Goals & Progress
The if-then plan you cannot keep
Standard goal-setting advice says to list what could go wrong and write an if-then plan for each one. It is good advice for about half your obstacles.
The other half are not things you do. They are things your situation does. The commute is forty minutes. The house is loud until eight. The job has a busy season. Write “if the commute is long, then I will train anyway” and you have not made a plan, you have made a way to feel bad about a commute. The obstacle keeps happening, the plan keeps failing, and the failure gets filed under willpower.
The tool below sorts each obstacle by two questions and gives each kind the counter-move that can actually work.
Not every obstacle wants an if-then plan
The usual advice is to list what could go wrong and write an if-then plan for each. That works for obstacles you control. For the ones built into your situation it produces plans you cannot keep, and then you feel bad about a commute. Sort each obstacle by two questions and each one gets the counter-move that can actually work.
Naming the outcome and then the obstacle in front of it is mental contrasting, from Gabriele Oettingen’s research. The if-then plan is Peter Gollwitzer’s implementation intentions. Both are worth reading in the original. What this adds is the sorting step: classifying each obstacle by control and recurrence, and routing it to the counter-move that fits rather than giving every obstacle the same one.
The two questions
- Is it in my control, or is it context? Not whether it is your fault. Whether the thing that happens is a decision you make or a condition you are in.
- Is it one-off, or does it recur? Once, or every week for the foreseeable future.
Those two answers pick the counter-move:
- In your control gets an if-then plan. A specific cue paired with a specific response, decided now.
- Context and recurring gets a setup change. You are not going to out-decide a condition that returns every week, so change the conditions instead.
- Context and one-off gets a Plan B trigger. You cannot plan it away and it may not happen, so decide in advance what it changes if it does.
Why the sorting is the part that matters
Naming the outcome you want and then the obstacle in front of it is called mental contrasting, and a 2019 systematic review examined it across health behaviour change. Doing that contrast is what makes the obstacles visible in the first place, which is why the tool asks for the goal and what success looks like before it asks what gets in the way.
If-then plans are separately well evidenced. Gollwitzer and Sheeran's meta-analysis of 94 studies found a medium-to-large effect on goal attainment, d = .65. That is a real result and it is why the if-then plan is the default counter-move for anything you control.
The reason it does not generalise is worth stating carefully. Wood, Quinn and Kashy's diary work on habits in everyday life found that much of daily behaviour is performed repeatedly in stable contexts, cued by those contexts rather than decided fresh each time. The inference the tool is built on follows from that, and is reasoning rather than a finding: if an obstacle recurs because your context recurs, then the durable lever is the context, not a stronger intention aimed at it. Move the shoes, block the hour, change the default. That is a smaller act than resolving to try harder, and it keeps working when you are tired.
So the routing is not decoration. Give every obstacle an if-then plan and roughly half of them get a counter-move aimed at the wrong thing.
Working through one
Goal: run a half marathon without walking. Success: 21.1 km, continuous, before December. Three obstacles, three different moves.
- "I skip the long run when I sleep badly." In your control, and foreseeable. If-then plan: if I sleep under six hours, I run the short version at lunch instead of skipping.
- "The gym is forty minutes from home." Context, and it recurs every single time. No plan survives that. Setup change: move the two short runs to the door rather than the gym, shoes by the bed, route already chosen.
- "A knee injury could end the attempt." Context, and one-off. Nothing to plan and nothing to redesign. Plan B trigger: if the knee is still sore after two weeks off, the goal re-scopes to a 10k in spring.
The third one is the one people resist writing, because naming the condition under which you would change the goal feels like planning to fail. It is the opposite. An undecided re-scope point is what turns one setback into abandoning the whole thing.
Common questions
What if I cannot tell whether something is context or mine?
Ask whether it would still happen if you were more disciplined. If yes, it is context. The forty minute drive does not get shorter because you want it more.
How many obstacles should I list?
Three to five. Beyond that you are usually listing variations of the same one, and the map stops being something you can hold in your head.
Is my map stored or sent anywhere?
No. It lives in your browser's local storage so it is still there when you come back, and Save file gives you a copy. Nothing is transmitted.
Where this comes from
Mental contrasting, the step of naming what you want and then what stands in the way, is Gabriele Oettingen's research. The if-then plan is Peter Gollwitzer's implementation intentions. Both are worth reading in the original and neither is ours.
What this adds is the sorting step: classifying each obstacle by control and recurrence and routing it to a counter-move that matches, instead of giving every obstacle the same one. The same map, with the same two chips and the same routing, is built into every annual goal in the Life Goals App.
Related guides and tools
- Life Goals Command Center - set the goals this map protects
- Habit Audit - when the obstacle turns out to be something you already do daily
- Habit Stack Builder - for the setup changes that need to become routine
- Future Self Letter - the horizon this all rolls up to
Sources
- Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement: A Meta-analysis of Effects and Processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38. doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1
- Cross, A., & Sheffield, D. (2019). Mental contrasting for health behaviour change: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Health Psychology Review, 13(2). doi.org/10.1080/17437199.2019.1594332
- Wood, W., Quinn, J. M., & Kashy, D. A. (2002). Habits in everyday life: Thought, emotion, and action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(6). doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.83.6.1281
