Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

by Chip Heath

Say that you’ve been putting off going to the gym. So you resolve to yourself: Tomorrow morning, right after I drop off Anna at school, I’ll head straight to the gym. Let’s call this mental plan an “action trigger.” You’ve made the decision to execute a certain action (working out) when you encounter a certain situational trigger (the school circle, tomorrow morning). Peter Gollwitzer, a psychologist at New York University, is the pioneer of work in this area. He and colleague Veronika Brand-statter found that action triggers are quite effective in motivating action. In one study, they tracked college students who had the option to earn extra credit in a class by writing a paper about how they spent Christmas Eve. But there was a catch: To earn the credit, they had to submit the paper by December 26. Most students had good intentions of writing the paper, but only 33 percent of them got around to writing and submitting it. Other students in the study were required to set action triggers—to note, in advance, exactly when and where they intended to write the report (for example, “I’ll write this report in my dad’s office on Christmas morning before everyone gets up”). A whopping 75 percent of those students wrote the report. That’s a pretty astonishing result for such a small mental investment. Does this mean that simply by imagining a time and place where you’ll do something, you increase the likelihood that you’ll actually do it? Yes and no. Action triggers won’t get you (...