The Sunday five minutes

The sentence is written once and looked at weekly, and the weekly look is what stops the sentence going the way of the wish.

On Sunday, at a time you'll keep, take five minutes and look at the week. Not the wish. The sentence. How many of the planned days happened? For each one that didn't, what was in the way? Then decide one thing about next week, and write the sentence again with that one change in it. That's the whole of it.

There are three findings behind this. Locke and Latham's summary in chapter 9 says feedback is one of the conditions under which specific goals work, and the wish gives none, because nothing on a Tuesday measures "get fit". The sentence gives feedback every week in a form a child could read, done or not done. Milne's participants planned for the coming week, not the coming year, and a week is the horizon over which you can see what's coming. And the fresh start effect, from chapters 3 and 11, gives you a free push on Monday, so a Sunday decision arrives at the start of the week with the calendar behind it.

What the Sunday look decides is size, day and time. If three weeks of Tuesdays went well, raise the size a little. Twenty minutes, not fifteen. If Tuesday failed twice and Thursday worked twice, the sentence moves to Thursday and the question is what Tuesday has in it that Thursday doesn't. If a whole week went, the sentence was too big for the week you actually had, and the first move is to shrink it, not to try harder at the same size. Trying harder is the picture's advice and chapter 5 explained where that leads.

What the Sunday look doesn't do is issue a verdict. It's five minutes about a line on a week, and it has nothing to say about what kind of person you are. If you notice a verdict forming, the earlier book in this series You wouldn't say it to a friend is about that, and its test applies. Would you say it to someone else who missed a Tuesday? Then don't say it to yourself.

Keep the five minutes short. It's a look, not a review of your life. The point is that the sentence gets adjusted before the next Tuesday, every week, for as many weeks as Lally's curve needs, which is more than you think and fewer than you fear.