By Dan Remon · Evidence checked October 2026
The same goals come back every January. Lose the weight, grow the business, get fit, write the plan.
The goals are usually fine. What sinks them is a short list of habits running underneath, and nobody puts those in the plan. There’s plenty of advice on what to add: the new routine, the new app, the new program. Far less of it covers what to stop.
These are the 5 things I’d quit first, what the research says about each one and how to make the quitting stick.
What to quit to reach your goals
If you keep restarting the same goals, quit 5 things: procrastinating, letting negative thinking set your actions, comparing yourself with others, chasing goals without a plan and talking about your plans instead of acting on them. Each one costs you weeks without looking like much on the day. Quit them one at a time, starting with the one that costs you most. Then check every Friday whether it has crept back, because an old habit returns the moment you’re tired or busy. The decision to quit takes a minute. Keeping it takes a weekly review.
1. Quit procrastinating
You weren’t born a procrastinator. Procrastination is a habit: a behaviour repeated until it runs on its own. Habits respond to structure.
A 2007 meta-analysis by Piers Steel, built on 691 correlations, found that the strong and consistent predictors of procrastination were how unpleasant the task is, how far away it sits in time, how confident you are that you can do it and impulsiveness, along with conscientiousness and its parts: self-control, distractibility, organisation and achievement motivation.1 The data is correlational, so it shows what travels with procrastination rather than proving cause. It still gives you a list of what to change:
- Make the first step smaller. “Write the strategy” is unpleasant. “Write 3 bullet points for the strategy” isn’t.
- Bring the deadline closer. A deadline next quarter is easy to ignore. Set one for this week.
- Build confidence with a checklist. Break the work into steps and tick each one off. Every tick is evidence you can do the next one.
- Remove the distraction before you start. Phone in another room, browser tabs closed, social media at set times only.
- Use the urge as a cue. Notice the moment you reach for your phone or open a new tab, and make it the trigger to do the first step instead.
I’ve covered more ways to stop putting things off in 10 ways of stopping procrastination.
2. Quit negative thinking
The voice that tells you what you can’t do doesn’t go away. Letting it decide what you do is what holds you back.
The standard advice is to drown it out with affirmations. The evidence for that is weaker than the advice suggests. A 2009 paper in Psychological Science started with a survey showing that people often use positive self-statements and believe they work. Then 2 experiments found that people with low self-esteem who repeated “I’m a lovable person” felt worse than people who didn’t. People with high self-esteem felt better, but only to a limited degree.2 The authors’ conclusion was that affirmations can backfire for the very people who most want them to work.
What I do instead is treat the thought as feedback. “You’ll never get fit” usually points at something real: no plan, no time in the calendar, a target set too high for this quarter. Fix that and the voice has less to work with. Feedback, not failure.
Belief follows evidence. Keep one small promise to yourself every day for a month and you’ll have more proof than any sentence you repeat in the mirror. I’ve written more on this in mindset mastery for leaders.
3. Quit comparing yourself with others
Comparison is a distraction that passes itself off as motivation. It pulls your attention off your own goal and opens the door to the negative thinking from the section above.
Social media makes it constant. A 2019 meta-analysis in the Journal of Affective Disorders found that more time on social networking sites and more frequent checking were linked to higher levels of depression, with a small effect. Upward comparison on those sites, measuring yourself against people who seem to be doing better, had a medium-sized link, stronger than time spent.3 The studies are correlational, and the comparison analyses rest on only 5 articles, so the data doesn’t prove that comparison causes low mood. It’s enough for me to treat the feed as something to manage.
The only comparison worth making is against yourself: this month’s numbers against last month’s. That tells you whether your system is working. Someone else’s results come from a different starting point, different resources and a highlight reel you can’t see behind. Small gains against your own baseline are what compound. I call that The 1% Compound, and I’ve set out the arithmetic in 10 moves for a better life.
Set 2 fixed times a day for social media and take the apps off your phone. If an app is hard to reach, you’ll check it less.
4. Quit chasing goals without a plan
Random actions produce random results. I know very few people who’ve built something lasting without planning their week, whether the goal is losing weight, getting fitter, growing a business or hitting the numbers at work.
Writing a goal down is a start. A plan needs more: exactly what the goal is, the deadline, the specific steps and the resources each step needs. Then each step needs a time and a place. In a 2006 meta-analysis covering 94 independent tests, plans that spelled out when, where and how people would act had a medium-to-large effect on reaching goals (d = 0.65).4
Years ago I extended the SMART goal model into my own version, SMARTER, built around a continuous cycle of evaluation, action and results. Today that cycle runs every week. The Weekly Compass takes 30 minutes at the start of the week to plan it and block the steps, and the Friday Debrief closes it. The full method for setting the goal itself is in goal setting that survives the quarter.
5. Quit talking about it
People are good talkers. They’ll tell you what they plan to do, where they’re heading and how much they’ll make. I’ve watched people describe the same plan for years with very little to show for it.
