It Is December 30th and Your Goal Is Dead: Write the Obituary Now

It is December 30th and the goal is dead. You wanted to wake at 6:30 every day for 90 days, and sometime in November it stopped happening. Write down why, in the past tense, in as much detail as you can manage. That is the whole exercise, and it is called a pre-mortem: a pre-mortem is a planning technique in which you assume a plan has already failed and work backward to explain why. Done on a personal goal, it takes about ten minutes and gives you a list of causes you can plan against while they are still hypothetical.

Where does the pre-mortem come from?

Psychologist Gary Klein described the method in “Performing a Project Premortem,” published in the Harvard Business Review in September 2007. His version is for teams: tell everyone the project has failed, then have each person privately write the reasons. The idea rests on 1989 research by Deborah Mitchell, Jay Russo and Nancy Pennington on “prospective hindsight,” which found that imagining an event has already happened improves people’s ability to identify reasons for the outcome. The improvement is usually quoted as about 30 percent, a figure that circulates through Klein’s article and later summaries, so read it as approximate.

Daniel Kahneman later endorsed the technique in Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), writing that its main virtue is that it legitimizes doubts. That matters for a solo goal too, because the person most committed to the plan is you, and you are the one least inclined to say it might fail.

Step 1: What is your goal, in one sentence with a date?

Use something concrete. “Wake at 6:30 every day from October 1st to December 30th” works. “Be a morning person” does not, because there is no morning on which you can check it. The rest of this post uses the 6:30 goal as the running example; swap in your own.

Step 2: How do you write the obituary?

Set a three-minute timer. Start with the sentence “It is December 30th and the goal failed because…” and keep writing causes until the timer ends. Do not edit. A typical first pass for a wake-time goal looks like this:

1. I turned off the alarm and went back to sleep.
2. I stayed up until 1 a.m. on weeknights, so 6:30 was five hours of sleep.
3. A trip in week four broke the pattern and I never restarted.
4. I felt fine on day 12 and decided I had it handled, so I stopped checking.
5. My partner’s schedule changed and the bedroom was noisy at 6.
6. I had a cold for a week and called it a pause.
7. I picked 6:30 because it sounded impressive, not because it fit my life.
8. Nobody knew I was doing it.

Number one deserves the most attention because it is the failure that happens in a single moment. The others are slower leaks.

Step 3: Which causes are actually likely?

Circle the five you would bet money on. Illness and travel are real, but they are rarely the ones that kill a goal on their own. They kill it when there is no plan for the day after. For a closer look at that one, see the restart problem, which covers why a single missed day so often turns into a quit.

Step 4: How do you turn each cause into a decision made today?

This is where the exercise pays for itself. Each circled cause gets an if-then response written in advance, which is the format Peter Gollwitzer’s research on implementation intentions supports; this post on implementation intentions walks through the evidence. Here is the example list converted:

Obituary line	Response decided today
Turned off the alarm and went back to sleep	The alarm cannot be dismissed without a consequence that arrives within 30 seconds
Stayed up until 1 a.m.	Phone goes on the charger at 11:15 p.m.; if it is not there by 11:45, tomorrow’s wake time moves to 7:00 and the streak stays intact
Trip broke the pattern	Before any trip, set the alarm in the new time zone and name one person who will see the result
Felt fine, stopped checking	Weekly 2-minute review every Sunday; the goal is not “done” until December 30th
Nobody knew	Tell two people today, with the end date

Notice what the first row is doing differently. The other rows are plans for hours or days from now. Row one has to work in the half minute after the alarm goes off, which is when you are least capable of carrying out a plan. That is why a commitment device, a cost you lock in ahead of time, fits it better than another intention does.

What is the best answer to “I turned off the alarm and went back to sleep”?

A consequence that shows up before you are awake enough to argue with it. DontSnooze was built around exactly this line of the obituary: when the alarm fires you have 30 seconds to record a short video showing you are up, and if you do not, a random photo from your camera roll goes to friends you chose. The decision you made on October 1st, while rested and sensible, is the one that runs at 6:30 a.m. on November 14th. You can build the same thing with a friend and a text message, as described in I logged every snooze for 30 days, but the feedback needs to arrive quickly, or it is just a note for later.

If you want to see what your own obituary might say before writing it, this month-long log of alarm excuses sorts real mornings into categories.

What the exercise cannot do

A pre-mortem finds the causes you can imagine. It does not find the ones you cannot, and a list written in a good mood will be shorter than one written after a bad week. That is why the FAQ above suggests running it again at day 45. It also does not supply motivation. It supplies a set of decisions that no longer depend on motivation, which is a smaller and more reliable thing.

Keep the sheet where you will see it on a Sunday, when the weekly review comes around.

The pre-mortem has an engineering cousin: what Murphy actually meant in 1949, and why the fix was to make the wrong move impossible.