A goal journal entry needs two things, and neither of them is a vision board. Write one goal specific enough that you could not fake having reached it, and hard enough that you are not sure you will. Then, underneath it, write the sentence that begins with “if” – the plan for the exact moment you would otherwise stop.
That second line is the part with evidence behind it. The two statistics that hold up most goal-setting writing do not have any, and one of them is thirty years into being publicly debunked.
The Study That Never Happened
You have probably met it. In 1953 Yale surveyed its graduating class, found that 3 per cent had written goals, and twenty years later discovered that those 3 per cent had out-earned the other 97 per cent combined. Sometimes it is Harvard Business School. Sometimes the multiple is ten times.
Yale University Library has looked into this on the record. Its answer to the question of where to find the 1953 goal study is that “no ‘goals study’ of the Class of 1953 actually occurred”. The library consulted university administrators and went through the records of several offices and found “no relevant record, nor did anyone recall the purported study”. The secretary of the Class of 1953 and members of the class had never heard of it either.
The trail is documented as well. The library traces the claim to a September 1991 article in Success magazine; the author of that article traced his own source to the motivational speaker Zig Ziglar, who said he had “only heard the statistics mentioned over the years, but had no concrete source”. Fast Company published Lawrence Tabak’s investigation of the whole thing in 1996.
Thirty years on it is still one of the most-repeated numbers in the genre.
The Statistic That Replaced It
The modern version is “writing your goals down makes you 42 per cent more likely to achieve them”, usually credited to Gail Matthews at Dominican University of California.
Here is what I actually found. Dominican University’s own scholarly repository holds a record for Matthews’ work on commitment, accountability and written goals. Its document type is recorded as a podium presentation, delivered at the 87th Convention of the Western Psychological Association in Vancouver in 2007. A later presentation followed at a conference in Athens. What I could not find – and I went looking specifically for it – was a peer-reviewed journal article, which is a different thing from a conference talk in a way that matters for a number this heavily used.
And then the part I did not expect. Matthews’ own abstract opens like this:
Perhaps you have heard of the Yale (or Harvard Business School) study of goals in which only 3% of the graduating class had specific written goals for their futures. Twenty years later that 3% was found to be earning an astounding 10 times that of the group that had no clear goals. Well, it turns out that this “study” is merely an “urban myth” … no such study had ever been done!
She is the person who called the first myth a myth. Her research exists because the fake study kept getting quoted at people. And her figure is now doing exactly what the fake one did – travelling without its paperwork, printed on planner packaging, quoted by people who have not read a word of it.
None of that is a criticism of her. It is a criticism of how the genre uses numbers. I could not verify the 42 per cent against a primary document, so it does not appear in this article as a fact, and I would treat it carefully wherever else you meet it.
What Does Replicate
Two things, both well-established, neither of which is about the mere act of writing goals down.
Specific and difficult beats “do your best”. Edwin Locke and Gary Latham spent thirty-five years on this. Summarising it, they wrote: “We found that specific, difficult goals consistently led to higher performance than urging people to do their best. The effect sizes in meta-analyses ranged from .42 to .80.” And then, more bluntly: “In short, when people are asked to do their best, they do not do so.” (Locke and Latham, “Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey”, American Psychologist, vol. 57, no. 9, September 2002, pp. 705-717, DOI 10.1037/0003-066X.57.9.705.)
And a written if-then plan beats a written goal. Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran call these implementation intentions. Their own summary, hosted by the National Cancer Institute, defines them as
if-then plans that link situational cues (i.e., good opportunities to act, critical moments) with responses that are effective in attaining goals or desired outcomes (“If situation Y is encountered, then I will initiate behavior Z in order to reach goal X!”).
Their 2006 meta-analysis is where the numbers come from. “Overall, forming implementation intentions had a medium-to-large effect on rates of goal attainment across the 94 studies included in the review (d = .65).”
The breakdown is more useful than the headline, because it names the two ways goals die. If-then plans had “a medium-to-large effect on alleviating failures to get started with goal striving (d = .61)”, and “an effect of similar magnitude on preventing derailment of goal striving (d = .77)”.
Starting, and getting knocked off. Two problems, two sentences.
