Killing a bad habit is easier said than done, but the Hipster Habit App—which is less of an app and more of a miniature printable book for your wallet—can help you through the process. All you need to do is make a few choices, stick with the plan, and you'll have a well-formed habit in 30 days.

This neat little printable comes from Buster Benson, who created Budge and Health Month. Both apps are designed to help you form helpful habits, so it's no surprise that Buster put this cool offline option together as well. Once you print it out and put the book together, you just have to fill out information about the habit you want to change or create. The "app" will then walk you through the steps you need to take to get started, such as setting a reminder on your phone. When you're all done, you just need to check things off on a mini 30-day calendar when you do them. It's kind of like a short-term version of the Seinfeld productivity secret. Since that's what I've been doing for the past six months, I'm pretty optimistic about Buster's printable "app." Definitely check it out if you're looking to kill some bad habits or create a few good new ones. Just remember to take them one at a time.

Hipster Habit App | via Buster Benson

Setting goals is easy, but prioritizing them is hard. Humans suck at properly weighing what we need to achieve our goals. We take on too much, skip steps, and often, as a result, we give up. Once you commit to a framework to prioritize your goals and cut the junk, achieving your goals gets a lot more realistic. Here's one way to do it.

If you're anything like me you have a ton of goals. Unfortunately, compulsive goal setting can be a major roadblock to actually achieving goals. Applying a rigorous approach to your goal setting is not only a great way to help you along the path to meeting them, but it's also a way to prune out all the junk you don't really need. We've talked before about how writing down all your goals is a good way to prioritize and that's essentially what we're doing here. However, instead of listing them we're going to categorize and compare them with a simple pyramid structure. (Think a little like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, but for your goals.) By the end you'll have weeded out unnecessary steps and ditched goals you don't really care about.

Consider this a system of life designing that helps you question assumptions and figure out what you really want. I've put together a Google Doc you can copy and fill in on your own (File > Make a copy). Here's how I divided the different goals up.

Level 1: The Primary Goals

Your primary goals are the base of all other goals—the one or two things you aspire to do before you die. Nearly everything above this bottom level should help you to one day complete these goals. Write in the goals that will truly matter to you in 20 years. It might be something like: live happily into your 90's or become the CEO of a company. You should only have two or three high stakes goals listed here that you'll design the rest of your life around.

Level 2: Long Term Goals

Your long term goals are the major goals that are required to get to the primary goals. These might be the sustainable habits you need to form over the years or the achievements you want to reach in order to get to your primary goals. Say your primary goal is to still be healthy and mobile in your 90's. You can't get to that point without working for it so a long term goal would be to lose (or gain) a certain amount of weight or improve your diet by your 50's.

Level 3: Short Term Goals

Think of short term goals as weeks or months out. Consider goals like: finish a drawing, build a deck addition, or cut cookies from your diet. The important part to remember is that these goals are short term, not short-sighted. So if you're primary goal is to lose weight think of what you can do now to make that happen. If it's to put on a show in an art gallery you need to finish a picture first.

Level 4: Recurring Goals

Your recurring goals are what you want to do daily/weekly/monthly regardless of what else is going on. Consider goals like: hit up the gym, jog, write a page a day, or anything similar. These aren't quite the same as short-term goals because they're to form a habit. Say one of your primary goals is to lower your daily stress level. Ask yourself what you need to do on a daily basis to make that happen in the long run (if you need some starter tips be sure to check out post on what you can do about your stress).

Level 5: Immediate Goals

These are the goals and to-dos that you can and want to accomplish right this second. As you write your list out you probably notice a few things you could be doing instead of writing your list. This is the ever-changing but necessary part of your pyramid because it allows you to measure your daily duties to see how they have an affect on your overall life goals. This could be as simple as cleaning the bathroom, or making a phone call. The purpose of including these here is to see where they affect other aspects of the pyramid both positively and negatively.

How to Use Your Pyramid to Weed Out Junk and Accomplish Your Goals

Now comes the hard part: turn this pyramid into an actionable living plan where you can prioritize and use your base goals as a foundation for everything else. As author David Foster Wallace points on in his Kenyon College commencement speech, life consists of what you pay attention to and you can structure your goals the same way. When you have too many goals conflicting with each other your attention is shifted too often. Trim away junk goals to get things done and find an actionable path.

