The Behavior Architecture 8-Day Cohort and Scholarship Application are now open. Next cohort begins Thursday, May 14.
👋 Hey, Martin Grunburg (mg) here, author of the Habit Factor® trilogy, creator of the Unified Behavior Model™ (UBM), and host of the Habits 2 Goals podcast — possibly the longest-running habits, goals, and performance podcast. For 20+ years, I’ve researched, trained, and coached with one objective: to make behavior change, habits, and goals easier to understand, implement, and teach. So I could be a more effective teacher, trainer, and coach.
That prolonged, concentrated effort yielded (and I’m supposed to say, “appears to be”) the world’s first elemental, unified, goal-directed behavioral model. Ten months post, pre-print, “appears to be” can be removed. Importantly, the Unified Behavior Model™ (UBM) is falsifiable, which means it is testable.
The best part— the ONLY reason YOU ought to care… is that UBM provides the highest-goal probabilistic outcome of ANY goal framework (wait for it), EVER. Of course, that statement is independently verifiable, so please DO NOT take my word for it — keep reading, listening, and TEST for yourself.
🎓 Next cohort: Behavior Architecture on Maven → | 5/14/26 - 5/21/26
🎙️ Habits 2 Goals Podcast 📄 Free habit tracking template
Read time: 4 minutes
The 16 Year Habit-Tracking Reversal
True story: The reason habit tracking works is the very reason the experts said it did not; it’s separate!
Start here
Even before their papers were published, the act of habit-tracking was ridiculed by behavioral scientists as ineffective, creating dependency, and a poor substitute for “real” behavior change.
Then, formal academic research was published to solidify that position. Habit-tracking was not a way to cultivate habits.
Last year, the field finally reversed course— it appears for good.
This is where the story gets… G to the double O, D! GOOD!
The most important thing to understand is that this isn’t an interesting footnote in behavioral science. It’s a revealing case study about how academics almost always dismiss— only to ‘discover’ — what practitioners already knew.
Shape-shifting research
“Liars figure, and figures lie.” ~Bobby G.
Here’s how the academic position evolved — and importantly, notice how the expert argument shape-shifted.
Phase 1 (2014–2017): Researchers warned that tracking apps drove repetition but failed to build “real” habits. One study reported that measurement reduced enjoyment—the collective verdict: tracking might drive repetition, but it doesn’t produce lasting behavior change.
Phase 2 (2016–2020): As millions of users experienced real results, the critique quietly shifted. The new position: tracking may drive repetition, but it creates dependency — fragility — rather than “real” habit. That dependence is “separate.”
Phase 3 (2022–Present): A 2024 systematic review reported a medium-to-large effect size for habit interventions. Psychology Today (December 2025) declared self-monitoring “one of the most replicated findings in behavioral science.”
The key takeaway: the same method formally dismissed in 2015 became canonical by 2025. Same method. Completely reversed verdict.
Someone Thought Differently
Not coincidentally, predating all of these academic critiques by a few years, an app called The Habit Factor® hit the iTunes store in June of 2009.
The Habit Factor® was the first habits-to-goals tracking app.
The Habit Factor® taught its users to follow its P.A.R.R. methodology, a way to create and align habits to achieve goals more effectively and efficiently. (Listen to Kara Tsuboi, CNET reporter (video below, 2013) —the corresponding book with the same name was published in 2010.
At the time, the dominant cultural framing of “habit” was predominantly negative: smoking, drinking, and nail-biting. And SMART Goals were the rage. Even coaches openly advised clients to avoid habits in pursuit of goals.
Key point: The Habit Factor® inverted the frame.
SMART goals left users with a never-ending to-do list. The Habit Factor® promoted the basic idea that by following a concise habit list—a few core habits, aligned with one’s most important goals, they’d arrive at their goals more quickly.
The market responded — habit trackers EXPLODED!!
Behavioral Sciences’ first pivot: Okay, maybe tracking works, but it’s separate.
The reason this is shocking is that BEHAVIOR ITSELF IS SEPARATE.
To behave means one can choose how to act: I can sit on the couch and eat potato chips or go for a run. I can crush beers or drink water. Behavior is separate, and it’s owned, meaning that however a person behaves, they are responsible.
Then, the experts’ critique shifted again— an accountability tool creates dependency!
What!? Seriously!?
Let’s examine this: that would be like saying a coach, sheet music, or training wheels for a bicycle create a dependency and are therefore not useful.
Training wheels are separate; they are a tool, and they are needed until (wait for it), they are not.
Behavioral tracking is separate (just like behavior), and it’s a tool. What scientist would suggest that you shouldn’t use a scale because it’s separate from weight loss?
Their collective position, sadly, solidifies their misguided understandings of behavior— not just tracking of behavior.
Oyy.
Can it get worse?
Here’s the part that’s difficult to swallow.
The field’s own most-cited habit study — Lally et al. (2010), the source of the widely-cited 66-day rule for habit formation — instructed participants to choose a behavior, perform it daily, record whether they carried it out, and repeat over 84 days.
The same researchers questioning the efficacy of habit-tracking were using their own habit-tracking tool to produce seminal research about how long it takes habits to form.
Oyy! (#2)
Do you want to wait another 16 years?
On July 8, 2025 — almost exactly sixteen years after launching The Habit Factor® — the Unified Behavior Model™ (UBM) was published to address the field’s long-standing demand— a literal imperative—for an elemental framework, a map to share with the people.
Their cry has been for a common framework based upon first principles. To present a “hard” testable scientific framework that could be challenged/falsified, something that would move the field away from its own, self-described “soft” critiques.
NOT A THERAPY. A TESTABLE, UNIFIED (ORGANIZING) FRAMEWORK.
Producing such a model would add immediate coherence and produce a common ontology to end a century-plus of “Competing and conflicting knowledge and theories” plaguing psychology in particular.
UBM PUTS BASIC BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE IN THE HANDS OF THE PEOPLE.
Which, to be clear, is the entire point of psychology and behavioral science.
From “Crises and ‘Incoherent mess’” To perfect organization and clarity. Total Coherence.
UBM is a falsifiable, four-element framework demonstrating that all human behavior emerges from four — and only four — elemental domains: Stories/Cognition, Emotions/Feelings, Behaviors/Habits/Skills, and Environment.
Go Deeper…
The most direct path to understanding your own Behavior Echo-System — and applying P.A.R.R. within behavioral science’s first, complete behavioral framework — is Behavior Architecture on Maven.
🌐 UnifiedBehaviorModel.com — free white paper 📚 The trilogy: The Habit Factor® · The Pressure Paradox™ · EVERYTHING 🎙️ Habits 2 Goals Podcast 📄 Free habit tracking template
