3-Bullet Summary

You’ll benefit more from reading the article the whole way through. But, if you’re pressed for time, here’s a condensed version of The Ultimate Guide on How to Achieve Goals and Forge Habits:

• There are two core pillars of goal achievement: consistency and volume.
• People don’t master these pillars because they either set goals poorly or give in to their lizard brains.
• The Dynamic Tracker-Timetable-Review Framework (DTTR) is an effective way to achieve goals. It couples perfectly with the 3-step framework in The Ultimate Guide on How to Set Goals and Secure Success to ensure goal completion.

I Really Shouldn’t… But…

You glance up for a second. 6:30pm. That means you’ve been studying for half an hour.

“30 minutes already?” you ask yourself, your tone implying that you’re surprised with your own discipline.

You peer back down at the document you’ve been working on. You’re half way through the assignment and you know that if you get it done today, then you can spend tomorrow however you want to.

“Right, 1 hour to go. Let’s knuckle down and finish this shi—”

“Ding…” chimes the phone. A notification’s just come in.

Suddenly, your brain starts talking to itself.

One half — the productive half that wants you to achieve your goals — says, “You don’t need to check that notification. Get the work done so we don’t have to do this task tomorrow!”

But the other half — the lizard brain that hates hard things and wants you to indulge — says, “Do it. Check that notification. What if it’s important?”

It’s a good vs evil scenario. You know which side you must choose. The outcome should be inevitable, right?

Yet, you reach for the phone. The good half of your brain’s voice grows silent. The lizard brain chuckles, and in Emperor Palpatine’s voice utters one word: “Good…”

You’re now enveloped in the social media whirlpool. You don’t know it yet, but you’ll be on your phone for another half an hour.

Looks like the task’s not being completed today after all.

Introduction

The lizard brain is extremely powerful. The number of times it pipes up and questions the productive brain is frightening, honestly.

Think about it, every time you try to eat clean, prioritise your fitness, study hard and get work done, it rears its ugly lizard head and makes you question yourself. If you really want to witness its power, just leave your favourite ‘naughty’ (keep it PG) pleasure on your desk and see how long you can go without indulging.

Most of us will indulge within an hour. Others will indulge in 2 or 3. Some maybe the next day.

However, some of us won’t indulge at all. Using myself as an example, I used to be addicted to sugary food (especially my Nan’s homemade cakes). If you put something sweet and delicious on my desk when I was 17, it wouldn’t have lasted long.

Yet, with the goal-achievement framework I’ve engineered, I’ve not touched junk food in years.

The purpose of this guide is to empower you with this framework so you, too, can destroy your lizard brain and achieve your goals.

The previous Ultimate Guide uploaded to the Strong Students library walked you through exactly how to set ambitious goals that’ll steer you clear of the New Year’s resolution trap. You must read that guide before this one because we’re going to build off it.

If you’ve read that guide and acted on it, then this one will be incredibly valuable for you.

We’re going to learn exactly what you need to do to achieve goals. We’ll discover the secrets behind habit formation and consistency so we don’t need to rely on willpower or discipline to get things done. Most importantly, we’re going to make it impossible to not achieve our outcome goals through science-based strategies that have been proven to work.

But, before we get down to the tools, we must understand the two key concepts behind goal achievement:

Consistency and Volume

Have you ever met someone who’s ‘consistent’? If you have, then, in terms of personality, they’ll do something in a similar way every time you see them. Although this guide isn’t about personality traits, the concept is similar to how we’re going to define it in terms of productivity:

Consistency = performing process goals when we set out to perform them.

This concept is the driving force for accomplishing your wildest dreams. In students, for example, those deemed as having the most ‘grit’ — the will to push through during hard times and consistently show up and achieve their process goals — get better grades¹. In other words, students who achieve their goals demonstrate rigorous consistency.

However, if consistency is what we need, this begs the question as to why it is so important.