Trim the Junk Away and Focus On As Few Goals as Possible

The goal of the pyramid is to ensure that every aspect of your goals work together. In that way it works a lot like the old food guide pyramid. The benefit of the pyramid is that you can see where your ideas fail and aren't coalescing. Let's get rid of everything that doesn't play nice together.

1. Start at the bottom of your pyramid and draw lines up through goals that match each other. For instance, at the bottom in your primary goals you might have "Publish a novel." In the long term goals you have "Write a novel," and near the top you have something like, "Write the first sentence of a novel." The line should move through each level and hit one or two different goals along the way.
2. Do this with all your goals moving upwards through the pyramid.
3. When you're done you'll probably have a few outliers scattered about. Ask yourself a couple questions about them: Why do I want this? Does this relate to anything else I want? If you don't have a good answer, cut them from the list. If you want to keep goals then focus them to help you with another goal.
4. Finally, go back through your levels and see what goals you can outsource to other people. You might be surprised at how many unnecessary steps you give yourself.

As an example, here's what I did for one of my goals. The primary goal at the bottom is: make and publish a video game. Along the path I had all sorts of pipedream goals: learn how to do pixel art, improve my shotty programming skills, write design documents, and more. When I saw all this in one image I realized I made it impossible for myself. I looked at each level and cut away everything I knew I wouldn't do. Did I really need to learn programming? No, because I know plenty of people who do it. Art? Nope, I know people who do that as well. Instead of learning five new skills I reduced it one goal: work with people I know.

By the end of this you should have a cohesive underlying framework where all your goals and wants work together in a manageable fashion. It's time to get started on accomplishing your goals.

Formulate a Plan and Get Started

You've trimmed away all the fat and nonsense so it's time to formulate a plan to achieve your goals. It's thought that smaller goals lead to a higher success rate and being very specific with those goals helps you achieve them. Thankfully your pyramid should already be filled with specifics so it's just about management now.

Planning out the process depends on how you like to do things. We've pointed out before that broadcasting your goal progress in public is a great way to keep yourself on track, highlighted some great goal tracking services, project management tools, and pointed out that sometimes you just need to suck it up and start. Find a system that works for you and get to it.

However you choose to plan your goals the point remains the same: focus only on the goals that matter, break them into smaller steps, and start work immediately. This is a one-time exercise that isn't about constant organization. You can tinker and tweak with each level as you go along, but stick with the basic high stakes structure if you really want to accomplish everything. Photo by Dan Zen.

Goals are ambiguous things that we as humans struggle to define and work toward. Hopefully the above method will provide the framework to create a path to where you want to end up. Be sure to share your own tips for organizing goals in the comments.

Title photo by Olivier Le Moal (Shutterstock.

Most shy people wish they were more confident, because shyness is ultimately a symptom of you being uncomfortable with who you are. You judge yourself based on other people's standards and spend too much time in your own head, thinking of how best to act and react in any given situation. This is nothing more than a bad habit, and it's the sort of thing you can break with regular practice.

I was a loud, confident kid when I was young. Then I transferred schools after 6th grade and was one of a few people who didn't know anybody. After a few failed attempts to make friends, I became shy. It was easier to just be quiet and avoid everyone than risk rejection. That shyness took only a few weeks to develop and it stuck with me for years. Author James Victore believes it's really nothing more than a bad habit:

Most of us are so afraid of failing that we don't even risk it. And what's worse, risk and rejection become something to avoid at all costs. A habit is formed. We close doors that may lead to opportunities and stop putting ourselves out there for other people to respond to. This fear of rejection is normal. Everyone shies away and has moments, or extended moments, of self-doubt. But the fear is also a test, it means you are onto something and you should pay attention to it and not shy away.

That fear is a good way to detect opportunities, but it can be easy to think we're too shy to make good use of them and find an excuse to avoid them. Like with any bad habit, you're not going to turn your diffidence into confidence in a couple of hours. Breaking a bad habit just involves forming a better one in its place, so make an effort every day to do something you'd otherwise avoid because you feel shy. Try simple things, and then when those big opportunities come along and strike you with fear you won't worry so much about the results. If you practice thinking just the right amount, rather than analyzing every possible outcome, that'll be your new habit. Just get outside of your head and be present in the moment every day. You'll have far less trouble next time you need to summon some confidence because you won't be thinking about it.

