Forget about setting goals? Clear and Locke-Latham, side by side

“The score takes care of itself.” Clear attributes the line to Bill Walsh, the three-time Super Bowl winner, and builds on it in the first chapter of Atomic Habits (2018): “If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.” Readers have quoted the second sentence on mugs, in planners and in a good many January resolutions.

So should you set goals or not? The sentence reads as a verdict, but the essay it comes from gives a more careful answer two lines later: “Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.” Locke and Latham’s research says something compatible. Precise, hard goals produce better performance than “do your best,” as long as people stay committed and can see how they are doing. Taken together, a goal chooses where you point, a fixed routine gets you moving each day, and feedback plus witnesses keep you honest about the gap.

What does Clear argue against?

His complaint is about a confusion of end-states with process. He lists four problems with a goals-first mindset. The first is survivorship bias: “Winners and losers have the same goals,” so the goal cannot be what separated them. The second: “Achieving a goal is only a momentary change.” His example is a messy room. Tidy it once, keep the pack-rat habits that made the mess, and the clutter returns.

Both points are sound, and neither says that a number and a date are useless. They say that wanting an outcome does not produce it, and that reaching an outcome once does not hold it in place. A reader who hears “forget goals” and stops writing down any target has gone further than the essay does.

What do Locke and Latham measure?

Edwin Locke and Gary Latham’s 2002 review, “Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey” (American Psychologist, 57, 705-717), pools decades of experiments. In the abstract’s terms, it covers the core findings, how goals operate, and what moderates their effects. The authors say their main interest was “performance on organizational or work-related tasks.” The headline result is that precise, hard goals beat “do your best” (the review reports effect sizes of .42 to .80), and three moderators decide how much of that survives contact with real life:

• Commitment. The review says it is “most important and relevant when goals are difficult,” and notes that making a public commitment raises it, “presumably because it makes one’s actions a matter of integrity in one’s own eyes and in those of others.”
• Feedback. The combination of goals plus feedback is more effective than goals alone.
• Task complexity. The goal advantage is smaller on complex tasks than on simple ones, because people have to discover a good strategy first.

For a closer look at the “do your best” half of this research, the piece on rewriting vague resolutions walks through the evidence. This post is about where it meets Clear.

Where do the two disagree?

Less than the slogans imply. Clear is addressing a person who wants a lasting change in how they live. Locke and Latham’s experiments mostly track output on a defined task over a defined window: loads hauled, trees cut, items sorted. Their review does not study what happens to a runner after the race. Clear’s yo-yo claim has no counterpart there, and his survivorship argument is a point of logic, not an experiment.

Real disagreement is narrow. If Clear were read literally, “no goals” would predict that a person with a good routine and no target does as well as one with both. The goal-setting data say a target adds performance on top of effort. Clear’s own text concedes the direction-setting role, so the quarrel is over emphasis, and the emphasis matters because of what people do with it.

What does the combination look like on a weekday morning?

Take wake time, the one task in this literature that is simple, daily and checkable. A goal alone, “get up earlier,” fails the Locke-Latham test: no number, no way to tell. A routine alone, “alarm across the room,” fails Clear’s own test, since nothing says which direction the routine points. The pair that works is a goal with a number (out of bed by 6:45 on weekdays, four weeks running) and a start that no longer needs deciding. Fixed times do that job in sleep medicine, and three jobs the fixed wake time does in CBT-I shows why the morning is the end of the night that gets pinned. If 6:45 is a guess, pick the median of your last seven mornings first.

That leaves the two moderators Clear’s essay mentions least. Feedback is the count: seven weekday squares, how many filled. Commitment is harder, and the review’s public-commitment finding points at it. For tomorrow morning, this is where a tool like DontSnooze earns its place: you record a short video when the alarm goes, a friend can see whether it happened, and the Sunday tally comes from something other than your memory of the week.

What are the limits of putting these together?

The synthesis is an inference. Locke and Latham did not test wake times, and Clear did not test goals against routines. Work-task experiments may transfer weakly to private habits. A fixed 6:45 also ignores chronotype, so for a person whose body clock runs late the “difficult” part may be a sleep problem, not a motivation one. And the target should be revisited once met; Clear’s yo-yo warning applies to a four-week goal as much as a marathon.

Next Sunday, count the filled squares, then pick the next number before the old one expires.

A related wrinkle on how to read your own progress partway through is in a field study comparing “half done” with “half to go” appeals, where the better framing depended on how committed the reader already was.