How to Audit Six Goals for Conflict, Using Emmons and King (1988)
Goal conflict predicts worse well-being (Emmons and King, 1988; Riediger and Freund, 2004). A worked six-goal collision matrix shows which one to cut.
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Goals that fight each other cost more than the hours they share. In Emmons and King’s 1988 studies, students who rated their own personal strivings as more in conflict reported more negative affect, more depression and more psychosomatic complaints, and those conflict ratings still predicted complaints a year later. Goal conflict is the degree to which pursuing one of your goals makes another harder to pursue, and it can be measured, which means a person with six goals can audit them in about ten minutes.
What did Emmons and King find in 1988?
Robert Emmons and Laura King published “Conflict among personal strivings: Immediate and long-term implications for psychological and physical well-being” in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (volume 54, issue 6, pages 1040-1048). I read the abstract, not the full text, so the details below stop where the abstract stops.
In two studies, 88 undergraduates listed 15 of their personal strivings and rated two things: how much conflict they experienced between the strivings, and how much ambivalence they felt about each one. Diaries and experience sampling then tracked positive and negative affect and physical symptoms. Conflict and ambivalence went with higher negative affect, depression, neuroticism and psychosomatic complaints. Conflict alone was also linked to health center visits and illnesses over the past year. At a one-year follow-up the ratings were stable, and they predicted psychosomatic complaints over time.
A third study sampled students’ thoughts and activities at random moments over three weeks. People were less likely to act on conflicted and ambivalent strivings and spent more time thinking about them. That last result is the one worth carrying into a schedule: a goal that collides with another does not go quiet. It stays in your head while it stays out of your day.
Did later work confirm it?
Riediger and Freund (2004, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30(12), 1511-1523) ran three studies using questionnaires, diaries and behavioral records. Their abstract reports that interference among goals, which they trace to resource constraints and incompatible goal-attainment strategies, was negatively associated with both trait and state well-being. Facilitation among goals, which arises when one goal is a means to another or the two share strategies, was positively associated with involvement in goal pursuit. They also argue that interference and facilitation are distinct characteristics rather than opposites. A pair of goals can score on both.
Two of their causes of interference are exactly what a calendar audit can see. Resource constraints means the same hours, money or energy are promised twice. Incompatible strategies means the way you would pursue one goal rules out the way you would pursue the other.
What does the evidence not show?
Both papers are correlational, and both rely on people rating their own goals. Someone who feels bad may rate everything as more conflicted, so the arrow could partly run backward. The one-year prediction of complaints makes that less likely without removing it. Emmons and King’s samples were undergraduates, and the abstracts I read give no effect sizes or per-study sample sizes beyond the 88. Neither paper says that cutting a goal improves anything. Cutting is my inference from the pattern, and the matrix below is my construction, not a published instrument. If you want the neighboring result on moment-to-moment desire conflict, Hofmann’s beeper study is the one to read.
How do you run a goal-conflict audit?
Write six goals. For each of the 15 pairs, ask whether the pair collides on hours, energy or method, helps (one makes the other easier), or is neutral. Here is a worked example for a person who has written down these six:
- Wake at 5:00 every day
- Sleep 8 hours
- See friends three evenings a week
- Study two hours a day
- Gym four times a week
- Side project, one hour a day
A day-job schedule makes the arithmetic short. Wake at 5:00 and sleep 8 hours and the bedtime is 9:00 p.m. That is one decision made by two goals, and it lands on the one thing evenings are for.
| Pair | Wake 5:00 | Sleep 8h | Friends | Study | Gym |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sleep 8h | neutral (sets 9 p.m. bed) | ||||
| Friends | COLLIDE | COLLIDE | |||
| Study | HELPS (if done at 5) | COLLIDE | COLLIDE | ||
| Gym | HELPS (if done at 5) | neutral | HELPS (train together) | neutral | |
| Side project | neutral | COLLIDE | neutral | COLLIDE | neutral |
Count the cells. Six collide, three help, six are neutral. Now count collisions per goal: friends 3, sleep 3, study 3, side project 2, wake time 1, gym 0.
What should you cut?
The count alone does not decide, and I would not cut sleep on it. A rule I would use: first, look for a goal whose collisions are with goals you value more. The side project collides with sleep and with study, because all three want the same quiet hour. Second, look for a goal whose collisions come from one parameter you chose, not from the goal itself. Friends collide with the 5:00 wake time and the 9 p.m. bedtime, but three friend evenings a week fit if you wake at 6:30 and are in bed by 10:30. The collision lives in the number 5.
So the audit points at two moves, in this order. Shrink the side project to weekends or put it on hold, which removes two collisions at once. (The much-repeated advice to drop most of your goals, the Buffett 25/5 story, is worth checking against its sourcing before you lean on it.) Then move the wake time to 6:30, which removes the friends-versus-wake and friends-versus-sleep collisions and keeps the two morning “helps”, since gym and study can still happen first thing at 6:30. Six collisions drop to two, both involving study, which is the next goal to look at. Whether you take the 6:30 option depends on whether 5:00 is a goal you hold for itself or one you adopted because it sounded disciplined, and the audit cannot tell you that. For a wider look at what early wake times do and do not buy, the wake-time evidence on five-a.m. starts is a fair counterweight.
If you do keep a wake time, pick it from what you actually do. The method in picking a wake time from your last seven mornings starts with the median of when you really got up, not the hour you wish you did.
Why is a single wake time the best place to start?
Because it is the goal other goals are scheduled around. Sleep length, bedtime, evening plans and the gym session all depend on it, so one fuzzy wake time can create several collisions and one firm wake time can settle them. If you need the wake-up itself enforced, DontSnooze asks for a 30-second video of you up and sends a random camera-roll photo to friends if you miss, which suits a wake time you have already chosen with the audit.
The same sequence works for any six goals. Ten minutes with the pairs, one cut, one re-score in two weeks.