Seven Unfinished Goals, and the Research on Dropping Some of Them
Wrosch et al. (2003) linked dropping unattainable goals and taking up new ones to lower stress and more mastery. A three-bucket sort for your own list.
In this article6 sections
A note on a phone, invented for this piece, titled “this year”: learn Portuguese. Finish the half-marathon plan. Write chapter one. Launch the newsletter. Clear the garage. Get the certification. Save six months of expenses. Every line was typed with real intent, and each carries a different amount of dust.
Whether that list is evidence of weak character has a research answer, and it is closer to “no” than the grit literature makes it sound. In a 2003 paper in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Carsten Wrosch, Michael Scheier, Gregory Miller, Richard Schulz and Charles Carver reported that people who find it easy to abandon unattainable goals, and easy to take up new ones, tend to report lower stress and a stronger sense of mastery. On that reading, the trouble with the list is the number of lines that are already dead and still being carried.
What the 2003 studies measured
The thesis has a companion paper with a title that states it outright: Wrosch, Scheier, Carver and Schulz, “The importance of goal disengagement in adaptive self-regulation: when giving up is beneficial,” Self and Identity, volume 2, issue 1, 2003. The numbers come from the PSPB paper, “Adaptive Self-Regulation of Unattainable Goals: Goal Disengagement, Goal Reengagement, and Subjective Well-Being” (volume 29, pages 1494 to 1508), which I read in full.
It reports three studies: 115 undergraduates, 120 young and older adults, and 45 parents, some of whose children had cancer. Participants rated two tendencies. Disengagement meant how easily they could reduce effort and relinquish commitment when a goal could no longer be reached. Reengagement was measured with statements such as “I seek other meaningful goals” and “I start working on other new goals.”
Among the undergraduates, each tendency was independently related to lower perceived stress, fewer intrusive thoughts and higher self-mastery, and reengagement also predicted purpose in life. Together the two tendencies explained between 11% (perceived stress) and 23% (purpose in life) of the variance in the well-being measures. The worst scores, the highest stress and the lowest mastery, belonged to students who reported being unable to stop pursuing unattainable goals and who also reported not taking up new ones.
One interaction deserves attention. Reengagement mattered most for students who struggled to let go: among them it was strongly tied to higher mastery (β = .65) and lower stress (β = −.61). Among easy disengagers the links were much smaller or, for stress, nonsignificant. The authors read this as new goals compensating for the cost of clinging to old ones.
In the third study, disengagement was especially strongly related to fewer depressive symptoms among parents of children diagnosed with cancer, an extreme case of circumstances that leave some goals out of a person’s hands.
The same group followed up in 2007 (Wrosch, Miller, Scheier and de Pontet, PSPB, volume 33, pages 251 to 265). Their three studies used health problems, cortisol rhythms and sleep efficiency, the share of time in bed spent asleep as indicators. Ease of disengaging went with better self-reported health and more normative daily cortisol patterns.
One detail from the measurement matters for a long list. The disengagement items ask about two things at once, reducing effort and relinquishing commitment. A goal that has stopped receiving effort but still sits on the list with its commitment intact is, by that definition, only half released. That reading of the half-built list is my inference, since the study never looked at lists. It is at least consistent with the intrusive-thought result.
Grit research bets the other way
Persistence has the better-known evidence. Angela Duckworth, Christopher Peterson, Michael Matthews and Dennis Kelly (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2007) defined grit as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals” and tested it in samples that included adults with educational attainment data (N = 1,545 and N = 690), Ivy League undergraduates (N = 138), two classes of West Point cadets (N = 1,218 and N = 1,308) and National Spelling Bee competitors (N = 175). Grit accounted for an average of 4% of the variance in success outcomes, and it predicted them beyond IQ and conscientiousness.
The Wrosch paper does not dispute persistence. Its own opening says that staying persistent has been tied to well-being and good health, and it frames giving up as the other half of self-regulation. Duckworth’s 4% average is also a modest share, which leaves most of the variance in success outcomes to other things.
Each side carries a failure mode. Applied to a dead goal, the grit advice produces years of pursuing a fight that cannot be won. Applied to a live but difficult goal, the disengagement advice produces a drawer full of abandoned projects that were reachable.
The two literatures answer different questions
Grit studies follow people through hard goals that can be reached: a degree, a cadet program, a spelling contest. Wrosch’s work is about goals that have become unattainable because a window closed, a body changed, a person left or resources ran out. A person with seven half-built goals sits where the two collide, and the research cannot sort their list for them.