The reason for consistency’s potency in goal achievement is related to its sister concept: volume.

Volume = work done towards a process goal.

It sounds like common sense, but people who do more of the right things also achieve more of the goals they set. For instance, studies have shown that students who study for at least 2–3 hours daily outperform students studying below this threshold². This is because they accumulate more volume towards their process goals related to studying, and thus progress faster towards their outcome goals related to getting good grades.

The Importance of Consistency and Volume

Let’s imagine two people have the same outcome goal:

‘In 6 months, I will be at least 15% bodyfat, and at most 12%.’

They then reverse engineered the same process goal:

‘Every week, I will resistance train for at least 2 sessions, and eventually progress this to 3.’

Person A follows this process goal to a tee. They start by turning up to do the bare minimum and train at least twice per week. Slowly, they try to progress this to three times per week, some weeks hitting it and some weeks not. By the end of month two, they’re training three times per week religiously. They have momentum behind them and the bodyfat’s melting away.

Person B is inconsistent with this process goal. They go to the gym three times a week from the start and the bodyfat initially drops fast. However, by the end of month one, they’re feeling burned out. They end up skipping two weekly sessions on a regular basis, and only train once per week for three whole months. They’re hustling in reverse.

Who do you think achieved the outcome goal?

I’ll save you the brainpower: Person A did. They achieved this goal because they accumulated more process goal volume than Person B. In other words, they did more of the process goal. They lifted much more weight, exercised for longer and, consequently, dropped more bodyfat.

If you can be consistent with your process goals, even if you perform less volume than what’s considered ‘optimal’ in the beginning, you’ll…

• Accumulate more volume than someone who’s inconsistent over time.
• Forge a habit by being more consistent, meaning you won’t have to rely on willpower to achieve process goals.
• Build yourself a volume foundation that you can add to over time, driving faster progress.

How to Achieve Goals

So, we now understand that if we want to achieve goals, we must be consistent to accumulate the volume that being consistent drives.

This leaves us with a looming question: how do we get consistent, stay consistent and accumulate a good amount of volume to actually achieve our goals?

The following sections of this guide, fortunately, have all the practical advice you need. Specifically, we’re going to cover The Dynamic Tracker-Timetable-Review Framework (DTTR) for goal achievement, which I’ve used for years and teach to all my students.

As we go through it, however, you must do one thing: take action when I tell you to. Remember, frameworks and knowledge are most effective when they’re implemented.

With that aside, let’s learn about DTTR.

Phase 1) Create Your Habit Tracker

The first phase of DTTR involves you creating a habit tracker.

Habit trackers are powerful tools in the pursuit of outcome goals for a few reasons:

• They’re a visual representation of all the process goals you need to achieve on a weekly basis — They make it so you don’t have to remember everything you need to do, hindering you from procrastinating and being distracted by other random habits.
• They hold you accountable — A 2016 paper showed that when one partner changed to a healthier behaviour (i.e., they added something productive to their life in place of a bad habit), the other partner was more likely to make a positive health behaviour change than if their partner remained unhealthy³. For example, when a female partner quit smoking in a relationship, 48% of male partners also quit when encouraged by a researcher. By contrast, when a female partner didn’t quit smoking and the researchers encouraged the male partner to quit, only 8% made progressive changes. Your habit tracker is your progressive partner. It represents the best version of yourself, thereby holding you accountable to achieving your progress goals.
• They gamify productivity — A 2021 meta-analysis (a study that looks at a lot of studies) of 23 articles (11,280 sample participants) on the topic of improving children’s dietary choices found that gamifying fruit and vegetable intake led to children consuming up to an entire additional serving per day⁴. Therefore, framing hard things as games rather than chores makes us statistically more likely to do them. Consequently, we’ll be more likely to see improvements from doing the hard things, and then actually desire the discomfort they bring in the future. A habit tracker is a game. Every week, you need to execute your process goals or endure the pain caused by an unticked box.

