事无巨细的计划往往事与愿违

    人人都知道，要完成一个冗长复杂的任务清单，最好的方法就是计划好每个任务的每个步骤。对吧？但如果你真的这么去做，结果却往往适得其反。请别难过，这其实是正常的。

    埃米•多尔顿在香港科技大学教授营销学，她告诉我们：“尽管动机很好，但大多数的目标最终都没有实现。”她与加州大学洛杉矶分校安德森管理学院的助理教授斯蒂芬•斯皮勒开展了一系列研究，试图找出这一现象背后的原因。

    完整的研究结果将发表在《消费者研究杂志》的10月刊上，题目为“物极必反：从完成意愿中获益取决于目标的数量”。

    他们发现，如果你的任务清单里只有一个大目标，计划周详会很有帮助。然而，清单越长，专门计划的用处就越小。

    “如果今天你有六件事要做，而且都很要紧，那么你坐下来开始安排每件事的细节时，就会很快意识到完成所有任务有多么困难。”多尔顿解释道：“你觉得难以应付，既然做不到，你就泄了气，没干劲了。相反的，那些并未制定详细计划的人会更相信自己能完成任务。”

    这里就可以引用亨利•福特的格言了：“如果你觉得你做不到，你是对的；如果你觉得你做得到，你也是对的。”为了避免因为过度分析而丧失行动力，多尔顿建议：“只对最重要的目标制定详细计划。”对其它事情，就像某鞋厂的招牌口号：just do it（只管去做）。

    不过多尔顿和斯皮勒还发现：一旦相信了其他人正面临更多麻烦，即使自己也任务繁重，我们反而不会受到计划的羁绊。多尔顿说：“如果你知道其他人要干的活更多，你就不那么容易被自己的计划吓倒了。”这一现象的原因还不那么清楚，但也可能仅仅是想和邻居，或者办公室隔壁小间的同事比一比的人类天性。

    是否从事某些职业的人士更容易完成其任务清单呢？最近LinkedIn的调查给出了答案：是。在6500名专业人士中，83%的从事农业的受访者自称能完成每天的任务清单，比例最高。而律师该比例最低，仅有66%。其他人士的得分都在两者之间。令人欣慰的是：没有哪个职业组能得满分。

    Everybody knows that the best way to accomplish a long, complicated list of goals is to plan each step of every task -- right? But if you've taken that approach and found that, the more detailed your plans, the less you actually got done, cheer up: It seems that's normal.

    "Despite good intentions, most goals go unfulfilled," says Amy Dalton, who teaches marketing at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She and Stephen Spiller, an assistant professor of marketing at the Anderson School of Management at UCLA, teamed up on a series of studies to find out why that is.

    The full research results will be published in a study called "Too Much of a Good Thing: The Benefits of Implementation Intentions Depend on the Number of Goals,"set to appear in the October issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.

    Turns out, detailed planning works quite well if you have just one big item on your to-do list. The longer your list, however, the less useful it is to make your plans too specific.

    "If you have six things to do today, all high priority, and you sit down and start planning everything out in detail, you quickly realize how difficult it will be to do it all," Dalton explains. "You feel overwhelmed and, because you don't think you can pull it all off, you're less committed. By contrast, people who don't form specific plans are more likely to believe they can achieve it all."

    Here Henry Ford's famous dictum kicks in. "If you think you can't, you're right," he said. "If you think you can, you're right." To avoid paralysis by analysis, Dalton suggests, "save the detailed planning only for your most important goal." For everything else, as a certain sneaker company's slogan says, just do it.

    One odd twist: Dalton and Spiller found that many of us can avoid tripping over our own plans even with multiple goals -- as long as we are led to believe that peers have even more on their plates. "People who think that others have more to do than they do are less overwhelmed by their plans," Dalton says. Why that should be so is not clear, but it may simply be human nature to try to keep up with Joneses -- or with the guy in the next cubicle.

    Are people in some jobs more likely to finish their to-do lists than others? A recent LinkedIn survey of 6,500 professionals around the world suggests so. Poll respondents in the agriculture industry ranked highest: 83% said they usually get their entire daily to-do list done. Attorneys scored lowest, at 66%. Everybody else in the survey fell somewhere in between. An encouraging thought: No occupational group claimed a 100% score.