Daily goals checklist: a printable page and a one-tap version

What goes on a daily goals checklist

Five rows, all about one goal: the goal itself, today’s step, a busy-day step, a tick and one line about how it went.

Say you start with a sheet of twelve goals instead. On Monday morning it looks great, every line filled in with neat capitals.

By Thursday it’s a grid of empty boxes, staring back from a door you open eight times a day for milk and leftovers.

So this sheet holds one.

Pick one goal and give it two sizes.

Not sure which goal? Start with the small goals that fit inside an ordinary day, or borrow one from these daily goals examples, which already come with busy-day versions.

The busy-day row is the one that keeps the sheet on the fridge. On a long day, the small step gets the tick. And nobody has to know it was the small one.

How to fill in your daily goals sheet

Write the goal and both steps once. After that it’s about a minute a night: the tick and the line.

The reading sizes above aren’t random. Ten pages fits an ordinary evening. Two pages fits the evening you get home late and eat standing up.

1. 1

   Name the goal plainly.

   Use words you’d say out loud. “Read before bed” is easier to keep than “Become a reader”.

2. 2

   Size today’s step.

   Something you could finish on a normal day with a little time left over.

3. 3

   Cut a busy-day step.

   Make it small enough for your worst ordinary day: 10 pages becomes 2.

4. 4

   Tick, then write.

   Tick the box, then write the line right away, while you still remember the bus.

Size the busy-day step for your worst ordinary day.

A filled-in example week

Here’s one week of the reading sheet, filled in the way a lot of real weeks go: some full days, some small ones and one gap.

Thursday is the interesting row. The box is empty, but the line still got written.

So the sheet keeps an honest record of the week instead of a tidy one. Wednesday and Friday got two pages and a tick each, and those are the days a twelve-goal sheet would have lost.

That’s the whole trick.

Write the line even when the box stays empty.

If two empty boxes show up in a row, the rule to reach for is never miss twice: the next day gets the busy-day step, whatever else is going on.

The same checklist on your iPhone

On a phone, the sheet becomes one goal with two step sizes, and the tick can happen right from the Lock Screen.

We make an iPhone app built on this same sheet, so we’re not neutral here. But a fridge and a pen on a string work just as well.

In Yumemira, the small-steps journal for iPhone, you pick something you want, like reading. Each ready goal comes as a goal with a busy-day step.

The reading goal starts at 10 pages a day, with 2 pages for busy days.

Tap Start on a step and it shows up as your step on the Lock Screen, with buttons you can tap without opening the app.

The one-line row comes along too, and on the phone it’s the easy part. It’s hard to have nothing to say about pages you read ten minutes ago.

But the line waits until you’ve done the step. When you mark it done in the app, Mira cheers and a button says Say how it went.

If you’d rather keep the lines on paper for longer than a week, a goal journal holds a whole month of them on one page.

Make your sheet tonight

Writing the sheet takes about two minutes. And the first tick can wait until tomorrow.

Tomorrow it’s one box and one line. The lemon magnet is optional.

A slanted tick looks just as good on a fridge door.