Willpower

in a month and how to get there. Leave some flexibility and anticipate setbacks. When you check your progress at month’s end, remember that you don’t have to meet each goal every time—what matters is that your life gradually improves from month to month.
    Aiming for huge and quick transformations will backfire if they seem impossible. If you can’t bring yourself to quit smoking altogether, try cutting down to two or three cigarettes per day. If you’re drinking too much but won’t swear off alcohol, perhaps you can live with a weekly plan that limits alcohol to the weekends, or that specifies several nights each week of no drinking while allowing whatever you want on other nights. Are you someone who can interrupt an evening of drinking to have no alcohol for an hour, to see where you are, and then make a good decision about whether to resume drinking? If you are, that can be an effective way to limit the damage. But if you’re not one of those people, don’t kid yourself. Effective planning should even budget your willpower. How will you expend your willpower today, this evening, and the next month? If there are extra challenges ahead, like doing your taxes or traveling, figure out where you’ll get the extra willpower, such as by cutting back on other demands.
    When you’re budgeting your time, don’t give drudgery more than its necessary share. Remember Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Set a firm time limit for tedious tasks. “Clean out basement” or “Reorganize closets” could take up the whole day—if you ever got around to it, which you won’t because you don’t want to lose a day of your life to something so mundane. But if you set a clear limit of one or two hours, you might get something done this Saturday (and then, if necessary, plan another short stint of work for another weekend). Even David Allen, the guru of productivity, makes allowances for Parkinson’s Law. When he travels for speeches on Getting Things Done, he doesn’t start packing until thirty-five minutes before departure. “I know I can pack in thirty-five minutes,” he says, “but if I start any earlier, I could spend six hours on it. Giving myself a deadline forces me to make decisions that I don’t want to make ahead of time—and I’ve accepted that about myself. I’ve got bigger battles to fight.”

Make a To-Do List—or at Least a To-Don’t List
    We devoted chapter 3 to the glorious history of the to-do list, but we realize that some readers might still not feel like drawing one up. It can sound dreary and off-putting. If so, try thinking of it as a todon’t list: a catalog of things that you don’t have to worry about once you write them down. As we saw in our discussion of the Zeigarnik effect, when you try to ignore unfinished tasks, your unconscious keeps fretting about them in the same way that an ear worm keeps playing an unfinished song. You can’t banish them from your brain by procrastinating or by willing yourself to forget them.
    But once you make a specific plan, your unconscious will be mollified. You need to at least plan the specific next step to take: what to do, whom to contact, how to do it (in person? by phone? by e-mail?). If you can also plan specifically when and where to do it, so much the better, but that’s not essential. As long as you’ve decided what to do and put it on the list, your unconscious can relax.

Beware the Planning Fallacy
    Whenever you set a goal, beware of what psychologists call the planning fallacy. It affects everyone from young students to veteran executives. When was the last time you heard of a highway or building being completed six months early? Late and over budget is the norm.
    The planning fallacy was quantified in an experiment involving college seniors working on honors theses. The psychologist Roger Buehler and his colleagues asked these seniors to predict when they would probably finish, along with best-case and worst-case predictions. On average, the students predicted it would take thirty-four days to finish, but in fact they ended up taking nearly twice as long—fifty-six days. Only a handful finished by the date of their best-case prediction. The worst-case prediction, based on the assumption that everything would go as poorly as it possibly could, should have been easy to beat—after all, rarely does everything go wrong—but in fact it wasn’t. Not even half the students finished