Guide · 5 min read
Create Your First Goal in ProtoHabit
A step-by-step walk through the goal builder: focus areas, curated goals, the five-question tune-up, and curating your habit plan before you start.
Open the Goals tab and pick a focus area
Choose Health & Fitness, Finance, Personal Growth, or Work & Career. Or tap "Create your own" — "Define a custom goal and habits" — if you'd rather build from scratch.
Choose a curated goal
Each focus area lists real goals: Lose weight, Save more money, Smart investment, Pay off debt, Stop impulse shopping, Build daily routine, Learn new skill set. Pick the one that matches what you actually want.
Answer the short questions honestly
About five quick questions — a baseline like your activity level or savings target, your timeline, your biggest barriers, and how consistent you've been. Your answers tune the plan, so don't answer for the person you wish you were.
Curate the habit plan
You'll see "Curate the habits for '<Goal>'. Add or remove anything — you can change this later." Cut what doesn't fit. Three habits you'll do beat seven you won't.
Tap "Start this Goal"
Your goal lands on Home under MY GOALS with its habits inside. Each habit also shows up in your Schedule tab automatically.
Log something today
Open the goal, pick the easiest habit, and tap "Log Activity". A goal with one logged activity is real. A goal with zero is a wish.
The goal builder is the front door of ProtoHabit. It turns “I should save more” into a named goal with concrete habits attached — and it takes about two minutes. Here’s how to get the most out of it.
Curated or custom — both are fine
The curated goals exist because most goals aren’t unique. Lose weight, Pay off debt, Build daily routine — these come with sensible starter habits, and the short questions adjust them to your baseline and timeline. If your goal is genuinely yours alone — training for a specific race, writing a novel — “Create your own” lets you define a custom goal and pick habits yourself, searching a catalog of 90+ or typing your own.
Either way, you end up in the same place: a plan you can edit before committing, and a goal you can reshape any time after. The 3-dot menu on a goal handles Rename Goal, Change Icon, Add to Schedule, and more.
The questions aren’t a quiz you can fail
The builder asks about your current activity level or savings target, how long you’re giving yourself, what tends to get in your way, and how consistent you’ve been lately. There are no wrong answers — but there are unhelpful ones. Say you’ll run daily when you haven’t run in a year, and you get a plan built for someone else. Answer honestly and the plan starts where you actually are.
Trim before you start
The curation screen is where first goals live or die. The temptation is to keep everything — more habits feels like more commitment. Resist it. Keep the two or three habits you can picture doing this week; delete the rest. You can add habits any time from the “MY HABITS +” button, and a habit only counts toward your free 10 once it has a logged activity — so there’s no penalty for starting small.
Once the goal is live, your next moves are organizing it with sub-goals as it grows, and putting habits on your calendar so they show up on the right days.
Put it into practice
Open ProtoHabit and try it — this guide will still be here.