For most of us, life is just too busy. It is hard to do everything you want and need
to do in a day. If you’re lucky, then
your failures are not that systematic.
One day, you get to the gym, but don’t get to relax with a book. Another day, you get the shopping done, but
don’t clean up the kitchen. Those kinds
of goal failures are fine. They just
reflect that you have to make choices about what you are going to accomplish.
The real problem comes when your goal failures are systematic. If you consistently fail to go to the gym,
then you don’t accomplish the long-term goal of staying in shape.
Because everyone has some set of goals that they find
difficult to achieve, there has been a lot of research focusing on how to get better
at accomplishing the most difficult goals.
One of the most effective techniques for helping you to achieve your
goals is the implementation intention,
which emerged out of research by Peter Gollwitzer and his colleagues.
An implementation intention is a specific plan to achieve a
goal. The idea is that many of your
goals are defined too abstractly to be able to carry them out. “Going to the gym,” for example, is a very
general statement. When you create an
implementation intention, though, you create specific steps to achieve the goal
and to avoid obstacles. You might say
that you are going to go to the gym on Tuesdays and Fridays at 4pm. You think through specific obstacles like
what you will do if a meeting comes up during your gym time or if you are just
feeling too tired to go. These
implementation intentions are effective, because they help you to recognize
when and where you will take actions that allow you to succeed.
An interesting paper from 2012 by Amy Dalton and Stephen
Spiller in the Journal of Consumer
Research suggests that there are limits to the effectiveness of
implementation intentions. In
particular, implementation intentions get less effective as the number of goals
you are trying to achieve goes up.
In one study, the authors asked people to commit to either
one new goal (like reading a book for pleasure, calling a friend, or eating a
healthy meal each day) or six new goals.
They either committed themselves to the goal, or they formed a specific
implementation intention. Then, for five
days, the researchers asked people which goals they fulfilled. They also asked people for their commitment
to the goals. At the end, they asked people how difficult they thought it was
to achieve these goals.
When people were focused on one goal, the implementation
intention helped people to achieve their goal.
They were much more likely to pursue the goal when they formed an
implementation intention than when they just committed to the goal. When they were focused on six goals, though,
they actually were slightly less likely to achieve their goals when they formed
an implementation intention than when they did not.
This finding reflected that when there was only one goal,
people were more committed to that goal and thought it would be less difficult
to achieve the goal when they formed an implementation intention than when they
did not. When there were six goals,
though, the implementation intention made people feel that satisfying the goals
would be difficult to achieve, and so the plans actually decreased people’s commitment to the goals.
The main message of this work is that you have to be careful
not to overwhelm yourself with the details when working toward a difficult
goal. Implementation intentions have
both a positive and a negative part. On
the positive side, they help you to figure out exactly how to add goal-related
activities to your life. On the negative
side, they can also make it clear how difficult it is to achieve the goal.
If you find yourself overwhelmed by the details, then try to
scale back your expectations. Even small
steps toward a goal are better than no steps at all. For example, if you cannot get to the gym
every day, try to get there at least once a week. After you add these new behaviors to your
routines, you may find ways to increase your commitment to that goal later.