Nearly every popular technique in this field arrives with a number attached and no citation underneath it, and about half the time the number dissolves when you go and look. Going and looking is most of what I do here. The newsletter is where whatever I turn up lands first, and it is short.
The Template
It is short, and it should be. A page of prompts would be padding.
- The goal, in one sentence, specific and difficult. Specific means someone else could tell whether you had done it. Difficult means you are genuinely unsure.
- If-then for starting. “If it is Tuesday at 7am and I am at my desk, then I will open the manuscript before opening email.”
- If-then for derailing. “If I miss two sessions in a row, then I will write for ten minutes on the next weekday morning, whatever else is happening.”
- Date it. That is the entry.
A worked example, constructed for this article rather than taken from anyone’s notebook:
28 September. Goal: submit the full manuscript to three agents by 20 December. (Not “work on the book”.)
If it is a weekday and the kettle has boiled, then I write for twenty-five minutes before I look at my phone.
If I have written nothing by Thursday, then Saturday morning is a session and I move the Saturday errands to Sunday.
Three lines. It fits on the inside cover of a notebook, which is where it should live so that you see it without opening anything.
The reason it takes this shape rather than the usual quarterly-goals worksheet is that the if-then sentence is doing something a goal cannot. A goal describes a destination. An if-then names a cue that will actually occur in your week and attaches one behaviour to it, so the decision is made in advance, at a calm moment, rather than at 7am against your own reluctance.
If you find it useful to write the goal as a letter instead, writing to the person who will have to do it is a different and gentler way in – though it is a motivational exercise rather than a plan, and it does not replace the if-then lines.
Which If-Then to Write
Gollwitzer and Sheeran’s chapter names three separate ways of failing to start, and they need different sentences. Diagnose before you write.
- You forget to act. The cue is missing, not the will. Attach the behaviour to something that reliably happens: a kettle, a school run, an alarm you already have.
- You miss the opportunity. The moment comes and goes while you are deciding. Name the moment precisely – “when I sit down after dinner”, not “in the evening”.
- You are reluctant at the start. You know exactly when, and you do not want to. Shrink the “then” until the reluctance has nothing to push against. Ten minutes. One paragraph. Boots on.
- You get derailed after starting. This is the .77 case, the largest effect of the three. Write the sentence for the interruption you can already predict: the busy fortnight, the illness, the trip.
That last one is worth a line of its own in the notebook, because it is the failure people never plan for. Everybody writes a start plan in January. Almost nobody writes the sentence for the first week it all goes wrong.
If what you are trying to build is a repeated behaviour rather than a one-off outcome, marking a behaviour done or not done is the companion page – a tracker answers “did I”, where a goal journal answers “am I still going the right way”.
How Often to Reread It
Weekly, and inside something you already do rather than as a new ritual. The weekly loop that runs a goal once it is written is the page for that, and it is deliberately not repeated here.
The rereading is not motivational. You are checking one thing: whether the if-then sentences still describe your actual week. Cues go stale. If you changed jobs, the 7am desk no longer exists, and the plan attached to it quietly stopped being a plan a month ago.
Once a year is a different and worthwhile exercise – the once-a-year version, looking back – but it is reflection rather than planning and it will not catch a dead cue in March.
How Many Goals
The research does not settle this, and anyone who gives you a number is guessing.
The practical limit falls out of the template itself. Every goal needs its own if-then lines, and those lines only work if you can recall them at the moment the cue arrives. Two goals with four sentences between them is manageable. Six goals with twelve sentences is a document, and documents do not fire at 7am.
Write fewer. Write them harder. Write the sentence for the week it falls apart, which is the one thing almost nobody has on the page – and which, of everything in this article, has the strongest number behind it.
The rest of the formats are in the rest of the template library, and if the underlying problem is that the writing itself keeps stopping, that is a different fix: building the writing habit itself.
The genre’s default is a worksheet with twelve prompts and a statistic on the cover. The evidence points at three sentences and no statistic at all. If you want more of the version that came from the source documents rather than the search results, my newsletter goes out occasionally and the first email arrives within the hour. There is also a full course, if you would rather work through the whole practice in order – it is on Udemy, and 36,700 people have taken it.