There’s research behind the instinct. In 4 experiments published in 2009, intentions tied to who people wanted to become, such as reading law journals to become a lawyer, were acted on less when someone else had taken notice of them. The final study suggested why: being noticed gave people a premature sense of already being who they were aiming to become.5
The picture is mixed. A 2017 meta-analysis of 141 papers found goal setting worked better when the goal was set publicly.6 A 2016 meta-analysis of 138 randomised studies found that monitoring your progress worked better when the results were reported to others or made public.7 Telling people your plan can feel like progress. Reporting your numbers to someone who checks them is the kind of talking that helps.
So my rule is this. Say the goal once, to the people who’ll hold you to it: a business partner, a peer group or a coach. Holding people to their numbers is a big part of what Stealth Coaching is for. After that, talk in numbers. Do the work before you talk about it: pick the action with the biggest impact, put it in your calendar, close the door and start.
How to make quitting stick: the Friday Debrief
Quitting is easy to decide on a Monday and easy to forget by Thursday. The tool I use to hold it is the Friday Debrief.
It takes 15 minutes at the end of the week, written down, and answers 4 questions:
- What moved this week.
- What stalled.
- What knocked the plan off course.
- The one thing that changes next week.
The third question is where the 5 habits show up. Procrastination shows up as the task that slid to next week again. Comparison shows up as the hour you lost to someone else’s highlights. Talking shows up as the plan you described 3 times and didn’t start. The fourth question is where you decide what to quit, one thing at a time.
Write it down, and keep it in the same place every week. In the 2016 meta-analysis on progress monitoring, the effect was larger when the information was physically recorded.7 A month of written debriefs shows you which habit keeps coming back, and that’s the one to work on next. Keep it to 15 minutes. A debrief that takes an hour gets skipped by the third week.
The Friday Debrief closes the weekly rhythm that the Weekly Compass opens. I’ve set out the full rhythm in a productivity system that survives a bad week.
How to start
Start by finding the habit that costs you most.
- The 1% Scorecard. Free, 8 questions, 2 minutes. You get a score out of 100 and the one thing to install first.
- The Quest. The performance membership, if you want the system and the weekly rhythm without private coaching. It runs in 28-day cycles and you can cancel anytime.
Pick one thing to quit. Defend it every Friday.
Related reading: From purpose to impact: how to turn purpose into weekly action, 7 tips for creating a clear vision for your life and Does visualisation work? What the research says.
FAQ
What should you quit to be more successful?
Start with 5 habits: procrastinating, letting negative thinking set your actions, comparing yourself with others, chasing goals without a plan and talking about plans instead of acting on them. Quit one at a time, starting with the one that costs you most. Check every Friday that it hasn’t crept back.
How do I stop procrastinating?
Make the first step smaller, bring the deadline closer and remove distractions before you start. A 2007 meta-analysis found that task aversiveness, task delay, self-efficacy and impulsiveness were among the strongest predictors of procrastination. Then book the first step into a specific time and place.
Do positive affirmations work?
Not reliably. In 2 experiments published in 2009, people with low self-esteem who repeated “I’m a lovable person” felt worse than people who didn’t, while people with high self-esteem felt better only to a limited degree. Keeping small promises to yourself builds more belief than repeating a sentence.
Should you tell people your goals?
Tell the people who’ll hold you to them, then report numbers rather than plans. One set of experiments found that when others noticed people’s identity-related intentions, they acted on them less. A 2016 meta-analysis found that monitoring progress worked better when the results were reported or made public.
Sources
- Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: A meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 65-94. doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.133.1.65
- Wood, J. V., Perunovic, W. Q. E., & Lee, J. W. (2009). Positive self-statements: Power for some, peril for others. Psychological Science, 20(7), 860-866. doi.org/
10.1111/ j.1467-9280.2009.02370.x - Yoon, S., Kleinman, M., Mertz, J., & Brannick, M. (2019). Is social network site usage related to depression? A meta-analysis of Facebook-depression relations. Journal of Affective Disorders, 248, 65-72. doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2019.01.026
- Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69-119. doi.org/
10.1016/ S0065-2601(06)38002-1 - Gollwitzer, P. M., Sheeran, P., Michalski, V., & Seifert, A. E. (2009). When intentions go public: Does social reality widen the intention-behavior gap? Psychological Science, 20(5), 612-618. doi.org/
10.1111/ j.1467-9280.2009.02336.x - Epton, T., Currie, S., & Armitage, C. J. (2017). Unique effects of setting goals on behavior change: Systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 85(12), 1182-1198. doi.org/10.1037/ccp0000260
- Harkin, B., Webb, T. L., Chang, B. P. I., Prestwich, A., Conner, M., Kellar, I., Benn, Y., & Sheeran, P. (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 142(2), 198-229. doi.org/10.1037/bul0000025
This article is general information, not medical advice.
