Several goals · multifinality
One habit can move several goals.
When one habit serves more than one goal, the same hour counts twice. Goal systems research has a name for it, multifinality, and it matters most when your week is already full.
Goals and habits form a network
Arie Kruglanski and colleagues describe goals as a system: each goal connects to the means of reaching it, and the links run many to many. A goal with several means has more than one route in, which they call equifinality. A means that serves several goals has multifinality.
Morning gym is multifinal when it moves Get stronger and Sleep better at once. Lose it in a busy week and two goals stall, which is why it’s the habit to protect.
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With several goals in play, people look for double duty
Catalina Köpetz and colleagues ran five experiments on what happens when more than one goal is active at once. The means people found acceptable narrowed to the ones that served every active goal, or at least harmed none of them.
The effect depended on a shared route being possible, and it weakened when one goal mattered far more than the others. People reach for double duty when it’s on offer, so it helps to be able to see it.
Goals that help each other get more effort
Michaela Riediger and Alexandra Freund studied how people’s own goals affect each other, across three studies. Goals that helped each other went with more involvement in pursuing them. Goals that got in each other’s way went with lower well-being.
Their studies measured these at the same time, so they show what goes together rather than what causes what. Still, the pattern is plain: a set of goals that pulls in one direction is easier to live with than a set that pulls apart.
On your chart
Goalaxi draws each goal as a planet and each habit as a satellite on wires, one wire for every goal it moves, so a habit carrying two goals is plain to see. The Does the most lens ranks habits by how much they carry.
A habit that pulls against another goal hangs on a spring instead, like Write late at night against Sleep better. And a habit can ride along with an obligation: Walk to Mom’s looks after Mom’s care and moves Get stronger in the same hour.
Sources
- Kruglanski, Shah, Fishbach, Friedman, Chun & Sleeth-Keppler, 2002. A theory of goal systems Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 34, 331–378
- Köpetz, Faber, Fishbach & Kruglanski, 2011. The multifinality constraints effect: How goal multiplicity narrows the means set to a focal end Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(5), 810–826
- Riediger & Freund, 2004. Interference and facilitation among personal goals: Differential associations with subjective well-being and persistent goal pursuit Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30(12), 1511–1523