The first actionable step in this article is to create your own habit tracker. The following steps will walk you through exactly how to do this.

Step 1) Label Your Process Goal Habits

In the goal-setting guide, you wrote down the following:

• Your outcome goals.
• The fields within them.
• The constituents of those fields with the most important ones highlighted.
• The strategies underlying those constituents with the most important ones highlighted.
• The process goals pertaining to those strategies.

You’re now going to label the process goals and the behaviours underlying them (process goal habits) in one of two ways.

If the process goal habit belongs to one of the important constituents you highlighted before, meaning it’s vital to you mastering that constituent, which is a key driver of progress in the outcome goal field (hence why it’s highlighted), then you’re going to label it as requiring deep work.

This refers to a term coined by Cal Newport in his book Deep Work. (This is an essential book for any student who wants to improve their focus and productivity.) Basically, deep work underpins a physical state of intense, undistracted focus. Because of how concentrated you are in a deep work state, this is when you want to attack mentally demanding tasks.

This is why you’re labelling the most important process goal habits as deep work. You’re prioritising the behaviours that pull levers and drive progress with your cognitive energy applied to them.

Conversely, if the process goal habit belongs to…

• One of the constituents you highlighted before, but you decided it wasn’t as essential as the 1–2 you selected during your 80/20 strategy analysis.
• One of the constituents you believed to be important but not as important as 1–2 you highlighted during your 80/20 constituent analysis.

You’re going to label it as requiring shallow work.

This is the opposite of deep work: a physical state of weak focus and low mental energy. It’s impossible to conduct deep work all day because you become incredibly fatigued if you do it properly. Therefore, shallow work is inevitable.

Nonetheless, because you can still work in a shallow work state, albeit at a reduced level of intensity, this is the ideal time to work on tasks that are important for achieving outcome goals but aren’t the longest levers to pull on your goal-pursuit journey.

Step 2) Create Your Habit Tracker

With your process goal habits now labelled as requiring deep or shallow work, you must add them to a habit tracker.

Habit trackers take two forms:

1. Hand drawn
2. Digital

A hand-drawn habit tracker would, at its core, be a list of all the habits you need to tick off in a week. This is a fine option, but digital habit trackers are superior. This is because digital habit trackers don’t have to be remade, which contrasts habit trackers written on paper that inevitably fill the pages as the weeks go by and you take up space on the page, forcing you to recreate them and waste time.

I’ve designed a completely free Notion habit tracker template for you to download and use to input your process goal habits. All you have to do is add your habits from Step 1 and make it clear to yourself that the habit either requires deep or shallow work.

Most habit trackers are checked off daily. You can do this if you like, but I instead recommended that you make one tracker for all your weekly habits. This keeps things simple and efficient.

For instance, say you set yourself the process goal to go to the gym and resistance train at least 2 times per week but no more than 4. If you had a daily habit tracker that said ‘gym’ to represent this, you’d automatically have to not tick the box on the days you aren’t meant to go, potentially demoralising the perfectionists out there who want to tick all their habit-tracker boxes (like me), or forcing you into making multiple unique daily habit trackers.

A better alternative would be to write down the process goal you originally set, scale it to a weekly process goal if you originally made it a daily habit, and tick it off only if you complete it by the end of the week. In this way, you still gamify your habits, but instead of having to faff around and make multiple habit trackers for each day, you have one big one that you get to review at the end of the week.

Phase 2) Make Your Ideal Weekly Timetable

Equipped with your habit tracker, you’re now going to schedule the activities within them in a timetable.

Remember from earlier that we discussed the importance of consistency and volume? Well, setting yourself up with a timetable basically provides you with a structure that guarantees both.

