Overview

Our mission is to help you set and follow through on your strategic goals in a word-class way. HabitStack will give you the knowledge, resources, and skills to take your execution to the next level.

This document will explain our method and give you everything you need to get started.

What is HabitStack?

HabitStack is a goal execution system. It helps ambitious teams (and individuals) at growing startups and established companies accomplish their strategic goals faster and with less stress. It keeps you focused on your most important priorities and embeds high-performance execution habits into your daily work life.

Inferior goal execution systems limit performance

The highest levels of performance and execution require advanced systems.

Most leaders of ambitious teams are very effective. But eventually, they reach the limits of the general purpose execution systems they’ve been using. What got them to this level won’t get them to the next. They need tools specifically designed for strategic goal execution.

Most of us—even very high performers—don’t have a system that adequately structures their execution. The result is that:

Important, strategic projects drag on longer than we wish they would
You’re busy fighting fires rather than doing longer-term, higher-impact work
You’re pulled in different directions and lack alignment with your fellow leaders
There’s a feeling of drowning in the daily chaos of running the business
Activities are tracked in several different places and it is hard to see how everyone’s work connects up to strategic goals. You get lost in the details.

The problem isn’t just that a poor goal system can be unproductive—it is also stressful and frustrating.

The solution is a true goal execution system

HabitStack is the simplest way to keep strategic goals on track. The method gives you and your team a practical system for setting goals, planning them out, and then executing on them. Here’s what the method does:

It helps you break down yearly and plan your goals into quarterly, monthly, and weekly wins so you work towards your big goals every week.
It helps you see how smaller tasks, often spread between different apps like email and task trackers, are connected to larger goals so you're constantly connected to your long-term goals.
It pulls your team together and keeps you in sync so you work as a unified whole.
It helps you develop weekly habits to reinforce your focus so that you make rapid progress on your strategic goals and still stay on top of your daily tasks—without layering on additional stress.
It keeps you accountable to yourself—and to your team or a coach, if applicable—so you stay motivated.

HabitStack helps you stay committed to your goals, work on the highest impact tasks, and ensure you and your team are pulling in the same direction.

Immediate impacts of adopting HabitStack

The platform helps you create the habits you need to consistently accomplish your strategic work. After implementing the system, you’ll notice dramatic improvements in what you accomplish and how you feel about it:

There’s clear direction and you feel confident that you’re doing the most important work.
Your team feels like they’re aligned with a common vision.
Your hard work feels like it pays off more—you’re able to make real progress on the things that matter most.

Who can benefit from HabitStack?

HabitStack is designed for ambitious individuals and teams that are working towards challenging, strategic goals. It works for tiny startups and established companies. It has been used with great results by individuals, leadership teams, and entire companies.

It can be used on your own. Using it with your team is extra powerful and layers on team accountability, transparency, and alignment. It is also designed to facilitate support from a coach if you are working with one.

HabitStack is not well suited for large enterprises wishing to assign goals to thousands of employees in a “command and control” environment.

HabitStack Method at a Glance

Here’s a brief look at how HabitStack works.

Overview

The HabitStack method consists of three primary components: goal setting, goal planning, and execution habits.

First, you set strategic goals. Most people don’t set productive goals. HabitStack helps you set goals that reflect the science of goal setting to maximize success.
Then you make a goal plan. You break up your longer-term strategic goals into shorter-term ones—at the quarterly, monthly, and weekly levels.
Finally, you develop execution habits. You follow a set of weekly habits—again, guided by science—to keep the work on track.

What are my weekly habits?

Here are the habits that HabitStack participants complete each week:

Read the weekly email. On Monday morning each week, you’ll get an email with details about what you need to do to be set up to win. This information is crucial for you to know what to do in a given week. Read the email!
Track wins. Next, update your goals (we call them “wins”) on the HabitStack platform. That means updating how complete they are—25%, 50%, 75%, or 100%.
Add new wins. Next, set new weekly wins. Think about what you will need to do to keep your larger goals on track.
Update confidence. Once you’ve taken stock of what you accomplished last week and what have planned for the current week, update how confident you are that you’ll meet your monthly, quarterly, or yearly wins. Updating your confidence helps you reflect on how things are looking—and avoids boring “status update” meetings since everyone can easily see how things are going.
Execute your wins. Block out time on your calendar to complete your weekly wins. Consistent discipline is far more effective than sporadic heroism.
Review your teams’ wins. If you’re using HabitStack as a team, take time to read through their wins. Leave comments or questions or encouragement if appropriate.

