Give your goal a skip day

Goals with a few planned skip days built in tend to work better than goals with no room to miss. In studies by Marissa Sharif and Suzanne Shu, people who had a challenging goal with “emergency reserves,” like going to the gym seven days a week with two emergency skip days, kept going after a bad day more often than people with either an easy goal or a hard one. The slack didn’t make them lazy. They worked hard to avoid using it.

Back in September you decided you were going to post four days a week. You were serious about it this time. Week one, you posted four times. Week two, four again. Week three, a client project blew up on Wednesday and you only got three posts out, and three felt like you’d already blown it, so week four you didn’t post at all.

That’s how a lot of good goals end. They don’t get dropped because the owner stopped caring. They get dropped because the goal had no room in it for a normal week, and the first time the week didn’t cooperate, it felt like failing.

I see this with my clients constantly, and the problem usually isn’t the person. It’s how the goal was set up in the first place.

Easy goals, hard goals, and the third option

Marissa Sharif and Suzanne Shu, researchers who were both at UCLA, wanted to know how the way you set up a goal changes what you do when you fall short of it.

They compared three kinds of goals. An easy goal, like going to the gym five days a week. A hard goal, like going seven days a week. And a third kind they called a goal with “emergency reserves”: seven days a week, with two emergency skip days you’re allowed to use if you really need them.

On paper, the easy goal and the reserve goal ask for the same minimum, five days. But people treated them very differently. With an easy goal, the bar is low enough that it doesn’t hold your attention. With a hard goal, the first miss feels like you’ve already failed, and a lot of people quit right there. The reserve goal gave people the high target of the hard goal and the safety net of the easy one.

What happens the day after you miss

What Sharif and Shu were most interested in was the day after someone missed. With a hard goal, a missed day is a failure, plain and simple. With a reserve goal, a missed day just means you used a skip day, which was always part of the plan. So people with reserves still felt like they were making progress, and they kept going.

Here’s the interesting part. People didn’t treat their skip days as free days off. They protected them and tried hard not to use them. In one of the studies, people with reserve goals kept working on a task even longer than the people with hard goals did. And in a field study with daily step goals, the people with reserves hit their goal on more days each week than people with either the easy or the hard version.

(Fair warning: a small follow-up study that tried this with eating goals didn’t find the same effect, so I wouldn’t promise it works for everything. But for business habits like planning, posting, and sales calls, it fits what I see every week.)

I’m going to push my clients to aim high every time, I’m not going to stop doing that. What the research changed for me is how we write those goals down. A hard goal with no room to miss is a goal you’re going to quit the first rough week, and every business owner I know has rough weeks.

What this looks like in real life

A client of mine had a rough stretch [in September] where almost nothing on her list got done. When we got on our call, she was ready to call the whole quarter a failure and start over in January.

I challenged her to call it a reset instead. We didn’t throw out her plan, we rebuilt the part that broke. We set up a protected 7 to 9 a.m. admin block every weekday, and we gave it an emergency reserve: one skip morning a week, no guilt and no explaining. If she needs a second one, that’s the signal to text me.

She’s kept that block for six weeks now. She’s only used her skip morning twice, and both times she was back at her desk the next day like nothing happened. The quarter she was ready to write off is the one where she finally got caught up. She told me the skip day is the reason she didn’t quit, because missing one morning never felt like failing.

Plan for the holidays now

November and December are going to test every goal you have. There’s Thanksgiving, school programs, sick kids, family in town, and clients who disappear for two weeks and then all need you at once. You’re going to miss some days, and that has nothing to do with your discipline, it’s just what this time of year looks like.

If your goals right now say “every day” or “every week, no matter what,” the next two months are going to make you feel like you’re failing at all of them. You can fix that before it happens.

(And if you’ve already fallen off something this year, I wrote about how to pick it back up without starting over in Why you keep starting over, and how to stop.)

Your homework

Pick the one goal that matters most for your business right now. It might be your Monday planning, your follow-up calls, your Friday review, or posting a certain number of times a week.

Rewrite it with an emergency reserve. Keep the target high, then add a small number of skip days. “Post four days a week” becomes “post four days a week, with two skip days a month.” “Admin block every weekday” becomes “admin block every weekday, with one skip morning a week.” Write it down somewhere you’ll see it.

That’s it. You’re still aiming high, you’ve just decided ahead of time that one bad day doesn’t get to cost you the whole goal.

If you want someone helping you set goals that hold up in a real week, and noticing when you’re dipping into your reserves a little too often, that’s what I do.

Frequently asked questions

What is an emergency reserve goal? It’s a challenging goal with a few planned skip days built in, like working out seven days a week with two emergency skip days. Research by Marissa Sharif and Suzanne Shu found people with these goals were more likely to keep going after a missed day than people with easy or hard goals.

Isn’t adding skip days just lowering the bar? Not in the research. People kept the high target and worked to avoid using their skip days. The reserve mostly changed how a missed day felt, so it didn’t turn into quitting.

How many skip days should I give myself? The research examples used about two skip days for every seven. For most business goals, I’d start with one skip day a week or two a month, then adjust based on how often you actually need them.

Sources: Sharif, M. A., & Shu, S. B. (2017). The benefits of emergency reserves: Greater preference and persistence for goals that have slack with a cost. Journal of Marketing Research, 54(3), 495–509. · Sharif, M. A., & Shu, S. B. (2021). Nudging persistence after failure through emergency reserves. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 163, 17–29.