My previous blog post on time management was about how to make your plans easier to implement. It’s great fun to make plans for yourself. You might be so happy about your admirable new intentions that you want to tell someone else about what you’ve decided to do. After all, if you say out loud that you intend to learn Bayesian statistics, doesn’t that make you more accountable if you get lazy? Why not say something to your friends over dinner to stop yourself from backing out?
You might want to think twice. Gollwitzer et al. 2009 presents four experiments suggesting that when you tell people you intend to engage in “identity-relevant activities”, it becomes less likely that you’ll actually follow through with your plans. If you want to read that long monograph or get comfortable with R, just do it. Continue reading “Why you should never advertise your plans”