What makes a goal worth planning for?
Short answer
A good goal is specific, a stretch but believable, and has a date. Decades of goal-setting research found that specific, challenging goals lead to better results than vague intentions to do your best.
Key points
- Specific: on the day, you will know whether you reached it.
- Challenging but believable: too easy invites coasting, too hard invites giving up.
- Dated: a deadline is what lets a goal be broken into weeks.
Specific beats "do your best"
"Run a 10K in under an hour by 14 June" gives you something to measure every week. "Get fitter" does not, so there is never a moment when you are clearly on or off track.
Hard enough to matter
Goal-setting research, summarised across 35 years of studies, found that specific and harder goals lead to higher performance than easy or vague ones, as long as the person is committed to the goal and has the ability and time to reach it.
A date turns a goal into a plan
Once there is an end date, the distance between where you are and where you want to be can be split into stages. That is what a plan is.
In your plan
The first questions of every plan ask for your target and your date. The plan's summary says honestly whether the two fit together, and what to change if they do not.
Related questions
Why does a written plan make you more likely to follow through?
Because wanting to do something and doing it are different things. Deciding in advance when, where and how you will act closes much of that gap, and the effect shows up across dozens of experiments.
Read the full answerHow long should my plan be?
Long enough for the goal and your starting point: a first 5K from scratch often takes around nine weeks, a marathon several months. Every plan ends on a date you choose, from two weeks to a year away.
Read the full answerWhy should you start smaller than you think you can?
Because the first weeks are about building the routine, not the result. A small step taken every day becomes a habit; a big one taken twice and then skipped does not.
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