Program Activities
When your goals are created it is time to plan the actions you’ll take towards each of them. An activity is a recurring action that you take every day or on certain days of the week.
Tap on the first goal to enter its screen. Then press the + button to add its first activity.
Creating a goal’s activities
When creating the activities for a goal think about it in an isolated manner. Add the activities that you think will make you feel good about the effort put into it.
For example, in a Learn Japanese goal you might add the following activities:
- Study Vocabulary every day.
- Watch a Japanese TV show for two hours each week.
- Go to Japanese Lessons each Monday and Friday.
- Chat with my Japanese friend once a week.
The main goal of the activity list is to ensure that when you complete all activities you will be proud of your efforts. Designing an activity list that yields long term success is also important since you won’t be happy if after a year of consistent study you achieve nothing.
Activity’s FAQs
What are weekly activities?
Daily and select-weekdays activities are fixed on certain days. You have to work out on Monday and Thursday, and if you don’t, you miss the workout.
If you want to be able to work out any two days of the week, you can set up your activity as weekly, and it will appear every day on the “This Week” section on the app, allowing you to do the activity any day of the week.
But, what should you use? It depends a lot on personal preferences, but we think that:
- Since they are more urgent, daily activities are completed more often. Choose daily what you want to be sure you do.
- Weekly activities are more easily deferred, but also they feel better to procrastinate. For this reason, they are a good fit for activities that would be good to do if you have some spare time from your daily ones, but are not critical to you.
Should I put a time goal into my activity?
Goaliath lets you put time goals into your activities, turning study vocabulary each day into study vocabulary for one hour each day.
What should you use depends on whether the activity has a clear end:
- The activity Write my novel doesn’t have one. You could dedicate 1 or 8 hours a day.
In this case, the best thing to do is to add a time goal in order to put boundaries to the activity. Choose a duration that will make you proud of the time dedication. Have in mind that you shouldn’t be doing much above the goal. Dedicating too much time to an activity will get you exhausted and out of time and energy for other important ones. So choose a goal that is high enough.
- The activity Workout at the gym is different (if you have a fixed plan on what exercises to do each day).
The activity can take more or less time, but it will last just what you need to complete the workout. In this case, you don’t want to put a time goal. Just check the activity once you have finished your training (you are still able to start a timer to track how long it takes tapping on the day’s activity to see its detail screen).
I don't know what activities to do towards this goal.
Time dedication activities are good for things you want to do, but you don’t know how yet. For example:
You want to learn to draw but have no idea how to start. Begin creating a “Learn to draw” goal, then a single “Learn to draw” activity with a daily time goal of 30 minutes.
Even without a clear plan you can dedicate that time to search for online resources, books, a local schol, etc. When that time dedication begins to blossom, you can later replace your “Learn to draw” activity by more specific ones like “Whatch master’s youtube videos”, “practice quick sketching” and “Work on my masterpiece”.
This is the power of time dedication, to clear the “I don’t know how to start” mist that leads to eternal deferring of what we want to do. That is why we think time dedication beats tasks or “what to do” lists. The former just breeds the latter.
How much effort should I put into each goal?
The more relevant is that goal for you, the more you’ll have to work to feel good about your efforts.
Also, avoid thinking about the time you have available when creating activities. Just think about the time you need to dedicate to be happy with your efforts on each goal.
Thinking “I don’t have much time, so I will just be able to train 1 day a week (even if I think that is not enough)” will lead to you working for nothing. Be sincere and create activities thinking on the time you need to feel good, not the time you have. Of course, the latter can affect the former! But this first one is the one that matters.
What about task lists?
For certain goals, you might need task lists to make a plan of action and track your progress. Goaliath does not support traditional task lists, as it is just a tool to help you put in the effort.
We believe that adding project management features would harm that main purpose. You’ll need to use another tool alongside Goaliath if you need task lists (for simple ones, we are fans of pen and paper).
Take this as a brief example:
- In Goaliath, you can have the activity Write my book for 4 hours each day. Doing that activity ensures you put in the effort that will drive all progress. The exact thing that you write does not matter for Goaliath, and you don’t need to edit the activity when you make progress on your book.
- You can have the whole novel planned on your computer and mark each chapter as completed while you are dedicating time to your Write my book activity.