Timetables have this power for a few core reasons:

• Timetables remove guesswork — They tell you exactly what you need to do and when. This means that you don’t expend precious time or energy making half-hearted plans and procrastinating, and instead achieve your goals.
• Timetables act as precommitments — By writing down a firm action plan, you no longer have to opt-in to complete a process goal and instead pre-commit. Studies have shown that by binding yourself to a contract (which is what our timetable is) and making a precommitment, you increase the likelihood that you achieve your goals significantly because you’re more likely to stick with your process goals to avoid failure⁵.
• Timetables hold you accountable — Just like how habit trackers hold you accountable, timetables do, too. Your timetable is like your daily guide. If it tells you to do something at a certain time, you’ll be more likely to do that thing than if you didn’t have the accountability.

Because timetables are goal-pursuit assets, you’re now going to make one. Specifically, you’re going to make an ideal weekly timetable. This timetable will be the best-case scenario containing all the process goal habits from your habit tracker that you need to achieve your outcome goals.

Importantly, remember that this timetable is ideal. There will be days on which you break the schedule, and that’s okay. You’re a human and unexpected things will crop up. You’ll want to study for 2 hours, but then you’ll have to pick X up from Y location. Don’t beat yourself up if this happens. Studies have shown that habits missed once have no impact on long-term habit formation⁶. Just don’t let it happen twice in a row, because then you’re forming a new habit.

Step 1) Choose Your Format

Like habit trackers, timetables take two forms:

1. Hand drawn
2. Digital

I personally use a digital calendar, specifically Google Calendar. The reason is because I can use Google’s tools to make my calendar elegant, and then print it off, meaning I don’t have to draw anything yet still have a physical copy that I can see at all times. Moreover, Google Calendar allows you to schedule notifications. This means that you can ask Google to remind you before your scheduled activity that it’s coming up. As you can imagine, this is great for kicking you into action!

Regardless of whichever format you pick, the steps you take in designing your calendar are the same. (If you want a more in-depth tutorial for the tool I use, Google Calendar, click here.)

Step 2) Block Non-Negotiables

With your format chosen, you now need to create time blocks for essential things that can’t be avoided during the week.

Below is a list of the nine most important non-negotiables. These will be in your timetable regardless of your process goals. This list shouldn’t be extensive; only add whatever is 100%, absolutely necessary for you to function on a weekly basis.

• 8–10 hours of sleep per night.
• An evening cooldown routine to prepare you for sleep (usually involving the bare minimum of a warm shower/bath and brushing your teeth).
• The minimum number of hours spent in paid employment to provide you with water, food, shelter and transport. (This should be as close to zero as possible and therefore is only non-negotiable if you need money.)
• Meals (preferably spent with family and/or friends).
• At least 1–2 hours of deep work per day (see Step 3)
• At least 2 resistance training sessions per week.
• At least 30 minutes spent walking in nature per day.
• 10 minutes of sunlight exposure near waketime per day.
• Mandatory family, sporting or educational commitments (e.g., classes and lectures).

With your non-negotiables listed, you’re going to add them to your calendar.

The way you’re going to do this is by setting time blocks. A time block is the interval in which your activity will be performed.

A super beneficial tip is to give yourself a time block that’s longer than you actually want to perform the activity for.

For example, I aim for 9 hours of sleep per night, but set a 10-hour time block. I do this in case I stay up a bit past my usual bed time (usually 9:30pm) and to account for things that occur during that sleep block that aren’t sleep, like tossing and turning before entering sleep’s deeper stages.

In this way, you give yourself flexibility as to when you start and end your activity, making it more likely that you’re actually going to be consistent, which will be crucial when we set our deep work blocks. This also enables you to add more volume if you want to (more on that in Phase 3). As said in the sleep example, you additionally account for things that come as a by-product of that habit but aren’t actually the habit itself.

Step 3) Block Deep Work

Now, you need to revisit your habit tracker. This tracker contains all the behaviours you must execute to achieve your process goals, and the baseline volumes for each (i.e., the lower bounds of the process goals) which will be referred to as the minimum effective dose (MED) from now on. Importantly, the most mentally demanding tasks within the most important constituents have been highlighted as requiring ‘deep work’.

