How to ensure you achieve your goals

When people set out to begin a major work project or adopt a
healthier lifestyle, it’s easy to become discouraged when
picturing the long road ahead. By the same token, even smaller-
scale plans like keeping a medical appointment or a standing
date to the gym can become easily derailed by the busyness of
our daily lives or a simple aversion to the doctor or the treadmill.
In a series of studies, Wharton operations and information
management professor Katherine Milkman finds that there are
relatively simple steps that people can take to help themselves —
or their employees or relatives —to stick to their plans and adopt
behaviors that are better for overall well-being.
The papers are “The Fresh Start Effect” and “Put Your
Imperfections Behind You: Why and How Meaningful Temporal
Landmarks Motivate Aspirational Behavior,” co-authored with
Wharton Ph.D. student Hengchen Dai and visiting professor
Jason Riis; “Holding the Hunger Games Hostage at the Gym,” co-
authored with Wharton health care management professor Kevin
Volpp and Harvard professor Julia Minson, and “Using
Implementation Intentions Prompts to Enhance Influenza
Vaccination Rates,” co-authored with Yale professor James J.
Choi and Harvard professors John Beshears, David Laibson and
Brigitte C. Madrian.
In this conversation with Knowledge@Wharton, Milkman
describes her findings and how people can put them into
practice.
An edited transcript of the conversation appears below.
On overcoming temptation and achieving goals:
My research looks at how people can overcome temptation and
how they can achieve their goals, particularly in the domain of
health. So how people can do things like exercise more, eat
healthier food and make and keep medical appointments that
they know are in their long-term best interest.
The first study I wanted to mention to you is one I did to look at
the power of planning prompts, or prompting people to form a
plan about exactly when they’ll follow through on and engage in
a good behavior, like getting a flu shot or a colonoscopy. We
found that when people are prompted to just write down the date
and time when they will get a flu shot, we see dramatically
higher rates of follow through. This also works with
colonoscopies.
“Planning prompts are one way people can really help one
another increase goal follow through.”
I have another study that I really like that looks at the power of
fresh starts. What do I mean by a fresh start? Well, there are
moments in our lives that feel like the start of a new era, the
start of a new cycle, like the beginning of a new week, the
beginning of a new month, the beginning of a new year, following
a holiday or following a birthday.  Twitter And following those
kinds of fresh start moments people actually are more motivated
to follow through on their goals. We see that people search more
for the term “diet” on Google [during those times]. We see that
people go to the gym more frequently following those fresh start
moments. And we also see that they create more goals, both
health-related and health irrelevant goals on a goal setting
website.
A third study that I think is representative of this line of work
looks at an idea I called temptation bundling. The idea is simple:
Imagine that you really struggle to go to the gym. You don’t have
the willpower at the end of a long day. And imagine you also
have a thing for a trashy TV show, let’s say Breaking Bad . You
feel a little guilty about watching Breaking Bad when you should
be doing other things. So how do you solve these two problems?
What if you only let yourself watch Breaking Bad while you were
exercising at the gym? You would stop wasting time at home
watching this TV show that you feel guilty about and you would
start craving trips to the gym at the end of a long day to see
what happens in the next episode. Not only that, you will enjoy
your workout and yourBreaking Bad episode more combined
because you won’t feel guilty watching that episode. And time
will fly while you’re exercising at the gym.
On the key takeaways:
The key takeaways are a number of tools that you can use to try
to help yourself or help others follow through on their goals. One
key takeaway is that whenever you want to help somebody
follow through on a goal, one thing you should do is actually
prompt them to think about exactly when and where and how
they will accomplish that goal. By prompting them to think
through those things, even if they do it privately and don’t ever
tell you their plans, you can help them reduce the likelihood that
they will actually forget to follow through because now there is
this cue embedded in their memory that is going to trigger the
recollection, “Oh, this is when I’m supposed to … this is the
moment I said I’d do it. This is when I’m supposed to go to the
gym.” It also makes it harder for them to procrastinate because
now they’re putting off something they explicitly said they’d do,
rather than kind of a vague intention. So planning prompts are
one way people can really help one another increase goal follow
through.
