Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Build habits throughout your day with subtasks

Repeating tasks are helpful for building habits in your life. Today’s tip, shared by dtreusch, adds an interesting twist: using subtasks throughout the day to help cement the habit.

I have some tasks that I want to remind myself to do multiple times per day and then I want a wrap-up task at the end of the day to record notes, etc.

Let’s take logging food into MyFitnessPal as an example. I’ve been using MyFitnessPal for awhile, but I am not consistent with logging. My goal for this year is to log shortly after each meal then check things over at the end of the day and close the day out in MyFitnessPal.

To set this up I created a task in RTM that repeats daily at 8 pm. This is my daily wrap up task where I can log notes, check over everything for the day and then close out the day in MyFitnessPal. Then I added three subtasks that are due at 7 am, 12 pm and 6 pm to remind me to log food into MyFitnessPal at the respective due time.

Finally, I changed my Do Today Smart List from:

(startBefore:tomorrow OR dueBefore:tomorrow)

to

(startBefore:Now OR dueBefore:Now)

This causes the subtasks and the main task to show up in the list based on due time. If I see multiples in the list at the end of the day, I know that I either failed to log my food shortly after the meal or I forgot to mark a subtask as done.

It works great to keep me on track develop the habit of logging into MyFitnessPal three times daily and I’ve started using this pattern for other habits I want to develop.

Thanks for sharing this tip, dtreusch! You’re our Tips & Tricks Tuesday winner this week.

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