Like you did for the previous step, you’re going to give each of these behaviours a specific block, but not individually. Instead, you’re going to simply lump them under an umbrella: deep work.

You may be asking, “If there are multiple deep work tasks that I have to perform, which should I prioritise during my deep work blocks?” and the short answer is as follows:

Whichever stem from your priority outcome goal.

In the goal-setting guide, you identified a priority outcome goal to channel your greatest efforts towards. So, do the deep work towards that goal before anything else.

Further, the previous article only asked you to set a few outcome and process goals because the less things you have to focus on in your life, the better you’ll get at that handful of things. If you have too many goals, then your attention will be diverted in too many directions to make substantial progress. Don’t be afraid of doing less.

That aside, there are three rules for deep work blocks:

1. Perform them when you’re fresh — get the volume in for the process goals when you’re at your sharpest. In this way, you’ll make the best progress towards becoming a master of the most important constituents of your outcome goals.
2. Don’t perform them for too long — Humans experience energy fluctuations throughout the day. The fluctuations are know as ultradian rhythms⁷. At the start of an ultradian cycle, you become aroused for around 30–45 minutes. Then, you become focused for around 30–45 minutes. Finally, you start becoming stressed and your concentration tapers off over the span of 30–45 minutes, before you reach an energy trough and need to rest. Performing deep work for more than 2 hours and 15 minutes at a time is therefore too much for most people. You’ll feel awful because you’re fighting your biology.
3. Don’t overuse them on a daily basis — Deep work requires an intensity that is exhausting. Not many people can perform more than 6 hours of deep work per day (3 blocks). Part of this is biological. For instance, depending on your wake time, most people start to experience a dip in energy around the 2pm mark as a result of the body reaching maximum daily temperature and starting to gradually cool down⁸. In turn, trying to perform deep work after this dip is incredibly difficult, meaning after you’ve experienced it there’s a good chance you’ll only be able to get 1–2 more blocks of deep work done, max. For this reason, I recommend starting off with 1–2 deep work blocks lasting 1–2 hours per day and progressing from there.

Figure 1. Don’t fight your biology; perform deep when you have energy. Credit: National Institute of General Medical Sciences (2022) Circadian Rhythms. Available at: https://nigms.nih.gov/education/fact-sheets/Pages/circadian-rhythms.aspx (Accessed: 2 Jul 2023).

In my case, I have a process goal that pertains to publishing at least one article to this website per week. This process goal is part of a business-related outcome goal, and is in one of its most important constituents. I know that I can get this done with 2 hours per day. Hence, I give myself a 2.5-hour deep work block in the morning to write articles and achieve my primary goals.

Step 4) Block Shallow Work

Once you’ve blocked your deep work, you must block the other process goal habits that you highlighted as shallow work.

These are the habits that are essential for your goals, but don’t move the needle towards massive progress in your outcome goal constituents as much as deep work. Therefore, they will be given less time per week than your most important deep work tasks, and should be performed when you have less energy in the day.

Recall from the previous step that I have a process goal that pertains to publishing at least one article to this website per week, which is part of a business-related outcome goal. There is another constituent that relates to this outcome goal: proofreading and referencing the articles I write during my deep work blocks. This task is important but not energy intensive. Therefore, I deem it shallow work, which I leave a block for after lunch on a Monday and Wednesday.

Step 5) Schedule a Weekly Review

In the next phase, we’re going to uncover the role of weekly progress tracking in motivation. This means that the final thing we must add to our ideal weekly timetable is 15–30 minutes for a weekly review.

Put this on a day where you can sit down in the evening with no distractions and reflect on the progress you’ve made throughout the week.

Once you’ve pencilled in your shallow work, all you’ll be left with is free time. You can spend this however you choose.

