To Complete Goals, Concentrate on ‘The Big Picture’ (Not Subgoals)

To help control and manage progress on a difficult or long-term goal, we often split that goal into many individual subgoals. Once we begin to complete these subgoals, our continued motivation and progress toward the main, or superordinate, goal can be compromised.

A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2006 shows that by putting people in mind of their subgoal successes or on their main goal commitment causes drastic differences in their future effort (the latter is better):

The authors show that when people consider success on a single subgoal, additional actions toward achieving a superordinate goal are seen as substitutes and are less likely to be pursued. In contrast, when people consider their commitment to a superordinate goal on the basis of initial success on a subgoal, additional actions toward achieving that goal may seem to be complementary and more likely to be pursued.

via Derek Sivers (Yep, via the post I linked-to in my previous post. I felt that this needed its own post as I wanted to provide a balanced view on the study, not just saying, somewhat incorrectly, “success on one sub-goal […] reduced efforts on other important sub-goals”.)

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