Willpower by Roy F. Baumeister Page B

starting with Monday’s to-do list:
    1. Let there be light.
    2. Observe light.
    3. Confirm light is good.
    4. Divide light from darkness.
    5. Give name to light (Day).
    6. Give name to darkness (Night).
    Thus was writ the weekly calendar: Tuesday for firmament-making chores, Wednesday for creating land and trees, Thursday for stars, Friday for fish and fowl, Saturday for man and woman, Sunday for R&R. The tasks were checked off one at a time, then reviewed at the end of the week: “And God saw every thing that He had made, and, behold, it was very good.”
    Does that restful weekend sound anything like yours? At first glance, the Genesis strategy seems ridiculously obvious: Set a goal; make a list of the steps to reach it; do them; relax. But how many mortals actually cross off all the items on their weekly list? Our failure rate keeps climbing as the lists keep getting longer. At any one time, a person typically has at least 150 different tasks to be done, and fresh items never stop appearing on our screens. How do we decide what goes on the list and what to do next? The good news is that there are finally some practical answers, but it’s hardly been a straightforward process to discover these strategies. Only after decades of research by psychologists and neuroscientists, after centuries of self-help books and millennia of trial and error, can we recognize the essential components of the Genesis to-do list.
    The first step in self-control is to set a clear goal. The technical term researchers use for self-control is self-regulation, and the “regulation” part highlights the importance of a goal. Regulating means changing, but only a particular kind of intentional, meaningful changing. To regulate is to guide toward a specific goal or standard: the speed limit for cars on a highway, the maximum height for an office building. Self-control without goals and other standards would be nothing more than aimless change, like trying to diet without any idea of which foods are fattening.
    For most of us, though, the problem is not a lack of goals but rather too many of them. We make daily to-do lists that couldn’t be accomplished even if there were no interruptions during the day, which there always are. By the time the weekend arrives, there are more unfinished tasks than ever, but we keep deferring them and expecting to get through them with miraculous speed. That’s why, as productivity experts have found, an executive’s daily to-do list for Monday often contains more work than could be done the entire week.
    We can be even more unrealistic in setting longer-term goals. When that great self-help pioneer Benjamin Franklin wrote his autobiography late in life, he recalled with some amusement the mission he had set for himself in his twenties: “I conceiv’d the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection. I wish’d to live without committing any fault at any time; I would conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into.” Soon enough, he noticed a problem. “While my care was employ’d in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another. Habit took the advantage of inattention; inclination was sometimes too strong for reason.”
    So Franklin tried a divide-and-conquer approach. He drew up a list of virtues and wrote a brief goal for each one, like this one for Order: “Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.” There were a dozen more virtues on his list—Temperance, Silence, Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, Justice, Moderation, Cleanliness, Tranquility, Chastity, and Humility—but he recognized his limits. “I judg’d it would be well not to distract my attention by attempting the whole at once,” Franklin explained, “but to fix it on one of them at a time.” The result was what he called a “course,” and what today would be marketed as 13 Weeks to Total Virtue. Long before Steven