Here’s what I usually reserve my free time for:

• Social interaction.
• Extra exercise/time in nature.
• Additional deep work (if I have the energy).
• Additional shallow work.
• The occasional social media doom scroll (yes, I’m human, too).

Phase 3) Review Your Progress Weekly

You’ve now got two very powerful tools in your arsenal: the habit tracker and the ideal weekly timetable. These tools are the focal point of the goal-achievement process. They will be the main driving forces for you turning your dreams into reality.

However, these tools are mostly effective for the accountability they provide. Although accountability is an excellent source of motivation, if we pair it with small wins and reflection along the way, then we’re basically combining fear (of letting ourselves down) with pride (obtained from the acknowledgement that we’re making progress). Indeed, research has shown that reflecting on performance and understanding what’s gone wrong and right is a strong predictor of future task performance⁹.

This is essentially because goals are a very visual thing. When we reflect, we begin to see how close a goal is. As weeks go by and we continue to reflect, the goal becomes closer. The closer a goal seems to be, the more energy we expend to achieve it. This is called the goal-gradient hypothesis and it’s been observed in many different settings. For example, research has illustrated how in reward programmes that promise free coffee for a given number of purchases, people spend more money on coffee the closer they get to obtaining the free one¹⁰.

Part of this is related to a neurotransmitter (brain chemical) called dopamine. This molecule essentially moves us towards things and has been shown to play a core role in goal-pursuit behaviours¹¹. As we get progressively closer to a goal, dopamine progressively increases. Moreover, because dopamine is so heavily involved in drive and motivation, we therefore experience these feelings more intensely as we approach the end destination.

Using Milestones to Leverage Dopamine

“What does this have to do with achieving goals?” you may be asking.

Well, the outcome goals we previously set in the goal-setting guide take up to a year to achieve, and in some cases closer to 10. If the only positive experiences we have lined up during the pursuit of these goals are the events themselves, we’ll be waiting ages to receive the dopamine hits that breed motivation and persistence. Some people will have the discipline to cope with this, but most of us will lose motivation from not feeling as though our efforts are worthwhile.

To counteract this, we’re going to develop a strategic weekly review, which we scheduled during Phase 2. This weekly review will serve as time to see whether we’re on track and a milestone in the goal pursuit journey.

There are just four steps to a weekly review. When the time comes during the week and you must conduct one, here’s what you’re going to do. Follow these steps and you’ll achieve your goals much faster, trust me.

Step 1) Check Off Your Habit Tracker

The first part of the weekly review is to see whether you’ve accomplished your process goals.

Go to your habit tracker and tick off all the process goals you’ve achieved that week. Hopefully you’ve done all you need to do and earned yourself a full house of ticks. If this is the case, you’ll get a nice little boost in dopamine as a reward for moving in the right direction, firing you up for next week. And, because the process goals you’ve set are explicit strategies required to master the constituents of the outcome goals you’re chasing, you’ll actually be making progress, too.

If there are a few boxes you didn’t tick off, there are two courses of action you can take:

1. Assess what went wrong — Identify the barriers that prevented you from achieving that goal and write them down. With the barriers identified, think about the practical steps you could take to mitigate them. Write these solutions down, too. Then, take action next week by implementing the solutions identified during the review and seeing whether you can then achieve the lower bound of your process goal.
2. Rewrite the process goal with a more realistic lower bound — Reduce your process goal’s lower bound by 1–2 weekly hours. Try to achieve that lower bound next week and build to the upper bound over time as you become consistent.

Step 2) Implement Progressive Habit Overload

During Step 1, you may have realised that you achieved the lower bound of a process goal easily.

For instance, say one of the process goals you set was the following:

‘I will study using active recall for at least 7 hours this week, but no more than 14 hours.’

