Publicly committing to a personal goal considered harmful | Hacker News Reader

Publicly committing to a personal goal considered harmful

spring.org.uk

40 pointsbeza1e116 comments

Rule from personal software projects: If you tell other people of your first release, you won't have a first release, ever. The only thing that works is "hey, i wrote this and it works, have a try!" -- you'll be hatching your creation until that and you might actually get to release it.

Note that the first release need not be big and complete, just something that works. But the game changes after that, so the above rule loses its context. Running a public project is a different scenario from the initial phase of development.

This is exactly how I do things in general. It's great for when you can't deliver. Nobody expects things that haven't been promised.

My experience is that it depends a great deal on the types of the goals and how they're presented. The article mentions vaguely-defined, general self-improvement goals, like taking up a new hobby. I can see a public commitment being counterproductive there. But I'd bet that it works differently for more quantifiable goals, especially ones with a specific starting time, such as completing Nanowrimo, or telling your boss that you're going find a fix for bug XXX before Monday.

Quitting smoking? A hell of a lot easier to change your mind about if you haven't told anyone.

Of course, we're just going on the article. I don't have access to the original paper, but just reading the abstract already suggests (big surprise here) that the article is probably not a faithful summary of the study in question.

The original paper is posted on the the author's site:

http://www.psych.nyu.edu/gollwitzer/09_Gollwitzer_Sheeran_Se...

I got to know this law by Derek Sivers's TED talk[1] and I totally agreed with him especially about personal programming project. A downside of this approach is that you cannot get a feedback until you unveil first version.

[1] Derek Sivers: Keep your goals to yourself http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/derek_sivers_keep_your_goal...

I find it more likely that the harm done to your goal is not caused by public announcement of that goal, but rather announcing it is evidence that you aren't as committed to the goal as you are to other goals that you're better at sticking to. In other words, if you're having trouble with achieving something in particular, or working towards it, then you are likely to acknowledge that to yourself in the form of "needing to set a goal" and thus "announcing it to the world", thus automatically ensuring that announced goals are less likely to be kept by the very nature of the fact that they needed to be announced in the first place. If you want something badly enough, you are more likely to "just do it", thus foregoing the need to announce it to others.

Had the idea of publicly committing been tested before? I'd be pretty surprised if this was the first controlled study about this idea.

I found beeminder (https://www.beeminder.com/) to be a surprisingly effective commitment utility. The goal has to be measurable, and you have to trust yourself somewhat enough not to subvert the rules, but since there is a counter-party most people's sense of personal ethics should be sufficient.

http://four.livejournal.com/963421.html

I'd say, only talk about your future plans as much as you are comfortable to. Sometimes just talking vaguely about your things with other people helps to keep you interested and motivated.

Well, I'm sorry to say that I believe exactly the opposite. Public committing means a high level of responsibility and scrutiny, and it is the best motivator for any task.

In our weelky meetings we write down each task that needs to be done and the name of the person in charge, then send it by email. Even if there is no follow-up the next week, we observed that stopping to send the emails leads to less work done (or, at least, not the work that is expected to be done by the managers)

Perhaps the effect depends on whether you are part of a team or not.

Yes, I guess you're right. Motivation is very dependent on the teamwork variable, and my argument was following the "startup" point of view, which is common here. Wasn't expecting down votes, however.

"Public committing means a high level of responsibility and scrutiny, and it is the best motivator for any task."

It's the best motivator for some people for some tasks. People and tasks are infinitely varied.

"In our weekly meetings ..."

It's interesting to ask whether motivation works differently for public-ish work tasks versus private goals.

Believe what you want, but your belief is directly contradicted by evidence.

Also note that your example is of something very different, as it is not personal goals of the person being put in charge of the tasks, but tasks put in place to carry out a duty to someone else.

With personal goals, publicly committing to them will rarely lead to a strong negative reaction if you fail.

I'm not so sure it's so clear (in research) that some form of public commitment reduces the likelihood of completion.

In fact, Robert Cialdini found that commitment was an excellent form of motivation. "If people commit, orally or in writing, to an idea or goal, they are more likely to honor that commitment because of establishing that idea or goal as being congruent with their self image. Even if the original incentive or motivation is removed after they have already agreed, they will continue to honor the agreement. For example, in car sales, suddenly raising the price at the last moment works because the buyer has already decided to buy."[1]

Cialdini performed his original research several decades ago, but it has been continued by the Freakonomics/Kahneman/"Nudge" crew. To the best of my recollection, all of their experiments showed a strong positive effect when public commitment was added. It's the principle behind StickK.com, as well.

Perhaps there are certain types of improvements (vague self improvement was mentioned elsewhere in this thread) that are harmed by external reinforcement, but I think that's more the exception rather than the rule.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cialdini (also check out his "psychology of influence" book for more on the topic)

"Public committing means a high level of responsibility and scrutiny, and it is the best motivator for any task."

Results is more explaining to many and less doing :)

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