designing habits

i haven’t felt the desire to write much these days because i feel like keeping my goals to myself. it’s a fun experiment for a change, and i want to see how i do at it.

in the meantime, i’ll share some meta-thoughts i had relating to my goals.

the idea is that i like to think about my habits as a product—they need to be well designed. i spent a bit of time thinking about how i can make it as easy as possible to get the right habits. it feels like there’s two ingredients.

the first ingredient is the right self-expectations. i’m not going to be david goggins tomorrow, but what i can almost guarantee is that i can work out 5 minutes more tomorrow than today. and that is definitely better than nothing.

i’ve been setting small expectations for myself every day. the expectation per day stay fixed because this is about habits, not outcomes. i have a short list of things that i’d like to do every day, and i’d like to check as many of them as possible. it becomes easy knowing that if i spent 5 minutes on a task, then it’s considered as a success.

so why is this well designed? well, there’s two reasons: it’s ridiculous to tell myself i don’t want to do something just for 5 minutes, and if i do something for 5 minutes, there’s a high likelihood i’m willing to continue after 5 minutes.

these expectations have allowed me to tell myself that i accomplished my goal. the problem is that if the goal is so low, then am i just measuring myself on whether i did it for 5 minutes or not as opposed to a measurable outcome? not quite. instead, i’m measuring how many of these 5 minute goals i did per day.

the second ingredient ties into this. i try to make it as easy as possible to track these goals. i have a notion spreadsheet where each cell is a checkbox, each row is a day, and each column is a goal. if i did that goal, even for a minute, then i get to check that box.

this is amazing because each day, tracking my habit goals takes less than 30 seconds of my time, meaning i have no reason not to do it. i don’t have to input any text, i just have to do around 10-15 clicks and i’m done. writing text can be creatively exhausting so having this simple system makes it easy to adopt and do consistently.

bonus: because i’ve plugged in all of my data into notion, it was easy for me to integrate this data into an agent i’ve been working on as a side project in the evenings. it’s at a point where i can chat with my data now and i can see what are the patterns in my routines. i don’t have any goals in my habits currently, i’m mainly trying to see what’s my baseline and then i can shoot a goal later once i identify what i want to change.

here’s an example excerpt from my interaction with my own personal agent:

Based on your habit tracking data for January and the start of February 2026, you are off to a solid start! Here is a breakdown of how you’ve been doing with your goals:

*### 🏆 Top Performers

• X You absolutely crushed this goal for the first three weeks of January. While there were a few missed days towards the end of the month, your consistency early on established a great rhythm.

• X You have been very consistent about X, making it one of your most reliable habits.

• X This habit saw a fantastic upward trend! You started a bit slow, but by mid-to-late January, you were reading almost every single day.

[…]

• X is currently your most sporadic habit. If this is a priority, you might want to try pairing it with one of your stronger habits to build more momentum.

• X is happening occasionally, mostly on weekends, which is a healthy balance, but could be increased if you feel isolated.

Overall: You built a very disciplined X! Keep up the momentum with X, and maybe try to sneak in X to turn those red marks into green ones. You’re doing great!*

it’s great to be praised by my own agent. there’s something cool about having an agent analyze your data and identify where you put in effort and praise you for it. it’s totally different than if it was as simple as an “if user = “andy”: log(”you are god”)”. it means the data doesn’t lie and things are great.

so yeah, things have been good in 2026. things have been repetitive, but that’s just a negative way of saying that i’ve built great habits and i’m hoping to stick with them!

here’s an image for better seo on this post.

thanks for reading!