opens in a new tab), they reported that seeing progress, even small progress, was the biggest lift to motivation on a workday.

That research was about jobs. But the idea travels well to goals at home.

A line turns “did it” into something you can see later.

• “Read 2 pages. Busy day, and the book just got good.”
• “Walked to the shop and back. Bought bread I didn’t need.”
• “Phone in a drawer for 30 minutes. Finished the crossword.”

Write the line while the step is still warm.

On paper, that’s a notebook by the bed and one sentence before the light goes off. Any notebook works.

In our app, the line comes right after the step. You tap Mark done, and Mira, the app’s star, cheers “Nice. That counts.”

Then a button says Say how it went. If you’d like the line waiting for you each day, try it in Yumemira.

Either way, you end up with a list of days you showed up, in your own words. You can read it back next month, and some of it will make you smile.

Pick tomorrow’s goal tonight

One goal, one number, one smaller version. That’s the whole plan for tomorrow.

1. 1

   Pick one goal.

   Take it from the 50 above, or from that thing you keep meaning to do.

2. 2

   Give it a number.

   Pages, minutes, glasses, dollars. Something you can check by bedtime.

3. 3

   Write the busy-day version.

   Make it small enough for your worst day last month.

4. 4

   Hang it on an anchor.

   Choose the moment it happens, like right after dinner.

Then leave it somewhere you’ll see it in the morning. The fridge door is a classic for a reason.

“Be productive” can stay a mood. Tomorrow’s goal is ten pages, or two.