The Psychology of Goals
If you're looking for some great reading this morning, you might be interesting in the PsyBlog series on the Psychology of Goals. This 9-part series digs into a number of different aspects of goal setting. To whet you're appetite, here is a brief snippet from our favourite of the series:
There are all sorts of unwanted side-effects to badly set goals (Ordonez et al., 2009):
- Too specific: It's easy to get stuck on a goal that's too specific and lose sight of the overall aim. Goals should be in the service of our overall aims, they shouldn't be our masters.
- Too many: when people have too many goals they tend to concentrate on the easy ones. If the difficult ones are more important, once again the overall aim can suffer.
- Too soon: short-term goals encourage short-term thinking. Do you want your business to be around in five, ten or twenty years? The reason it's difficult to get a cab on a rainy day in New York is partly because cabbies do such good business that they go home early, having met their daily target. Why stop working when profits are high? That's short-term goal-setting for you.
To read the rest of the articles, just pick from the list below:
