Discipline Comes From Design

People who score high on self-control report using it less often than people who score low. In a study that sampled adults’ desires as they happened over a week, those high in trait self-control reported weaker desires, less conflict between their desires and their goals, and fewer attempts to resist (Hofmann et al., 2012). Much of the research on follow-through points the same way: people who get hard things done tend to set up their tasks and surroundings so that less willpower is needed.

The Sunday-night verdict.

If you have ever sat down on a Sunday evening to start a large piece of work, such as studying for an exam or writing a report, and found yourself reorganizing folders an hour later, you have probably reached the usual verdict: not enough discipline, try harder tomorrow.

That verdict rests on a model in which self-control is a supply of fuel that runs out. The model is tidy, and it has not held up well. What replaced it is more useful to anyone trying to do difficult work.

The ego-depletion finding did not replicate.

The fuel model has a name in psychology, ego depletion: the claim that exerting self-control on one task leaves less for the next. For two decades it was one of the field’s most cited effects. In 2016, a preregistered replication conducted across 23 laboratories with 2,141 participants found an effect close to zero (Hagger et al., 2016). A second multisite test, with 36 laboratories and more than 3,500 participants and led by researchers who had supported the theory, also found no reliable effect (Vohs et al., 2021).

None of this means people never get tired, and researchers still disagree about what exactly failed. It does undercut the idea that an evening study session collapsed because you resisted a doughnut at breakfast.

The Hofmann study above fits this picture. People with high self-control appeared to face fewer of these fights in the first place. The rest of this post is about how that kind of setup gets built.

What predicts procrastination.

Piers Steel’s meta-analysis of procrastination research found that the strongest and most consistent predictors of delay were how unpleasant the task is, how far away its reward sits, how confident people are that they can do it, and the traits of impulsiveness and low conscientiousness, including low self-control (Steel, 2007). Personal traits matter, but several of the strongest predictors are features of the task, and those can be changed.

There is a physiological side too. Amy Arnsten’s research at Yale, much of it conducted in animal models, describes how uncontrollable stress impairs the prefrontal cortex, the region most involved in planning and keeping a goal in mind (Arnsten, 2009). Put together, these findings suggest that a large, vague and distant task produces stress, stress makes planning harder, and the brain looks for something that relieves the feeling right away. The practical response is to change the task rather than lecture yourself.

Big goals need small targets.

The standard advice about goals, to make them specific and difficult, is broadly supported. Decades of research by Edwin Locke and Gary Latham show that specific, difficult goals lead to better performance than being told to do your best (Locke & Latham, 2002).

Complexity changes that. On a task you are still learning, a hard outcome target such as “score a 95 on the kinesiology exam” can do less good, because attention goes to the score instead of to learning how to do the work. In that situation learning goals tend to work better, for example “explain the origin, insertion and action of each rotator cuff muscle without my notes” (Seijts & Latham, 2001).

A good learning goal can still be too far away to affect what you do tonight. In a 1981 study, Albert Bandura and Dale Schunk found that children working through a difficult arithmetic program made faster progress, and came to feel more capable, when the work was broken into near-term subgoals instead of one distant target (Bandura & Schunk, 1981). A near-term goal gives feedback while it can still help.

A practice I use with students applies this research: the more stressed you are, the smaller the next goal should be. On a calm day, “read and outline chapter 7” is a reasonable target. On an exhausted Sunday night, shrink it until starting stops feeling like a fight, such as opening the book to the right page and reading one paragraph. This is an application of the goal research, not a tested finding in its own right.

I relied on it while finishing my dissertation, which felt like a marathon within a marathon. On some days the goal shrank to sitting down at the desk or just turning the computer on. It worked more often than I expected, because starting is where much of the resistance is.

Plan and act at different times.

Once you are working, where should your attention go? Two findings are worth reading together. For people still learning, attention to process works better than attention to outcome. Students who mentally rehearsed how they would study for a midterm, including when, where and how they would review, studied more, felt less anxious and scored higher than students who rehearsed getting a good grade (Pham & Taylor, 1999).

For experienced performers the pattern reverses. Skilled golfers who were told to attend to the step-by-step mechanics of their putting stroke performed worse than when their attention was elsewhere (Beilock et al., 2002). Once a skill is automatic, narrating it gets in the way.

An older idea sits behind both findings. Heinz Heckhausen and Peter Gollwitzer described deciding and acting as separate mindsets, one open and evaluative and the other narrow and committed (Heckhausen & Gollwitzer, 1987). Running both at once is how people end up replanning a whole project every time they sit down to work on it. In practice that means planning at a separate time from the work, and leaving the plan alone once you start.

If-then plans.

Many goals fail at the moment of decision. “I’ll study more this week” leaves the when and where to be settled later by a more tired version of you.

Implementation intentions, which I usually call if-then plans, settle those details in advance: If it’s 6 p.m. on Tuesday or Thursday, then I sit at the kitchen table and review 20 anatomy flashcards. Pooling 94 independent tests with more than 8,000 participants, Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran found a medium-to-large effect on goal attainment compared with holding the goal alone (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006). In one study of high school students preparing for a high-stakes exam, those taught if-then planning together with a technique called mental contrasting completed about 60% more practice questions than a control group (Duckworth et al., 2011).

Repeating a behavior in response to the same cue is also how it becomes automatic, and that takes longer than the popular figure suggests. The “21 days” claim traces to Psycho-Cybernetics, a 1960 book by the plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz, who described how long his patients took to adjust to a changed appearance. When Phillippa Lally’s team at University College London tracked people forming new habits, the median time to automaticity was 66 days, with a range from 18 to 254, and missing a single day did not meaningfully set people back (Lally et al., 2010).

If a new routine still feels like work on day 30, that is consistent with the research.

Keeping going through the middle.

Long projects often lose momentum in the middle. Motivation can run higher near the start and near the finish and dip in between (Bonezzi, Brendl & De Angelis, 2011).

Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer analyzed nearly 12,000 daily diary entries from 238 people doing complex work. Progress in meaningful work, often small, occurred on 76% of people’s best-mood days (Amabile & Kramer, 2011). Near-term goals are a way to produce those days deliberately.

Progress also works better when it is visible. A meta-analysis of 138 experimental studies found that monitoring goal progress improved goal attainment, with larger effects when progress was physically recorded or reported to others (Harkin et al., 2016). Crossing items off a paper list is one simple way to do this.

The one thing to do.

Before you leave your desk today, take two minutes to look at what is unfinished. For each open item, write one if-then line for when you will pick it back up: If it’s 8 a.m. and my coffee is poured, then I open the draft and write one paragraph.

Unfinished goals tend to intrude on your thinking, an effect usually traced to Bluma Zeigarnik. In a series of laboratory studies, E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister found that making a specific plan for an unfinished goal eliminated that interference even though the task itself was still undone (Masicampo & Baumeister, 2011). Writing the plan lets you stop thinking about the task until the time you set.

If what stops you is staying with something while you are still bad at it, the post on the week-three wall picks up there. If your phone is the main obstacle, that is the subject of my book Focused, the first in the Mastery Series, now available on Amazon.

What this does not show.

None of this replaces wanting the goal. If-then plans help with goals you already hold; they do not create motivation where there is none. Several of the findings above come from laboratory studies with students, much of the stress research was conducted in animals, and the practice of shrinking goals under stress is an application of the research rather than a tested result.

Design also has limits. Structure can make hard work more likely, but it cannot make an impossible workload possible. If the workload itself is too large, a better plan will not fix it, and the conversation needs to happen with whoever set the workload.