Goals are important, and we constantly set and pursue goals to improve ourselves, for example, staying healthy by regulating gym activities and checking our diets. At work, you may also plan your career by setting goals according to your age. For example, one may desire to be a director by 30 years old, or earning a six-figure salary by 40 years old. Breaking it down to smaller goals, we may seek to hit that sales quota next month, or remind oneself to create a certain number of leads by the next quarter. While setting goals is good, one needs to be careful of leaving all the work to the future self — “It’s two more days to the start of next month. I will talk to more clients then, so I don’t have to work so hard now.”
My new research, co-authored with colleagues from Sungkyunkwan University, University of California, Los Angeles, and University of Florida, published in the journal Organisational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes, shows that anticipating temporal landmarks, such as New Year, or the 30th birthday, will make people less motivated in their goal pursuit activities. The date demarcates the future self from the current self. Thinking that the work can be done by the future self, we slack off from chasing our current goals.
It is all fine if our future selves pick up the slack as we thought it would. The thing is, they don’t. In one of the experiments in the study, we recruited 130 undergraduates, who were told that they were participating in a 7-day “click marathon” for charity. Logging into the study website and clicking a specific button, for five minutes daily, would raise money for the charity. The control group saw a generic calendar while the condition group was nudged to see 1 February (Day 4 of the experiment) as a clear demarcation from 31 January. The results? There was a large difference in the number of clicks between the groups only on Day 3, 31 January. Those in the condition group had about half the number of clicks of the control group. Yet this condition group did not catch up on their number of clicks on 1 February.
The findings can also be relevant to employers, coaches and managers. For this group of leaders who monitor others’ goals, setting a temporal landmark may not be the best way of motivating their charges to work hard towards their goals. To encourage them, the employers or coaches can remind their charges of things that they consistently do for goal pursuit. This is because research has shown that people desire to be consistent with their past actions. In one of our experiments, when participants in the temporal landmark condition group were reminded of what they consistently did for their workout goal, they were less likely to skip a workout.
Motivation is dynamic. Previous research has shown that temporal landmarks can ignite the pursuit of new goals. If you are already working on a goal, having that future date in mind may actually reduce your motivation to work hard now. If you want to achieve your goals, hand the responsibility to your current self, not your future self.