Op-Ed: Confidence vs Shyness | The 99 Percent

Photo by Kevin Poh.

You're surrounded by all types of triggers. You see a vending machine and your stomach growls; the sight of a stapler invokes all the stresses of work; looking at that one book always gives you ideas. These triggers prime a response in your brain for all types of habits. Giving your environment an overhaul—with your triggers in mind—can make you more productive, happier, and goal oriented. Here's how.

We're talking about the simple, external triggers you run across every day. These triggers can influence your decisions, make you recall memories, or even cause stress. These external, environmental triggers have an affect on your day, and it's possible to use them to your advantage. In short, you can remove the bad triggers and spotlight the good ones. We'll show you how to find and categorize the triggers around you, but let's start with a basic look at how your brain reacts to what you see before we move on to a step-by-step process for optimizing your environment.

How Your Brain Responds to Triggers from Objects, Ideas, and Advertising

When you look at an object, you're not just seeing the optical qualities of it. Your brain is also processing a ton of information to comprehend what the object is, even building your history with an object or idea. Sometimes when you see something, that object also triggers an emotion or thought and then re-fires your brain in a new way to prime a response. In effect, a trigger is essentially an external influence that directly precedes an action, emotion, or habit.

You see an object or idea that reminds you of an action and then you take that action. Your actions can be positive, negative, or neutral. The triggers aren't inherently good or bad, they just exist, but you can manipulate your triggers so you're weighted toward a more positive outcome.

For instance, if you keep cookies on the counter, you're probably going to eat more cookies. If you surround yourself with objects that trigger creative responses (books, pictures, quotes, whatever works for you) you could see an increase in your idea generation. In the case of advertising, triggers are the essence of how products get sold to you.

We've talked before about how ads manipulate you, and one of those manipulative tactics is to trigger a need to purchase something you didn't know you wanted. This is done in all sorts of ways, from glorified price dropping ("Buy now, one day only!" or "Buy One Get One Free!") to actually triggering an emotional response that makes you want to buy something.

The truth is ads use the same tactics you do to yourself. Your environment is filled with positive and negative triggers—the knick knacks on your desk; the rotten banana in the fruit basket; the unused running shoes—all of these things have a slight impact on your decision making on a daily basis.

What really matters is that you can control these triggers to a point. As Psychology Today points out:

[E]ven the slightest outside stimuli—such as a sound or a smell—can trigger changes in the firing rate of neurons in a way that changes the flow of information between different parts of the brain and alters one's perceptions.

With that in mind, let's start tracking and labeling your personal environmental triggers.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Tracking the Triggers in Your Environment

Since most triggers are entirely subconscious you have to make a mental effort to find where they're coming from. This means you have to dedicate time where you're mindful of your environment and your habits. The end goal is to remove as many of the negative triggers as possible (you can't get them all) and try to find your positive triggers so you can accent your environment with more of them.

Step 1: Track Your Triggers

The first step is to find, track, and think about your triggers. This is a lot harder than you'd think and it's not possible to get them all. Still, a little work now can make it so you can optimize your environment in the future.

Start by keeping basic notes of your habits, random (but useful) thoughts, and even odd emotions. Keep an eye out for: memories, ideas, habits, and tasks triggered by objects. Write them down in a notepad with as much information as you can. Include the following:

• Location
• Time
• Your Emotional State
• The Action Preceding it
• Result
• Any Additional Notes on the Environment (weather, smells, sounds, etc)

Don't worry about rationalizing any of this data right now. The first step is just collection. Chances are that more often than not you're not going to recognize a trigger, but if you track all the right information you'll start to form a bigger picture.

Step 2: Evaluate Your Notes and Figure out the Real Triggers

Triggers are not an exact science, and everyone has different triggers with different reactions. The trick now is to take a look at your data and try to find what triggered a reaction. If your notes are anything like mine, they're partly nonsense. You'll have seemingly worthless bits of information like:

• Location: Stairway
• Time: 8:15
• Emotional State: Anxious
• Preceding Action: Bathroom
• Result: Suddenly felt anxious
• Any Additional notes: None

If you didn't find a trigger at the time, return to the scene, take a look around, and see if you find something new. In my case, standing in my stairwell and actually paying attention revealed a framed picture that I forgot was there. After thinking about it I realized the picture was likely the cause of the anxiety.

