Con­ven­tional wis­dom for set­ting goals and fol­low­ing through on inten­tions is to make a pub­lic state­ment of intent in order to bring about some account­abil­ity. How­ever the research on the the­ory is mixed.

Derek Sivers sum­marises a num­ber of stud­ies that sug­gest we should keep our goals pri­vate if we want to remain moti­vated (espe­cially if that goal is con­tribut­ing to a per­ceived or hoped-for ‘identity’):

Announc­ing your plans to oth­ers sat­is­fies your self-identity just enough that you’re less moti­vated to do the hard work needed.

In 1933, W. Mahler found that if a per­son announced the solu­tion to a prob­lem, and was acknowl­edged by oth­ers, it was now […] a “social real­ity”, even if the solu­tion hadn’t actu­ally been achieved.

NYU psy­chol­ogy pro­fes­sor Peter Goll­witzer has been study­ing this since his 1982 book Sym­bolic Self-Completion (pdf arti­cle here) — and recently pub­lished results of new tests in a research arti­cle, When Inten­tions Go Pub­lic: Does Social Real­ity Widen the Intention-Behavior Gap?

Four dif­fer­ent tests of 63 peo­ple found that those who kept their inten­tions pri­vate were more likely to achieve them than those who made them pub­lic and were acknowl­edged by others.

Once you’ve told peo­ple of your inten­tions, it gives you a “pre­ma­ture sense of completeness.”

The research arti­cle in ques­tion con­cludes that “Identity-related behav­ioral inten­tions that had been noticed by other peo­ple were trans­lated into action less inten­sively than those that had been ignored” and that “when other peo­ple take notice of an individual’s identity-related behav­ioral inten­tion, this gives the indi­vid­ual a pre­ma­ture sense of pos­sess­ing the aspired-to identity”.