“People are more likely to go to the gym in the
months following a birthday than in the months
preceding it.”
Another practical implication of my work is that it suggests that
you may want to encourage people to follow through on their
goals at fresh start moments. If you’re thinking about when [to
remind an] employee about an objective that he or she wanted
to meet, for instance, the best time may be after a fresh start. So
at the beginning of a new week, month, year, following a
birthday, a work anniversary or even at a moment you could
frame to them as a fresh start for some reason. It’s the start of
a new project, for your team, for instance. So those are a couple
of practical implications.
Temptation bundling suggests that you can encourage people to
bundle their temptations with things that they know they should
do. For instance, as we talked about earlier, bundling an
engaging audio novel, say, or a TV show with exercise. Or you
could only allow yourself to, say, get a pedicure when catching
up on overdue work. Or to watch your favorite TV show at home
when catching up on some household chores or listening to your
favorite music while catching up on chores.
On the biggest surprises from the research:
One thing I found really surprising was how huge the demand
was in a study I ran for temptation bundling. In this study we
asked participants if they would be willing to pay us to take away
a possession they could otherwise use freely— an iPod we’d
given them as a gift, that was preloaded with a tempting audio
novel of their choice— and lock this possession they could
otherwise use freely at the gym so they could only access it
when working out. We thought that not that many people will find
it attractive to pay us to take away something they could
otherwise use whenever they wanted. And, in fact, more than
60% of our participants said, “Oh, sign me up, that sounds
great.” And they wanted to give us money in order to take away
this tempting possession so it could help them exercise more.
So that was one really interesting, I thought, and surprising and
exciting finding.
I have another one that’s kind of funny. My other surprising
finding is actually in the research I did on fresh starts, also in a
study looking at gym attendance. What we found in that study,
one of many things we found in that study, is that people are
more likely to go to the gym in the months following a birthday
than in the months preceding it – so, following this fresh start
event. Now interestingly, that’s true for every birthday that was
in our data set except one notable birthday— the 21st birthday.
When we first found this, we were a little surprised and then
pretty quickly we realized maybe there is a reason for that.
That’s not so bizarre after all. But that was something that stuck
out at us as interesting in our findings.
On the practical implications of the research:
One thing that organizations could do is simply use planning
prompts whenever they want to encourage follow through on a
good behavior. They could prompt people to think through the
where, when and how of engaging in that behavior. Another thing
they could do is try to provide tools to facilitate temptation
bundling. For instance, at their gyms they could offer to have a
subscription available to Netflix that you could log into and
watch your favorite show, and pick up where you left off. Or they
could hold your iPod in a locker for you so that you could pick up
listening to your favorite audio novel where you left off on your
previous visit.
On misconceptions dispelled by the research:
I think one of the main misperceptions these studies dispel is
that there’s not a lot you can do if you are, say, overweight or in
debt or haven’t achieved the educational goals that you hoped to
achieve. What these studies say is that there are, indeed, tools
you can use and strategies you can employ and that your friends
can actually help you with as well …to help motivate you to
achieve your goals.
On new ground covered by the research:
A lot of this research that I’ve done …is actually really new. No
one had ever looked at fresh starts before, so that’s sort of wildly
new. No one had ever looked at this idea of temptation bundling.
The one set of studies that overlap a little bit more with past
work are the studies on planning prompts. People had looked at
the power of planning prompts in the past, but what sets our
work apart is two things. One, a lot of past studies involving
planning prompts actually involved face to face contact or
contact over the phone with someone who asked you to walk
through a plan. And what we actually did is sent a simple
mailing. You never interact with another person. You’re simply
prompted to write down the date and time when you plan to
engage in a given behavior. There is no social pressure that
might be increasing the power of the planning prompt, and we
still see huge benefits.