On your habit tracker, you give this a big fat tick at the end of the week. You found it incredibly easy to achieve the lower bound and know you could hit the lower bound again the next week. Therefore, it would be wise to strive during the next week to do more work towards that process goal. This process is called progressive habit overload.

The way it is recommended to do this is to increase your lower bound by about 1–2 hours per week (although this may be lower for certain habits, so don’t be afraid to make 30-minute weekly jumps) and turn your original lower bound into a range that always includes the baseline number. This baseline number is what we will call the minimum effective dose (MED). So, with progressive habit overload, the process goal from before would look like this:

‘I will study using active recall for at least 7–9 hours this week, but no more than 14 hours.’

Your new target gives you sweeter fruits to reach for, but also has the MED for you to fall back on if you need to prioritise other things. If you can hit the upper lip of the range next week, you will accumulate more progress goal volume. You will also make faster progress towards your outcome goal because you’re doing more of the process goal related to it than before.

If you start easily doing 9 hours, you’d transform your process goal during your weekly review to something like this:

‘I will study using active recall for at least 7–11 hours this week, but no more than 14 hours.’

This, my friend, is the secret sauce to achieving outcome goals. Most people start trying to achieve poorly set goals by reaching for the upper bound first. Yet, because they haven’t even proven to themselves that they can sustainably hit the lower bound and built a strong volume foundation, they basically guarantee burnout. By taking the initial goal-pursuit process slow and incrementally increasing the amount of process goal volume you perform, you’ll eventually…

• Turn the process goal into a habit.
• Be able to do more of it because it’s a habit.

Step 3) Check Whether You’re in the Maximum Recoverable Volume Zone

Once you hit the upper bound regularly, however, it is not always beneficial to implement progressive habit overload.

For instance, if you want to achieve a health-related outcome goal and your process goal was related to going to the gym, training an additional day per week, say 5 instead of 4 (an additional 1–2 weekly hours), may actually be detrimental to your progress by hurting your ability to recover. Hence, you’ve reached the maximum recoverable volume zone (MRVZ) for this process goal habit.

It’s very difficult to know when you enter the MRVZ. Sometimes you will be able to increase your upper bound further and push the limits. Other times, you’ll do it, get overworked and regress. The MRVZ varies per process goal and individual. Regardless, here are some key indicators that you’re past the MRVZ and should decrease the weekly volume dedicated to your process goal:

• The process goal habit no longer brings you any satisfaction. Instead, it evokes negative emotions, like anger and sadness. You don’t want to do it anymore but, because it’s a habit, you do it anyway.
• Your physical health is suffering. You may be sleeping poorly, losing/gaining weight unexpectedly, stressing more than usual, experiencing a dip in libido, and/or feeling exhausted constantly.
• You’re becoming a more bitter person. Overreaching towards a process goal habit will often cause you to feel burned out and frustrated. Thus, you will be more likely to project these feelings onto others and experience more negative social interactions.
• It’s taking over your life. Obsessing over your goals in an enthusiastic, passionate way is great. Obsessing over your goals in a stressed-out, compulsive way — like an addict obsesses over their fetish — is unhealthy. Know the distinction. One will cause mental and physical health disorders whereas the other will drive amazing progress.
• You’re regressing. If you’re doing so much of a process goal habit that you’re objectively moving away from your outcome goal, you’re outside the MRVZ.

If a process goal habit on your tracker leads you to resonate with one of the points above, then you’re outside the MRVZ for it. Therefore, you’ve got two options if you want to achieve your goals.

Your first option is to decrease the upper bound by 1–2 hours per week. If it’s still too much the next week, drop it by another 1–2 hours. Your goal is to rid yourself of these symptoms quickly, so don’t be afraid to do less if it permits you to remain consistent and healthy.

Option two is to experiment with reducing the volume of another process goal you perform in the week by 1–2 hours. To illustrate, here’s the process goal from the previous step:

‘I will study using active recall for at least 7–14 hours this week, but no more than 14 hours.’

