Remember Your Goals Long Term With These Strategies

How can you remember your goals when life gets busy? What does it take to keep long-term goals in mind?

To remember your goals, give yourself reminders to prompt you to take action and link a series of actions to a certain cue. By setting useful reminders in place, you can remember your goals more easily.

Learn how to set reminders that work and achieve your goals.

Remembering Your Intentions

Often, when you set goals, you face the obstacle of forgetfulness and no longer remember your goals when other priorities take over. Our working memory (the amount of information we can hold in our heads at one time) is limited, and in the hustle and bustle of our busy lives, many of us blank out on our intentions to develop better behaviors. We suggest two tactics to solve this problem:

Set timely reminders that cue action. Reminders work best when they come right before you’re supposed to take action. When you prompt yourself to, say, prep lunch for the week right before you meant to do so, you’re far more likely to follow through.
Link your cues to specific action steps—for instance, you could define a sequence of behaviors that compose the morning routine you want to build. Then, link a cue (such as your alarm clock ringing) to the first step and carry out your plan from there.

Cues and reminders work best the more vivid, unique, and otherwise memorable you can make them. Engage your memory by using all your senses—sight, taste, sound, texture, and smell—to develop cues that won’t let you forget. For example, you might associate the sight, smell, and taste of a hot, fresh, aromatic cup of coffee with your alarm clock sound. This way, the cue becomes more vivid and spurs you out of bed more effectively.

Develop Durable Memories

As Barbara Oakley explains in Learning How to Learn, the key to efficient use of your memory is to integrate what you want to remember into your long-term memory, which can hold memories indefinitely.

Working memory holds new connections for about 10 seconds, and these memories grow more durable the more you connect them to existing networks in your brain. Hence, Oakley recommends that to develop lasting memories, you need to:

Avoid distractions, since shifting your attention for even a minute can cause you to forget what you had in mind.
Stop multitasking, which causes your brain to constantly load different items into your working memory, pushing out what was there before.

Oakley also argues that you’ll form stronger memories when you use all of your senses. This is somewhat like creating vivid cues insofar as both involve creating and strengthening the synapses in your brain that will help you to recall that information. The more connections you’ve made between a piece of information (like the sight of your calendar) and its related context (such as checking your day’s tasks), the more easily you’ll recall and perform the right behaviors when the cue memory is triggered.

To apply this, try setting out a focused period of time—say, 30 minutes—in which to develop and memorize your reminder and your action steps. Get specific, get vivid, and then try using active recall, another memory technique that reinforces existing memories, to further cement the plan in your brain by firing and refiring the right neural pathways.

Remember Your Goals Long Term With These Strategies