Is 'do your best' a goal? Six vague resolutions, rewritten
Specific, difficult goals beat 'do your best' in Locke and Latham's research. Six vague goals, from 'get fit' to 'wake up earlier', rewritten with a feedback loop.
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Picture a logging truck weighed at the mill gate. Fill it to the legal limit and the haul pays; leave it a third light and the same fuel and driver hours buy less timber. In a field study by Gary Latham and Jay Baldes, unionized truck drivers who were assigned a loading target raised their loads from 60 percent to 90 percent of the legal weight, saving the company $250,000 in nine months. That figure comes from Locke and Latham’s 2002 review in American Psychologist (volume 57, pages 705 to 717), which cites the original as Latham and Baldes, 1975, Journal of Applied Psychology.
So is “do your best” a goal? By that research, no. Across the studies Locke and Latham pooled, specific and difficult goals beat exhortations to do your best, with meta-analytic effect sizes between .42 and .80. Their explanation is plain: “best” has no outside reference point, so everyone defines it in whatever way leaves them comfortable.
What did the logging studies actually change?
Three things moved from the foreman’s head into the open: a number, a way of counting it, and a person who looked at the count. The drivers also began adjusting their trucks so they could estimate weight before reaching the scale, which is the paper’s example of people inventing methods once a target exists.
The 2002 review says goals work through four routes: they direct attention, raise effort, extend persistence, and prompt people to search for strategies. They also need two supports. One is feedback. As the authors put it, if the goal is cutting 30 trees in a day, “people have no way to tell if they are on target unless they know how many trees have been cut.” Goals plus feedback outperformed goals alone (Erez, 1977, among others). The other is commitment, meaning you actually care about hitting the number.
One scope note before the rewrites. Those studies were mostly assigned work goals, in jobs with a scale at the end. Whether they carry over to a January resolution is a reasonable inference, not a result.
How do you rewrite a vague goal?
Ask of each goal: what is the number, what is the date, and what will show me where I am this week? Here are six, rewritten. The targets are illustrations; swap in your own.
| Vague goal | Rewrite | Feedback loop |
|---|---|---|
| Get fit | Run 5 km in under 32 minutes by 15 December | Timed 5 km every second Saturday, logged in a notebook |
| Be more productive | Finish a first draft of the Q4 report by Friday 7 November, 90 minutes of phone-off work each weekday | Tick a calendar square only if the 90 minutes happened |
| Wake up earlier | Out of bed and on camera by 6:45 on weekdays for the next 4 weeks | Verification step: a short video at 6:45 that someone else can see, tallied each Sunday |
| Save money | Move 300 a month to a separate account on payday | Account balance checked on the 1st |
| Learn Spanish | Hold a 10-minute conversation with a tutor by 1 March | Tutor session booked weekly; vocabulary reviewed 15 minutes a day |
| Write a book | 500 words a day, 5 days a week, until 40,000 words exist | Running word count in a spreadsheet |
What changed in each row?
Not every rewrite is equally good, so some commentary.
“Get fit” and “learn Spanish” improved most, because the old versions had no way of failing. The new ones can be missed on a particular Saturday, which is the point.
“Be more productive” is the trickiest. Productive at what? The rewrite swaps a feeling for a deliverable and a dose of focused time. If you cannot name the deliverable, the goal is still vague, and no formatting rescues it.
“Save money” went from an aspiration to an automatic transfer. The feedback loop there is almost free, because the balance reports itself.
“Write a book” carries a trap: 40,000 words is a difficult goal, but “500 words a day” is a process target, and Locke and Latham found that for complex new tasks a performance target can backfire. The FAQ below covers that.
“Wake up earlier” is the one where self-reporting fails fastest. “I’ll get up at 6:45” is checkable only by the person least motivated to check it at 6:44. The rewrite adds a witness: proof that exists outside your head. That can be a text to a friend, a flatmate who bangs on the door, or an alarm app like DontSnooze that asks for a short video and sends a random photo from your camera roll to your friends if you skip it. If you have no current wake time to anchor to, take the median of your last seven mornings and start there.
Why does the feedback column matter more than the target?
The target gets the attention, but the third column does the steering. A number without a check is a wish with decimals. Latham’s loggers could see the scale. Your gym goal needs the equivalent: something that hands you the same figure every time, whether you feel like looking or not.
Proof also shades into the question of who sees it. People stake all kinds of targets on video checks, and eight of them that have nothing to do with mornings show how ordinary the numbers can be. For a deeper look at why a self-reported log is the weakest version of the loop, see the proof hierarchy.
Will precise goals make life duller?
Possibly, if every goal is a quota. A fair objection is that numbers drain the play out of things. Latham’s own phrase, reported by the Association for Psychological Science, was that goals “turned an otherwise meaningless task into a game.” If the rewrite feels like a chore, shrink the scope instead of dropping the number, and keep one slot in the week for something with no target at all. Making life more exciting without overhauling it usually means adding a little stakes and an audience, which is the same ingredient set.
Pick the vaguest goal you currently hold. Give it a number, a date and a place where the count will show up on a Sunday evening. Then see whether you still want it.
Frequently asked questions
Can a goal be too hard?
Yes, but later than most people expect. In Locke and Latham’s review, performance rose in a straight line with goal difficulty and flattened or fell only when people hit the limit of their ability or stopped being committed to the goal. A goal you have quietly given up on is the usual failure, not one that is merely ambitious.
Does it matter who sets the goal?
Less than you would guess. Latham and Erez found that an assigned goal worked as well as one set together with the person, provided a reason was given; a terse ‘do this’ with no explanation produced lower performance. If you set your own goal, write the reason next to it.
What if I am learning something brand new?
Set a learning goal instead of a performance goal. On a complex task, Kanfer and Ackerman’s air traffic controller simulation found that a performance target got in the way of learning the job, while Winters and Latham (1996) showed a specific learning goal, such as discovering a set number of strategies, beat ‘do your best’ on the same kind of task.