Over time, you’ve progressed the volume and capped out the lower bound, forcing you to increase the upper bound:

‘I will study using active recall for at least 7–14 hours this week, but no more than 14–16 hours.’

However, you’re feeling burned out; you’re outside the MRVZ. But, your priority outcome goal is related to getting good grades, so you don’t want to do less of it for now. So, you check over your other process goals and turn your attention to one related to the relationships field:

‘I will spend time actively interacting with my friends and family for at least 2–4 hours this week, but no more than 6 hours.’

You’ve actually progressed this goal over time, hence why the lower bound is a range. In turn, you’ve identified that your MED for this habit is 2 hours. Therefore, instead of aiming to do it for four hours per week, you could return back to the 2-hour baseline whilst you’re prioritising getting good grades. Now, you’ve reclaimed 2 hours during the week, you have less to focus on, and you’re still making progress in the relationships field because you’re performing the MED! If your symptoms improve, you’ve identified your MRVZ for this habit at this moment in time.

By constantly assessing your priorities and adjusting your process goals accordingly, you align your actions with your desires. Moreover, because every habit has a MED, just because you’re going all in one one outcome goal temporarily doesn’t mean the rest of your life has to suffer.

Step 4) Set Your Habit Tracker for the Next Week

You’ve now assessed whether you’re achieving your process goals, implemented progressive habit overload and clarified whether you’re in the MRVZ.

Now, you’re simply going to reset the habit tracker for the next week. If you downloaded the free Notion habit tracker, then you just need to follow the instructions on the page. If you made your own, simply do what you did before but add in the rewritten process goals if you altered them.

Once this is done, you’re all set for the new week. Aim to tick off the boxes again and achieve your weekly milestones. Repeat Step 1 once review day comes around again.

Eventually, you’ll have a really refined habit tracker. You’ll know the exact volumes for each habit you need to perform to make the best progress towards your priority outcome goal. Some process goal habits will be in the MED zone, whereas others will be in the MRVZ. This will change over time as your priorities evolve and you establish new outcome goals.

Keep reviewing your progress and refining your approach and you’ll achieve goals that you set effectively.

Final Thoughts: The Ultimate Guide on How to Achieve Goals and Forge Habits

In 1989, two researchers published a study¹². They followed 200 people who set New Year’s resolutions between 1988 and 1989 relating to common goals: weight loss, smoking cessation, relationship improvement, etc. One week into 1988, 77% of participants had maintained their resolutions. After one month, the number decreased to 55%. After three months 43%. By 1989, this figure was only 19%. This study showed something really important:

We suck at sticking with our goals and achieving them.

However, we only suck because we’ve never been taught how to achieve goals.

If you were told by a random stranger to do the splits, you’d (probably) be unable to because you’ve never practiced. You’ve never fully lengthened your hip flexors or trained the movement. Thus, if you tried to, you’d probably tear a thigh muscle.

Likewise, if you’ve never implemented the strategies in The Ultimate Guide on How to Set Goals and Secure Success, as well as the one you’ve just completed, you’re going to crash and burn when you attempt to pursue a goal. (You probably won’t tear a thigh muscle, though — depending on the goal of course.)

Why, then, do people think that they can go straight into achieving goals? If goal achievement is an art that requires effort and frameworks, why do people assume they can freestyle it?

Fortunately, you’re no longer one of these people. Equipped with DTTR, you will never fail to achieve a goal again. You’ve got science-based tools in your goal-pursuit arsenal that have been proven to work. Moreover, you know the two key principles behind goal achievement that actually drive progress —consistency and volume — as well as how to leverage dopamine to motivate you to hustle.

No longer will you set a flawed goal or bite off more than you can chew. Whilst everyone around you goes all in on their poorly designed goals whilst dying on the inside after just one week, you’re instead going to create ambitious goals and take baby steps towards them — baby steps that add up to many miles over time as you grow and master the process.