Goal-setting guides

Straight answers about setting goals and keeping them, including where the popular advice is wrong. Written to be useful whether or not you ever install this app.

• How to break a big goal into steps you can do this week

  The gap between "get fluent in Spanish" and anything you can start on a Tuesday. A three-layer method, the test for whether a step is small enough, and the four ways decomposition usually goes wrong.

• Why annual goals collapse by February

  The failure is built into the format, not into you. What a year-long goal does to feedback, why the restart instinct makes it worse, and what to do from the middle of a broken plan.

• Goal tracking with no account and no cloud

  What you get when an app has no sign-in and makes no network requests, what you genuinely give up, and how to check a privacy claim yourself rather than believing the App Store label.