The Volitional Benefits of Planning

Abstract

Assume that you have decided to accomplish a personal wish or desire that has been on your mind for quite some time. Should you go ahead and plan the execution of behaviors that will eventually lead to your desire? Or would planning only be a waste of time, as you already feel highly committed to act and ready to go? Would passively waiting for a good opportunity to get started not be sufficient? As planning might not add anything to the commitment implied by your decision, the time and effort devoted to planning might be unnecessary. The present chapter focuses on this issue: Does planning promote the willful implementation of a person's goals and thus provide volitional benefits? My colleagues and I believe that planning helps to alleviate crucial volitional problems of goal achievement, such as being too easily distracted from a goal pursuit or giving up in the face of difficulties when increased effort and persistence are needed instead. The conceptual analysis of this question relies on ideas that have evolved around the model of action phases (Heckhausen & Gollwitzer, 1987). In particular, we use two different but related concepts to understand the processes by which planning unfolds its beneficial effects on goal achievement: "implemental mind-sets" (Gollwitzer, 1990) and "implementation intentions" (Gollwitzer, 1993).