Use Systems and Habits to Avoid the Threshold Effect

When people set goals to help them improve, they run into many problems. Goals are great to measure performance against expected outcomes. But goals are horrible for actual improvement.

Goals don’t address the steps you need to take. They don’t address the process. They focus solely on what the expected outcome is and why it is a good guess.

When you use systems and habits to improve, you focus on the steps you need to take. This details how you are going to reach your new levels of achievement. Goals simply state what that level should be.

The other problem with using goals as a strategy for improvement is that goals don’t motivate after the goal is met. They may provide an extra push when getting close to reaching the goal. But once you hit it, you will naturally lose motivation and slow down.

This is referred to as the threshold effect. That goal threshold will lead a deterioration of motivation after you cross it.

Many will point to this as the reason why goals work. They push you to reach that level. They motivate you as you get close to it. They aren’t worried about after you hit the goal because they will argue that you should then set another, higher goal.

But most of don’t want to always feel as though we are lacking. We want to feel content in life. We don’t want to be complacent, but we also don’t want to feel as though we hold off happiness until the goal is met, only to push it off again by setting another goal.

The systems and habits approach to improvement is much different. It forces us to make changes to the recurring actions we take in life. We take better steps forward.

These better steps forward then become automatic. They solidify into habit. They form new structures, new systems.

This means that it isn’t about motivation or willpower to do them any longer. They occur without our attention.

The threshold effect doesn’t come into play with the systems and habits approach to improvement because there isn’t a threshold set that we are striving to reach. Instead, we are working to keep improving. We want to get better all the time.

It isn’t that we are unhappy and hoping that next level will provide temporary happiness. It is that we learn to live with a content mindset, always remaining happy but still doing the work necessary to get better.

There are many disadvantages to using goal setting as an improvement technique. Goals can be fine to make predictions of where you will end up. They are beneficial to help measure actual progress against to see if we are truly improving at the rate we anticipated.

But goal setting alone isn’t a strategy to improve. Instead, we must learn to shift our focus to be on the actual steps we take on a regular basis. This is where the systems and habits approach to improvement shines.