Write Your Plan for the Moment You Usually Quit

Sheina Orbell at the University of Essex and Paschal Sheeran at the University of Sheffield followed patients who were having joint replacement surgery. Before surgery, the researchers measured how motivated each patient was to get back to normal activity. They also asked whether patients had made specific plans for when and where they would do it. Three months after surgery, the patients who had made those plans had started 18 out of 32 everyday activities sooner than the patients who had not, and the difference could not be explained by how motivated the two groups were (Orbell & Sheeran, 2000).

Charles Duhigg retold this study in his book The Power of Habit. His version reports that the patients with plans walked almost twice as fast and got in and out of chairs three times faster. Those figures do not appear in the published abstract and could not be confirmed against the full paper, so they are left out here.

People make plans when calm and carry them out when tired.

At eight in the morning, with coffee in hand, it is easy to promise yourself that tonight you will study for two hours, finish a project you have been putting off, or stay calm when a difficult coworker criticizes you. If you are exhausted by eight at night, the first confusing paragraph or a sharp comment can be enough to drop the plan. An hour later, you could be on your phone or replaying an argument and frustrated with yourself for not having more discipline.

George Loewenstein at Carnegie Mellon University calls this a hot-cold empathy gap. When people are calm, they do not fully appreciate how pain, fatigue or strong emotion will change what they want and what they do (Loewenstein, 2005). When you plan in the morning, you are likely to underestimate how hard the evening will be.

If this happens to you regularly, it is not evidence that you are lazy or lack character. You are making plans in one state and expecting to carry them out in a very different one.

Find the moment when the plan usually falls apart.

Many plans fall apart at a moment you can predict. For a student, it might be sitting down at the kitchen table at 7:30 p.m. and feeling the urge to check the phone before opening the course module. For someone at work, it might be a supervisor correcting them in front of other people.

If you are like many people, you may ask yourself in that moment whether you really have to do this now, and then do whatever ends the discomfort fastest, such as picking up the phone or snapping back at the person. An if-then plan names a specific moment and the action you will take when it arrives; researchers call it an implementation intention. Written in advance, it settles the question before that moment, so you do not have to decide while you are tired or upset. Discipline Comes From Design covers the research on if-then plans in general and on how stress affects planning.

A plan works better when you care about the goal and the moment is specific.

If-then plans do not work in every situation. Paschal Sheeran, Thomas Webb and Peter Gollwitzer randomly assigned 85 undergraduates to plan, or not plan, where and when they would do independent study, and asked them a week later how many hours they had studied. The plans helped students who strongly intended to study, but not students whose intention was weak (Sheeran et al., 2005). Gollwitzer and Sheeran also argued, in their meta-analysis of the research, that a plan is unlikely to help when the moment and the action are not spelled out precisely (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 200638002-1)).

“If I feel tired tonight, I’ll study anyway” fails that test, because feeling tired happens many times a day and does not point to a specific moment or a specific action. “If it’s 7:30 p.m. and I’ve cleared the dinner table, then I put my phone on the charger across the kitchen and open the practice questions” passes it.

How to write the plan.

This takes about two minutes. Take an index card or a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle.

• On the left, write the one moment from the past seven days when your plan most often fell apart. Choose one, not ten. Name the time, the place or the event, such as “7:30 p.m., when I sit down at the kitchen table” or “when my supervisor corrects me in front of someone else and my chest tightens.”
• On the right, write what you will physically do in the first ten seconds after that moment, not how you want to feel. “I’ll stay calm” and “I’ll focus for two hours” describe outcomes you cannot carry out directly. Write what your hands, feet and eyes will do: “I plug my phone in across the kitchen, open the practice question bank on my laptop, and answer question one before I decide anything else.” Or: “I uncross my arms, breathe out slowly once, and write down exactly what they said before I respond.”
• At the bottom, write a minimum version for bad days. On days when your energy is very low and the full plan seems impossible, do a ten-minute version instead, such as reviewing five flashcards before bed. Doing a small amount keeps the routine going for the next day.

The one thing to do.

Tonight, before your usual hard moment arrives, write one card using the three steps above and put it where you will see it at that moment, such as on the kitchen table or next to your laptop. When the moment comes, follow the right side of the card without reconsidering it.

If you are not sure when your plans usually fall apart, keeping a record for a week is one way to find out. My book Focused: Reclaiming Attention in a World Built to Distract You begins with a seven-day distraction audit, in which you record what interrupts you and when. See Focused on Amazon.

What this does not show.

The abstract of the joint replacement study describes a comparison between patients who had made plans and patients who had not. It does not report that patients were randomly assigned, so other differences between the groups could have played a part, although the researchers found that motivation did not explain the result. The study by Sheeran and colleagues was conducted with undergraduates over one week. The point about specific moments comes from the researchers’ review and reasoning rather than from a direct test.

A written plan settles one decision in advance, so you are not making it at the moment you are least able to. Physical therapy will still hurt, and studying for a board exam after an eight-hour shift will still be hard. The ten-minute minimum and the advice to choose one moment at a time are practical suggestions and have not been tested on their own.