Once you have an idea of what the triggers are it's time to decide if they really matter.

Step 3: Categorize and Grade the Triggers

You can't control the entire world. Instead, you can decide where to reduce the effect of certain negative triggers and then look at how to integrate more positive triggers with a simple 1-10 scale.

Grab your spreadsheet and categorize each trigger as actionable (the picture on the wall, the cookies on the table), or non-actionable (the bad weather, the morning commute). For the actionable tasks, rate them on a scale of 1-10, where 10 is a positive trigger and 1 is a negative trigger. The top and bottom numbers on the list are what you really care about. Say you notice your kitchen is filled with a bunch of triggers that bring out a lot of bad behaviors. That means you need to work on that area of the house. Let's take a look at how to take action on your results and optimize your space accordingly.

Optimize Your Environment with the Information You Gather

Now comes the fun part. It's time to get rid of all the triggers that create negative habits or emotions and fill up that space with the positives. You can't force ideas with objects, but you can prime your subliminal and give your willpower a break by creating a good environment. The end goal is to create an environment that reflects what really matters to you and get rid of the rest.

Revise Your Home and Workplace

Start by taking out your list and visiting the places where those negative triggers primed you for bad habits or memories. Throw everything in a box (or away, if need be). When you're done, you'll probably have a lot of empty space to fill.

Now take a look at your positive triggers. Ask yourself one question: are they located in places you go often or are they hidden away? If they're hidden away, you should move them to fill in those negative spaces.

For myself, a lot of this work was done in the kitchen. I moved certain types of pots that were hidden away to a pot rack so I remembered they existed. I picked up a fruit basket so I'd remember to eat my fruits. I completely rearranged my little pantry closet so I'd stop forgetting what was in there.

I took small steps like moving my running shoes by the door so I'd remember I like jogging. I also moved a couple instruments out of my little studio so I'd remember to play around every day. Photo by Alexander De Luca.

Revise Your Digital Workspaces

Of course, the real world is just part of your environment. Chances are you also spend a good amount of time staring at a screen. You can use these same ideas for your computer or phone as well. Our guide to a minimal desktop is a great place to start if you're always distracted by different programs or websites on your computer. Start with a minimal desktop and then add programs as you need them. If keeping Photoshop in your dock reminds you that you need to learn Photoshop, do so.

Additionally, I'm a huge fan of minimizing the amount of apps on your phone, a process we've shown you how to do before. Doing this systematically gets rid of all the useless junk on your phone that triggers bad behaviors and leaves just the apps that are useful to you.

Triggers are also a great way to manage your to-do lists. As Fast Company points out, it's a trick used by Getting Things Done author David Allen:

He advises people to avoid a single master to-do list; instead, he recommends a series of context-dependent lists (such as a "calls list," so when you phone a potential customer, you're also reminded to call your A/C repairman and your sister for her birthday). The lesson: If you have something you don't want to forget, don't scrunch up your brain and try really hard to retain it; just install an environmental trigger to do the remembering for you.

The idea is the same as the environmental approach: plant ideas in your mind by using lists and objects that trigger a reaction.

The last big subliminal trigger is ads online. You can use these to your advantage as well. Sure, you can easily block ads with Adblock Plus, but an even better solution is to replace those ads with a positive triggers. Adlesse and Overapps are both cross-platform extensions that allow you to replace ads with widgets. These widgets include art, famous quotes, or random facts.

By the end of all this you'll have a comfortable workspace or home that reflects your real goals. If all goes well, it's a place where your positive triggers—the things that keep you on track for goals—are easily accessible, and the bad ones—the triggers that keep you from those goals—are gone.

After doing this for a week myself it's astounding how many things I got rid of or moved around even though I never thought of certain things in my home as negative triggers. I took down pictures, moved others to new places where I would actually see them, and completely rearranged my kitchen. It's hard to say how long this will work, but I imagine a yearly review will keep things fresh and interesting.

Have some tips of your own? We'd love to hear them in the comments.