The Small Steps That Have a Big
Impact on Achieving 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 your Breaking 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.
“Here are … 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.”
One of the things that we do is isolate the fact
that it’s not something about social pressure, it’s just the act of forming a
plan privately that can really increase follow through. We also do that study
with a very large, real population—thousands of people looking at real flu
shots, whereas a lot of past studies have looked at hypotheticals or self
reports.
On
what’s next:
I’m doing a lot of research right now looking at
other ways we can encourage people to follow through on their goals and
overcome temptation. One study that I’m particularly excited about is a large
field experiment looking at encouraging people to save more for retirement. We
have about 30,000 people, and in our experiment we’re encouraging them all to
sign up to take money out of their paycheck and send it to their 401(k). Some
people are offered the opportunity to do that, to start having the money …at a
fresh start moment — so say, following a birthday or following the New Year —
whereas other people are also offered the opportunity to do it in the future,
but at a fairly arbitrary date. And what we’re hoping is that our hypothesis
will be confirmed, which is that people will be more motivated to save and
enroll in these retirement savings programs following fresh start dates, and
that that will be a strategy that can then be employed more widely.
Wharton’s Katherine Milkman. http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/small-steps-that-make-a-big-impact-on-achieving-goals/
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