How to Achieve Your Goals: What Ten Tactics Add Once You Leave the Lab
How to achieve your goals: ten popular tactics with the effect sizes reported in lab and field studies, why the field numbers shrink, and a 7-day plan.
In this article6 sections
The tactics people recommend for achieving a goal have published effect sizes, and the same tactic often looks several times weaker once it is tested on real behavior. If-then plans, pooled across 94 mostly laboratory tests, show d = 0.65 on goal attainment. The same kind of plan added to a flu-shot reminder showed d = 0.09, and added to a colonoscopy reminder, d = 0.04. This post lays out ten tactics with the numbers their studies reported, explains the shrinkage, and ends with a seven-day plan that uses the cheapest ones first.
Late October is a decent time to run it. Most New Year’s goals meet their first real obstacle by February, and a rehearsal in autumn lets you meet that obstacle early.
The shrinkage, as arithmetic
Take the planning numbers as a worked case. Dividing the field results by the pooled one (my arithmetic, using figures reported in the review below): 0.09 divided by 0.65 is about 14 percent, and 0.04 divided by 0.65 is about 6 percent. The pooled figure comes from Gollwitzer and Sheeran’s 2006 meta-analysis, where most studies used laboratory tasks. The field figures come from Milkman and colleagues’ 2011 and 2013 studies of mailed reminders, where the target was a single appointment.
A second, blunter check comes from intentions themselves. Thomas Webb and Paschal Sheeran’s 2006 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin kept only experiments where people were randomly assigned to something that raised their intentions. A medium-to-large change in intention (d = 0.66) led to a small-to-medium change in behavior (d = 0.36), so behavior moved about 55 percent as far. I read the abstract and the publisher’s record for that paper, not the full text. Treat the ratio as a rough guide, since the abstract does not say how it varies by goal.
Neither ratio says the tactics do not work. Both say that a number from a paper about a laboratory task is an upper estimate for your Tuesday.
What each tactic adds, in the units the studies used
Angela Duckworth, Katherine Milkman and David Laibson published a long review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest in 2018 (issue dated 2019) that lists effect sizes for most of the tactics people recommend for goals. I read the sections on situational and cognitive strategies. The table below borrows its figures, adds Harkin and colleagues’ 2016 monitoring meta-analysis, and keeps each study’s own units, so the rows cannot be ranked against one another.
| Tactic | Reported effect | Source | Caveat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Raise the intention | d = 0.66 on intention, d = 0.36 on behavior | Webb & Sheeran 2006 | Abstract only; 47 randomized tests |
| Set a specific, hard goal | d = 0.34 on behavior change | Epton, Currie & Armitage 2017, as cited in the 2018 review | Larger for challenging, public and group goals |
| Prompt yourself to monitor progress | d+ = 0.40 on goal attainment | Harkin et al. 2016 (see the monitoring meta-analysis) | Mostly health goals |
| If-then plans, pooled | d = 0.65 | Gollwitzer & Sheeran 2006 | Majority were laboratory tasks |
| If-then plan in a field mailing | Flu shots up 4 percentage points; colonoscopy d = 0.04 | Milkman et al. 2011, 2013 | One-time behaviors |
| Planning prompts for gym attendance | No effect over the next two weeks | Carrera et al. 2018 | One large field experiment |
| Mental contrasting | d = 0.87 on self-reported activity at 7 months | Sheeran et al. 2013 | Self-report |
| Remove temptations from sight | ds = .56 to .63 on study goals the following week | Duckworth, White et al. 2016 | Self-report, short follow-up |
| Money forfeited if you skip the gym | Gym visits up 25% | Royer, Stehr & Sydnor 2015 | Employees offered the option |
| Money forfeited if you fail a nicotine test | 3 percentage points more passed | Giné, Karlan & Zinman 2010 | Smokers offered the account, compared with those not offered |
Two patterns show up when you read down the right-hand column. The large effects mostly come from laboratory tasks or self-reports, and the field numbers on real behavior are small: a 4-point lift on a flu shot, a 3-point lift on a nicotine test. And the tactics that do best in the field change what is physically or financially true when the moment arrives, such as a forfeit, a calendar slot or an object out of sight, rather than what you tell yourself beforehand.