What the studies can support is narrower. Staying attached to a goal that cannot be reached is associated with distress, and a path to new goals is associated with relief. Neither says that a goal you are tired of is a goal you should drop.
Three limits apply to all of this. The studies were cross-sectional and the authors state that their findings do not allow any causal interpretation: people with high well-being may simply report disengaging and reengaging more easily. The tendencies were measured by self-report. And the authors raise a caution that bears directly on long lists, that at some point taking on new goals might stretch a person too thin, with the breakpoint unidentified.
The sorting method below is also mine. Wrosch’s papers measure how people respond to unattainable goals, and none of them hands anyone a triage procedure. What follows borrows their two processes, letting go and starting again, and turns them into a list exercise that nobody has tested.
Dead, asleep and live
A dead goal is one that your circumstances have made unreachable or that you no longer want, backed by a fact you could state to someone else. An asleep goal is wanted and reachable, with a reason it cannot move this season. A live goal is wanted, reachable, and has a first action you can name for this week.
A short rule keeps the sort from turning into mood: dead needs a fact, asleep needs a date, live needs an action. A bad month is not a fact. “The exam registration closed and the next sitting is in three years” is one.
The 2003 paper’s list of reasons a goal becomes unattainable is wider than it first sounds. It names biological and sociostructural limits, life events such as a divorce or job loss, and the plain fact that resources are limited, so that people “may disengage from leisure goals to secure the attainment of career or family goals.” That last route matters for a long list. A goal can be fully reachable in principle and still be dead because a bigger goal has first claim on the same evenings, and saying so is a trade-off you made, which differs from a failure you suffered.
| Bucket | Test question | Evidence you need | What to do with it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dead | Has something outside my control made this unreachable, or do I no longer want it? | A closed deadline, a changed constraint, or a clear loss of desire | Write a one-line release note and delete it from every list and reminder |
| Asleep | Do I still want it, and does a dated reason keep it from moving now? | A named obstacle and a review date | Park it on a dated page with zero weekly effort |
| Live | Can I name the first physical action I will take this week? | An action, a day and a place | Schedule it before anything else is added |
Some goals can sit in two buckets for different reasons, which is a sign that the goal is too large. “Finish the half-marathon plan” may be live as “run Saturday” while its race date is dead.
Applied to the invented note, the sort might go like this. Clear the garage is live, because a weekend and a trash pickup exist. Portuguese is asleep until a trip is booked. The certification is dead if the employer changed the requirement. The newsletter is dead if the reason for starting it was an idea of what a person like you does. The Wrosch data on intrusive thoughts suggest that a goal like that may cost more than a quiet line on a list implies.
How to run the sort in twenty minutes
- Copy every goal into one place, including the ones that only exist in your head. Seven or seventeen, it makes no difference to the method.
- Read each goal aloud with the test question from the table. Do the dead bucket first, since it is the one that needs a recorded reason.
- For each dead goal, write one sentence stating the fact or the lost desire. Keep these in a file you can see, so the release is recorded and not just felt.
- Give each asleep goal a review date and a condition for waking it.
- For each live goal, choose a first action, a day and a start time, and attach it to something that already happens.
- Start something new in the freed space only if a goal in the live bucket needs help. Wrosch’s reengagement finding is about a path to new goals when old ones close, and the stretched-too-thin caution is a reason not to refill the list the same afternoon.
The release note is the step people skip. Without it, the disengagement is the half-state described earlier: effort gone, commitment retained.
Tomorrow morning belongs to the live bucket
A live goal only exists in the hour it gets. The research implies a modest practical move: after the sort, take the one or two goals that earned live status, attach each to a start time, and make that start time hard to dodge. Dead goals deserve no alarm, and an asleep goal sets none until its review date.
DontSnooze fits this one job: set the alarm for the hour a live goal’s first action begins, and the friends in your group see whether you were up for it. Friends watch for free, and posting your own proof needs Pro; the sequence on the alarm side takes a minute to read. What it protects is the start of a goal you have already judged worth starting, which is a separate job from deciding whether the goal deserves a start.
The sort itself needs no app. It needs a pen, one sentence per dead goal, and a decision about which two lines on the note deserve a Saturday morning.
After a sort like this, the note on the phone is shorter than it was. Two lines carry times next to them, one line has a review date in January, and the other four have a sentence each in a file called “released,” which is the first record the list has ever had of something being finished with.