Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

by Roy F. Baumeister

To reach a goal, how specific should your plans be? In one carefully controlled experiment, researchers monitored college students taking part in a program to improve their skills at studying. In addition to receiving the usual instructions on how to use time effectively, the students were randomly assigned among three planning conditions. One group was instructed to make daily plans for what, where, and when to study. Another made similar plans, only month by month instead of day by day. And a third group, the controls, did not make plans. The researchers felt they were on solid ground in predicting that the day-by-day plans would work best. But they were wrong. The monthly planning group did the best, in terms of improvements in study habits and attitudes. Among the weaker students (though not among the good ones), monthly planning led to much bigger improvements in grades than did the daily planning. Monthly planners also kept it up much longer than the daily planners, and the continued planning thus was more likely to carry over into their work after the program ended. A year after the program ended, the monthly planners were still getting better grades than the daily planners, most of whom by this point had largely abandoned planning, daily or otherwise. Why? Daily plans do have the advantage of letting the person know exactly what he or she should be doing at each moment. But their preparation is time-consuming, because it takes much longer to make thirty daily plans...