The 2018 review adds a warning that applies to every row. It cites a synthesis of 62 meta-analyses of health-behavior interventions (Johnson, Scott-Sheldon and Carey, 2010) in which the average effect was d = 0.26 when every study had been published in a journal and 0.01 when only 45 percent had. Published tactics look better than the full record would.
Why the numbers argue for smaller periods
A weekly target is one of the cheapest edits available. In the review’s account of Bandura and Simon’s 1977 dieting study, one group of dieters was given weekly food limits and another was given limits for each of four periods of the day. Most dieters in the weekly condition spontaneously invented daily limits, and the ones who did not lost no weight. The group assigned the smaller periods cut intake and lost more than a pound a week. A second study the review mentions, Bandura and Schunk’s 1981 math training for children, found that children told to finish one module per session beat children told to finish seven modules by the last session, by about 40 percent on a posttest, although the review says it is unclear whether that was a goal effect or a deadline effect.
Both are old studies on narrow groups, and the first is secondhand here. They still match what the table implies. An intention of “lose weight this year” has no moment in it where something can go wrong or be fixed. A count per week, or a limit per afternoon, does. A visible count also gives you a finish line that arrives every week. Clark Hull’s 1932 rats ran faster the nearer they got to food, and the same pull appears in people (the coffee-card study is the best-known case), so a goal with a close, countable end gets more effort than one whose end is a year away.
A pre-mortem for the part intention does not cover
If behavior moves only about half as far as intention, as in the Webb and Sheeran average, the missing half lives in particular places: the 6 a.m. when the bed is warm, the Thursday your manager schedules a meeting at your gym slot, the week a cold takes your pace. A pre-mortem is a way to list those places in advance. Imagine it is a month from now and the goal is dead, finish the sentence “it died because…” as many ways as you can in five minutes, circle the three you believe, and write an if-then response for each. The full method, with a worked example, is in the obituary exercise.
The if-then step matters because of the field rows above. A plan like “if the 6 a.m. alarm goes off, my shoes are by the door” worked in some trials and not in others. The pre-mortem does not fix that, but it makes the plans fit your own list of failures instead of a generic one. Gary Klein’s original method assumes a team and a project, so treat the personal version as a borrowed technique with no trial of its own behind it.
A seven-day plan
The steps below are the same ones in the frontmatter of this post, ordered by how cheap they are to do.
- Day 1. Convert the goal to a count out of seven days, and write the smallest version that still counts.
- Day 2. Run the five-minute pre-mortem and write three if-then responses.
- Day 3. Change one thing in the room, and put the sessions in your calendar at fixed times.
- Day 4. Pick one yes-or-no mark per day, made at the same moment.
- Day 5. Put a small cost on a miss that you would actually feel.
- Day 6. Act out the weakest if-then once, at the real time and place.
- Day 7. Count completed against planned. If you fell short, change the count, the time or the room before you change how badly you want it.
For goals that start with getting out of bed, DontSnooze handles Day 5 in one particular way: when the alarm rings you have 30 seconds to record a video showing you are up, and if you do not, a random photo from your camera roll goes to friends you chose.
Run it again for a second week with the target unchanged, then a third. The papers above mostly measure days or weeks. A goal that is still a count on your calendar by the end of the month has cleared the stretch where the studies stopped looking.
What this evidence cannot tell you
The Webb and Sheeran result is an average across many kinds of intentions and behaviors, and the abstract does not say how it varies by goal. The effect-size table mixes lab and field work, self-report and observed behavior, one-time actions and repeated ones. The review’s authors say plainly that almost all the experiments they cover predate the replication reforms in psychology, so more precise estimates are likely to differ. None of these studies tested the seven-day plan above as a package; it is an ordering of single tactics, chosen so each step is cheap, and the single-tactic numbers are the only evidence behind it.
Where a given goal tends to stall, stage by stage, is mapped in this diagnostic of the intention-behavior gap.
The original New Year’s resolution follow-up by Norcross and Vangarelli (Journal of Substance Abuse, 1988 to 1989) is the usual source for the February collapse. I did not re-read it, and secondary reports of its percentages disagree with one another, so this post quotes none of them. A month-by-month account of that drop, with the figures the guide attributes to the study, is in the New Year’s resolution guide; treat those numbers as unchecked here.