Stick to New Year's Resolutions & Habit Change with Google Forms and Boomerang for Gmail

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video I’ll share some ideas on how make lasting habit change and to stick to New Years resolutions this year using Google Forms and Boomerang. 

This is the time of year, when everyone is geared up for habit change.  We are ready to turn over a new leaf, straighten up and fly right, make a fresh start.  This year we are going to behave differently than we did last year!  I’m not an expert on behavior change, but I AM a lifelong student, so I’ll share a little of what I have learned and some tech tools i use to support these efforts.  First, 

Smaller changes

are more likely to stick.  We’ve all tried to do a giant system overhaul like going on the Paleo diet, or exercising or meditating for an hour a day.  I don’t want to say those things are doomed to fail, but it is unlikely that you’ll make it a full 3 weeks doing any of those things.  And maybe that is all you need — after all 3 weeks on a liquid diet is bound to produce some change.  But if you want to make life long or even year long changes, it is best to attempt small, incremental changes. So, instead of going whole hog Paleo, try to eat more servings of fruits and veggies a day.  And instead of committing to exercise or meditate everyday for an hour, attempt exercising 3 days a week or meditating 10 minutes a day. Which brings me to my 2nd tip . . .

Measurable

Make your habit change measurable.  By that I mean, something you can put into a spreadsheet or on a graph.  So, a goal of eating 5 fruits and vegetables a day is measurable — just vaguely eating more fruits and vegetables is not. Be careful not to confuse the habit you need to change with the outcome.  Wanting to lose 10 pounds is not a measurable habit change. Eating under 1500 calories a day is. Why is it important to have measurable goals?  Because in order to change ingrained habits, you will need to hold yourself

Accountable

I think there are 3 components to accountability - collecting, reporting, and consequences. Just think about how a company runs. You can tell all your sales people that you expect them to bring in $100,000 in sales this month, but you will not actually influence their behavior unless you have a way to 1) figure out their actual sales dollars (collecting) 2) make that visible to others (reporting) and 3) either punish them for not achieving their goals or reward them for achieving them (consequences).  We have to use the same components for personal behavior change as well.  And this is where technology is helpful, although you can do this with rudimentary low tech tools also.  Let’s go through the components:

Collecting

Figure out what habit you want to change, make sure it is measurable and WRITE IT DOWN.  This is a basic Cognitive Behavioral technique. Writing things down makes us more committed.  We are going to use an example, i have written down that I want to drink 4 full glasses of water per day.  I might have a couple of things I want to change, but let’s just start with this one. Now, I need to collect the data on my progress. Because it is a daily goal, it makes sense to collect data daily.  At the beginning of the year, when I’m all fired up, that should be easy. Everyday I’ll remember to open my spreadsheet and record how many glasses of water I had the day before.  If you do this in Google Spreasheet, you can access it from anywhere. However, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (or CBT) principles require that you think ahead about how you might eventually fall off of the wagon and think of ways to prevent that from happening from the very beginning. Well — it doesn’t take much imagination to see that I’m going to forget to do this after it’s less of a priority. So, how do I continue to remember to do this every day?  Here are the three things I do:

• Daily task - I put a daily recurring reminder in Toodledo to remind myself to record this data. But because I was trying to change several habits at one time, I thought I’d make this process easier on myself by creating a 
• Google Form - this is not really necessary, but it does streamline the data input process.  I usually have a bunch of habits I’m trying to change, so it makes data collection easier. 
  • Go into Google Drive, choose New, then more, then Google Forms. 
  • Name it whatever want — how about New Years Resolutions
  • Then onto the first question. For my example habit, my question is how many glasses of water did you drink yesterday?
  • Now, for the answer, I want to be able to put in a number, so I choose Short Answer. You can pick checkmark format if it’s a yes or no question or a drop down format if there are a limited number of answers. I’ll also make this question required. 
  • Okay — let’s check this out. Click on this button that looks like an eye to preview the form. Looks good.
  • Go ahead and put in an answer. Let’s say I overachieved yesterday and drank 5 glasses. Hit Submit. 
  • Okay now go back into Google Drive and double click on your form.  Click on responses to see your answer. 
  • We want to put all of these responses in a spreadsheet, so click on this little Google Sheets icon here. We are going to create a new spreadsheet, the default name here is fine, and click Create. It will automatically open the spreadsheet for you. 
  • Here it is!  Google Forms automatically date stamps the responses, so you don’t need to collect that information on your form. You can add other questions to the form and all of the responses will appear on this spreadsheet.  Here is my New Years Resolution Form with nine measurable things I’m attempting to change.   In order to make things super easy for myself, I use one additional tech tool to get a 
• Daily Email Reminder - this is redundant, since i already have a daily reminder from Toodledo, but I can always use more than one reminder.  I use Gmail, so in order to have a recurring daily email sent to me, I installed a Chrome extension called Boomerang, which adds a bunch of additional functions to Gmail.  
  • In Chrome, go to three dots, then More Tools, then Extensions. 
  • Scroll to the end and choose Get More Extensions. 
  • Search for Boomerang, here it is, and click Add to Chrome.  You may need to choose your profile to add it. 
  • Okay — now it is added. I’m just using it to send myself recurring emails. To do this, hit Compose to make a new email, address it to yourself, put in a subject line, and paste in either a link to the form or, the embedded form, but the embedded form only works if you are getting mail in Gmail — not on the Mail app for iPhone. 
  • Now hit the red button that says, Send Later. Down at the bottom select Schedule Recurring Message.  I’m going to have it start tomorrow at 5am, repeat daily, have no end date and Schedule.  It disappears as though it has been sent, but it is really just scheduled. 
  • So now every morning when I get up, I get an email in my inbox with a form ready to be filled out collecting data about my habit change. Okay — that was a lot, but frankly collecting data is three quarters of the battle. Now, what to do with it?

Reporting

At a minimum, you need to report to yourself about how you are doing against your goals on a regular basis.  That said, the more people you tell, the more committed you will be to staying on top of your goals. Just posting a graph showing your progress or sticker chart is one way to make it visible to anyone who walks by. My brother used to give a daily report to his 8 year old son who was very rule-oriented and was horrified and judgmental if his dad veered off his plan.  I suggest finding an accountability buddy. Someone who you report to each day or week about your goals and your measurable progress towards that goal. For example — “5 out of 7 days last week I achieved my goal of 4 or more glasses of water per day.”  They don’t have to share your specific goals, but it helps if that are also working towards something so that they have some skin in the game. And finally, you should plan out some

Consequences

These should be thought through ahead of time and be real. Unless you are in a 12 Step Program, I wouldn’t expect 100% compliance. For example, for the 9 things I’m trying to change, I reward myself if I hit 90% compliance. That means that each week, I count how many yeses I have achieved and divide by the total possible yeses for that week. That gives me a percentage.  But you can do 6 out of 7 days, or whatever level you think is worthy of reward. Remember, the point is to achieve long lasting habit change, so don’t be too draconian or you’ll just give it up altogether. 

Your consequences should also be placed at motivational intervals. Once a month might not be frequent enough at the beginning.  If you are an adult, it may be difficult to figure out a way to reward yourself.  Maybe allowing yourself to splurge on a new cookbook, indulge yourself with a bubble bath, or take yourself out to a movie as a reward. If you are more motivated by punishment then, by all means, use that!  My brother (again — we have similar brains, so we have spent many hours talking about this kind of stuff) has a punishment for himself that on the days that he doesn’t meet his goals, he has to go outside and plunge his entire arm up to the bicep into the maggot infested compost pile. Nasty.  And highly motivating. Whatever it is — hold yourself to it!  And tell your accountability buddy about your consequences so that you are not tempted to let yourself off the hook. 

This was a way longer video than I thought I’d make about this!  But honestly, behavior change is one of the most mysterious and frustrating aspects about being human. It makes sense to spend some time focusing on what works and then putting a system in place to support your goals.  I don’t hold myself up as a shining example of success in this regard — I’m also human after all.  But I will say that one summer 5 years ago, I decided that I wanted to change 8 specific bad habits. Some were big, some small. I’ve been working on them ever since and have more than 5 years worth of daily data that I have collected.  Out of those 8 things, I have totally changed 4, partially changed 2, and need to focus more on the last 2 — which are diet related and therefore, for me, are inconsistent.  That said, I’m liable to slip at any moment, so 5 years later — the daily monitoring is still important to me. 

I’d love to know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!