On Monday you told yourself
this week I will write the tests
for the parser.
You meant it.
It was a good plan.
On Friday afternoon
the parser still had no tests.
Nothing stopped you.
Every day
something else was more urgent,
or more interesting,
or simply arrived first.
The tests were always
going to happen later.
Later has no time on it.
That was the whole problem.
Peter Gollwitzer
spent years studying this gap
between intending and doing.
What helped most
was not a stronger intention.
It was a more specific one.
He called it
an implementation intention.
Not I will do X.
When situation Y happens,
I will do X.
A large review of the research,
by Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran in 2006,
pulled together
nearly a hundred tests of the idea
and found it made people
noticeably more likely
to follow through
than a goal alone.
The reason is simple.
A goal waits for you
to remember it
and decide that now is the time.
An if then plan
hands the deciding
to a moment that is going to happen anyway.
The cue arrives,
and the next step
is already chosen.
So stop writing goals
for the week.
Write the moment.
After stand up on Tuesday,
before I open chat,
I open parser_test
and write the first failing case.
When a review request arrives
after four,
I leave it for the morning.
When the build is running,
I read the next ticket,
not the news.
Make the cue concrete.
A time,
a place,
an event you can see.
Make the action small enough
to start without thinking.
Open the file.
Write the first case.
Not finish the suite.
And plan for the thing
that usually stops you.
If someone messages me
while I am in the test file,
I reply after the first case passes.
An intention without a when
is a wish
with a deadline you never set.
Give it a door to walk through,
and it walks.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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