When does planning interfere with achieving your goals?

Specific plans make it easier for you to achieve a single goal.

Specific plans make life harder when you’re trying to achieve multiple goals at the same time.

Via Eurekalert:

“We found that specific planning helped people who had a single goal on their to-do list, but not people with multiple goals,” the authors write. A second study, which involved a computer task, yielded similar results.

Why is specific planning less effective when applied to a number of goals? The authors believe that planning reminds people of all the obstacles and constraints that stand in the way of achieving goals.

Overall it might be smarter for you to use specific plans (especially “if-then” plans) and really focus on one goal at a time.

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