Note: Budget at least 3 hours per week to execute your weekly habits and complete your wins. Some people can dedicate far more than that to their strategic work—it depends on your situation.

What do we do in the weekly meetings?

When you use HabitStack as a team with a HabitStack facilitator, you’ll have weekly meetings dedicated to strategic work. The meetings are 30 to 60 minutes and they will dramatically improve your progress towards strategic goals.

Note: If you’re using the system as an individual or with a coach, you may not have weekly meetings. However, you are still encouraged to regularly set aside some time to dedicate to the process below.

Meetings differ slightly from week to week. For example, you’ll spend the first week of the month or quarter planning for that month or quarter. But generally, here’s what happens in meetings:

Habit check. Make sure every habit—tracking wins, adding wins, updating confidence—is completed.
Reflections. Look to see whether you (and your team, if applicable) accomplished what you said you would. Celebrate the wins. Reflect on misses: What did you learn? What will you do differently going forward?
Updates. Discuss wins that need the team’s attention, changes to confidence levels, or changes to wins that resulted from feedback.
Revisit existing goals and coordinate efforts. The team supports each other in refining goals if necessary, and ensuring everyone’s goals are aligned.
Discussion. We invite discussion from the team. We may discuss particular wins or strategic decisions that require team input.

HabitStack is simple but powerful. It keeps your team aligned on key goals and helps you all accomplish your most important work.

What makes HabitStack different?

Standard ways of working serve us well up to a certain point. But, eventually, ambitious people want to take the next step in their level of focus and strategic leadership. HabitStack is a specialized toolset that enables the shift from “business as usual”.

This means that you’ll be challenged to become fanatical about certain mindsets and practices.

Through HabitStack, you’ll become:

Fanatical about writing goals down. Writing your goals down creates commitment and transparency. You, and your teammates, if applicable, remember what you committed to, so successes and failures are visible to everyone. This can create feelings of vulnerability, but it also facilitates accountability and alignment. It’s part of the HabitStack magic.
Fanatical about setting weekly goals. We don’t just break goals down to the quarterly or monthly level, but actually to the weekly level. Weekly wins ensure you’re working steadily towards your longer-term goals and allow you to quickly readjust if you catch yourself drifting off course.
Fanatical about measurability. We develop habits for tracking our goals and measuring progress. We do that because we understand that measuring progress is critical for evaluating success and improving performance.
Fanatical about completing your goals on time. We ask HabitStack participants to be hungry for wins. We want you to be 2 to 3 times more committed than you already are to accomplishing goals on time.
Fanatical about not hiding, but learning from your mistakes. It’s hard to face our mistakes, but it’s essential for learning. HabitStack’s emphasis on reflecting on what went wrong so we can improve later is essential for getting to the next level of performance.
Fanatical about attention to detail. Without care and attention, many people fall into setting slapdash goals and sloppy execution. High-performance goal execution requires you to be crisp and clean with your habits and goals, so we go to great pains to build that detail into our process.

If you’re using HabitStack in a team, you’ll also become:

Fanatical about getting and giving constructive accountability. Accountability is critical to a high-performing team—but it’s difficult to hold people accountable without blame or guilt. The HabitStack system strongly emphasizes constructive accountability that blends a commitment to team goals with a deep respect for peers.
Fanatical about collaborating across departments on strategic goals. Making significant progress on your company’s strategic goals requires alignment across your teams. HabitStack pushes you to collaborate with your colleagues on a whole new level.

Fanatical is a strong word, but taking on these mental habits is key to strategic leadership. HabitStack isn’t just a place to record your goals and measure your progress. It’s designed to push you to shift your mindset so you think about, value, and execute on your goals in a more deliberate way.

What’s next?

Most of us aren’t as effective as we could be because we lack the right system. HabitStack is designed on the science of goal setting to help you achieve your key goals faster. After using HabitStack, you’ll find yourself making meaningful progress on those important tasks that you never seem to have time for, you’ll still get your daily work done, and you’ll feel less stressed and anxious doing them.

HabitStack might be different than what you’re used to, but we promise the benefits will be worth it.