Goals

A few goals kept beside your journal, so intent and evidence live in the same place.

5 minutes to set · Set once, glance at occasionally · Free

What it is

A short list of goals, tracked lightly, sitting next to the journal rather than in a separate app. The point is proximity: your goals and the actual record of your days end up in the same place, which makes it much harder to believe a story about your year that the entries do not support.

Writing a goal down is not a trivial act. Specifying what you intend to do — and ideally when and where — substantially improves follow-through compared with holding an intention in your head.

Kansha keeps this deliberately thin. No sub-tasks, no dependencies, no burndown.

How to do it

1. Write a small number of goals. Small is doing real work here.
2. Make each one specific enough that you could tell a stranger whether you had done it.
3. Where it fits, add the when and where — the conditions under which you will act.
4. Update progress when you think of it, not on a schedule.

What you might get from it

• Written intentions are acted on more often than remembered ones
• Sitting beside the journal, goals get checked against what actually happened
• Feeds the AI analysis, so stated intent can be compared with the entries

What the research says

Evidence: Moderate. Gollwitzer's work on implementation intentions found that specifying when and where you will act markedly increases follow-through, across a wide range of goals.

• Gollwitzer, P. M. (1999). American Psychologist. Specifying when and where you will act substantially raises the rate at which goals are completed. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.54.7.493

Where that runs out

The evidence supports if-then implementation intentions specifically, not goal lists in general — a list of aspirations without conditions is much weaker. Kansha shows progress as a percentage, which some people find motivating and others find a stick to beat themselves with.

Who this might not suit

If percentage progress tends to feed perfectionism for you, this one is worth turning off — you can hide it in Settings without losing anything else.