A university professor recruited 267 participants. They were selected from a wide age range (23-72), a wide spectrum of backgrounds, and a wide variety of businesses, organizations, and networking groups throughout the United States and overseas. He split them in five groups:
Group 1 was asked to simply think about business-related goals they hoped to accomplish within a four-week block and to rate each goal according to difficulty, importance, the extent to which they had the skills and resources to accomplish the goal, their commitment and motivation, and whether they had pursued the goal before (and, if so, their prior success).
Groups 2-5 were asked to write their goals and then rate them on the same dimensions as given to Group 1.
Group 3 was also asked to write action commitments for each goal.
Group 4 had to both write goals and action commitments and also share these commitments with a friend.
Group 5 went the furthest by doing all of the above plus sending a weekly progress report to a friend.
The purpose of the study was to determine how goal achievement in the workplace is influenced by writing goals, committing to goal-directed actions, and accountability for those actions. The results?
At the end of the study, only 43 percent of Group 1 either accomplished their goals or were at least half way there. Sixty-two percent of Group 4 accomplished their goals or were at least half way there. However, 76 percent of those in Group 5 either accomplished their goals or were at least half way there.
Upon seeing the results, the professor concluded:
Source: https://scholar.dominican.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1265&context=news-releases
Sharing your personal goals with other can be daunting But, at the very least, you can avoid ending up like the students in group no. 1 and 2, who didn’t write down their goals and actionable steps. Those who didn’t write down their goals and actionable steps did worse than all the others who did.
I’m writing this article in January and we all know that people at this time of year make new years resolutions. We also know that they never follow through with them. If you’re reading this, you probably feel the need to break free of that cycle. You don’t want to wake up next January thinking “where did the year go?” and “why haven’t I gotten anything done yet?” So, here’s something to help you :
The Plan&Journal App
Whenever you have a goal to achieve you open up Plan&Journal and write it down. You then write down your actionable tasks and plan them out to be done on specific days. It doesn’t cost you anything to try it out, and can finally start getting stuff done. The end of the year only gets closer. The sooner you take action, the less likely you are to procrastinate on it. So, if you’re on your iPhone, click bellow to download the app. If you’re on your computer, open up the App Store and search “Plan&Journal.”
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