Several goals · if-then plans
How many goals fit in a week?
No study gives a magic number. What the research does show is that putting a few goals first helps, and that a plan that works for one goal can stop working when you make one for every goal at once.
A plan helps one goal
An if-then plan ties a goal to a moment: “If it’s 7 am on a weekday, then I go to the gym.” Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran gathered 94 independent tests of these plans and found a medium-to-large effect on reaching the goal. It’s one of the most reliable findings in the field.
A plan for every goal can backfire
Amy Dalton and Stephen Spiller asked what happens when people make if-then plans for several goals at once. The benefit didn’t carry over. Planning each goal made it plain how much the whole set asked for, and commitment dropped.
When the same set of goals was framed as manageable, the harm went away. The trouble wasn’t the number on its own. It was a week that looked impossible once it was all written down.
Putting a few first helps, and the rest don’t suffer
Mark Conner and colleagues ran a randomized trial with 1,802 people over eight weeks. People asked to put one or two health habits first did better on them than people asked to put none first, and two did better than one. The habits left off the list didn’t decline.
So a short list of priorities doesn’t mean a smaller life. It means a few things get the plans and the attention, and the rest carry on as they were.
On your chart
Goalaxi holds a course of three goals, and five makes a full chart. Something else you want can come aboard with a rechart, or wait as a wish until there’s room.
The job, the kids and a parent’s care go on the chart too, as obligations, so the week you plan for is the week you have. And a habit that moves several goals at once lets three goals share the same hours.
Sources
- Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006. Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119
- Dalton & Spiller, 2012. Too much of a good thing: The benefits of implementation intentions depend on the number of goals Journal of Consumer Research, 39(3), 600–614
- Conner, Wilding, Prestwich, Hutter, Hurling, van Harreveld, Abraham & Sheeran, 2022. Goal prioritization and behavior change: Evaluation of an intervention for multiple health behaviors Health Psychology, 41(5), 356–365