Guide · 6 min read
Organize Habits with Goals & Sub-Goals
Nest sub-goals inside goals to structure big projects — a Lose Weight and a Save more money walkthrough, plus how the Breakdown card shows where your effort went.
Understand the structure
A goal holds habits and sub-goals, and sub-goals nest as deep as you need — Lose Weight → Training → Run. Home and every goal page show the same two sections: MY GOALS and MY HABITS.
Split a fitness goal into Training and Nutrition
Inside Lose Weight, create two sub-goals: Training and Nutrition. Put Run (km) and a strength habit under Training; put Drink Water (glasses) and a meal-logging habit under Nutrition.
Split a money goal into Spending and Investing
Inside Save more money, create Spending and Investing. Track expenses ($) and a no-impulse-buys habit go under Spending; a weekly contribution habit goes under Investing.
Move habits where they belong
Use a habit's 3-dot menu — "Move to Group" or "Change Group" — to file loose habits into the right sub-goal. The same menu handles Rename, Hide, and Delete.
Expand the Breakdown card
At the top of every goal page sits a collapsed Breakdown card with a subtitle like "5 habits · 2 shared attributes". Expand it for the attribute total, a Today / Week / Month / Total strip, and a stacked bar with one segment per habit.
Ask the bar where your effort went
The stacked bar's % legend shows each habit's share of the goal's activity — and it rolls up sub-goals too. If Training is 80% of Lose Weight and Nutrition is 20%, you know exactly what to fix.
A flat list of habits works until it doesn’t. Around six or seven habits, “Run, Drink Water, Track expenses, Stretch, Read…” stops telling you anything about what you’re actually building. Sub-goals give the list a shape — and the Breakdown card turns that shape into numbers.
Two worked examples
Lose Weight splits naturally into Training and Nutrition. Training holds Run (logged in km) and maybe a rep-based strength habit. Nutrition holds Drink Water (glasses) and whatever eating habit you’re working on. Now the goal page reads like a plan instead of a pile, and tapping into Training shows just that slice of your effort.
Save more money splits into Spending and Investing. Spending holds Track expenses (logged in $) and Stop impulse shopping. Investing holds a recurring contribution habit. Same structure, completely different domain — the nesting model doesn’t care what you’re building.
You don’t have to restructure on day one. Start flat, and when a goal gets crowded, create sub-goals and use “Move to Group” from each habit’s 3-dot menu to file things away. Nothing about your history changes when a habit moves.
Where did my effort go?
This is the question the Breakdown card answers. Expand it on the Lose Weight page and you get a stacked bar — one segment per habit, with a % legend — across Today, Week, Month, or Total. Because it rolls up sub-goals, you see the whole goal at once: maybe Run is 60% of everything you’ve logged, Drink Water 30%, and the strength habit a lonely 10%.
That’s not a judgment; it’s a map. On Save more money, a bar dominated by Track expenses tells you you’re great at watching money and not yet moving it — time to give the Investing sub-goal some love. Chips below the bar surface every attribute shared by two or more habits, so cross-habit totals like minutes or dollars get their own line.
Keep the structure honest
Two levels is plenty for most goals. Go deeper only when a sub-goal itself gets crowded — Lose Weight → Training → Run is the ceiling most people need. And prune: the Hide option on the 3-dot menu is there for habits that earned a rest without deserving deletion.
When your structure is set, reading your insights shows what each individual habit is doing over time.
Put it into practice
Open ProtoHabit and try it — this guide will still be here.