From Big Goal to Today
How to Turn a Someday Goal Into Something You Can Do Now

Most big goals start life as “someday”. Someday I’ll write a book. Someday I’ll learn the piano. The hard part is rarely wanting it. It’s knowing what to do about it on an ordinary Tuesday.

One popular answer is a goal funnel: you start with the big goal and narrow it, step by step, until you reach something you can do right now. This page looks at where that idea comes from, what research says about each part of it, and how to try it on a goal of your own.

Where the goal funnel comes from

The version this page follows comes from The ONE Thing, a 2013 book by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan. They call it “Goal Setting to the Now”.

The idea is to set a goal far in the future and then work back towards the present. The book describes it as setting a goal and then methodically drilling down to what you should be doing right now.

The official guide on the book’s website lays out the steps as a chain of questions. Each answer becomes the starting point for the next one.

1. Someday: what’s the one thing I want to do someday?
2. Five years: based on my someday goal, what’s the one thing I can do in the next five years?
3. This year: based on my five-year goal, what’s the one thing I can do this year?
4. This month: based on my one-year goal, what’s the one thing I can do this month?
5. This week: based on my monthly goal, what’s the one thing I can do this week?
6. Today: based on my weekly goal, what’s the one thing I can do today?
7. Right now: based on my daily goal, what’s the one thing I can do right now?

At the monthly step, the guide adds what it calls the Focusing Question. Its general form is: “What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”

The guide also gives an example from one of its seminars. One woman’s someday goal was to become the main act at a jazz venue. She worked her way down to a task for today: start researching the library of jazz music.

What we read. We read the official goal-setting guide and a post on the book’s website, a post on the KellerINK blog, and short searchable passages of a scanned printing. We did not read the whole book.

The funnel is a planning method, not a finding. In searches of Europe PMC, Crossref and the web, we found no study that tests the seven-step funnel as a whole. But several of its parts have been studied on their own, and that research is where the rest of this page goes.

What the research supports

Specific, hard goals

Holds up This part holds up well. For decades, specific and difficult goals have led to better performance than being told to “do your best”.

Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, two psychologists who developed goal-setting theory, summed up about 35 years of research in 2002. They found that specific, difficult goals consistently led to higher performance than urging people to do their best.

The research behind it is broad. It covers well over 100 different tasks and more than 40,000 participants in at least eight countries.

There are limits, and they matter for a someday goal.

• Commitment. The link between goals and performance is strongest when people are committed to their goals.
• Feedback. Goals plus feedback on progress worked better than goals alone.
• New, complex tasks. Goals had a smaller effect on complex tasks than on simple ones. In one study of a complex task, a goal for a score got in the way of learning the task.
• Learning goals help there. In a later study, a hard goal for learning the task, rather than for the score, led to better performance.

Locke and Latham also cite the observation that errors on fast-changing tasks often come from failing to break a distant goal into nearer ones. That is close to what the funnel asks you to do.

Goal setting has critics too. In 2009, four business-school researchers argued that its benefits had been overstated and its harms largely ignored. The harms they listed included a narrow focus that neglects other areas and a rise in unethical behaviour.

The critics did not dispute the main finding: their own summary says specific, challenging goals can boost performance.

Locke and Latham replied in the same journal, and the critics’ later answer quotes their reply. They called the critics’ evidence “largely anecdotes”. They also said they “were among the first to alert practitioners to the possible dangers of setting goals”. The debate is mostly about goals that managers set at work, and we don’t try to settle it here.

If-then plans

Holds up If-then plans work, though the effect is smaller than early studies suggested. An if-then plan links a situation you expect to a specific action: “If it’s 7am on a weekday, then I write for twenty minutes.”

Psychologists call these implementation intentions. Peter Gollwitzer described them in a 1999 paper as plans that link anticipated critical situations to goal-directed responses.

He gives one early example from research he co-wrote. Students named projects to finish over the Christmas break. For hard projects, two thirds of those with a plan for when and where to start finished them; only one fourth without one did. For easy projects, the completion rate was very high (80%), regardless.

• 2006: a meta-analysis of 94 tests found a medium-to-large effect on reaching goals.
• 2024: a larger update of 642 tests found if-then plans effective. Effects were larger when plans took the if-then form, people were highly motivated, and the plan was rehearsed.

The 2024 paper also found strong signs of publication bias. Its corrected estimates ranged from d = .35 with one method to d = .15 with a more conservative one, and the authors call the effect robust but small.

Picture the obstacle, not only the finish

Gabriele Oettingen, a psychologist at New York University, has studied two ways of thinking about the future. In four studies published in 2002, believing a good outcome was likely went with more effort and better results. Enjoying daydreams about it went the other way.

The people in those studies were job seekers, students with a crush, students before an exam and patients having hip-replacement surgery. Effort and results were measured weeks or months later, up to two years.

Her answer is mental contrasting: after imagining the future you want, you think about the obstacles in the way. Paired with if-then plans for those obstacles, it is often shortened to MCII.

A version you may meet is WOOP, short for Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan. Its official site shows Oettingen guiding people through it, and says it asks you to imagine what obstacles inside yourself stand between you and your wish.

A 2021 meta-analysis pulled together 21 studies of this technique with 15,907 participants. It found a small to medium effect on reaching goals. Because of some publication bias, the authors add, the actual effects may be smaller.

There is a second, quieter effect. Mental contrasting works through expectations: when people expect to succeed, they commit to the goal, and when they expect to fail, they tend to put it off or drop it. So it can also lead someone to set aside a wish that seems out of reach for now.

Planning backward

Partly One paper supports it, mainly for complex goals. In 2017, three researchers compared planning the steps in time order with planning them in reverse, starting from the goal.

Compared with forward planning, backward planning led to more motivation, higher expectations of success and less time pressure. It also led to better goal-related performance. The authors found the effect especially when goals were complex to plan.

A few cautions come with it.

• Who took part. Over five studies, groups of students planned for schoolwork, tests, exams or job interviews.
• Simple goals. For relatively simple goals, there was no difference, according to a summary from the Association for Psychological Science, which publishes the journal.
• A correction. The journal published a correction to the paper in 2018. We couldn’t open it to see what it changed.
• Few studies. The authors themselves note that research on how people plan is scarce. Searching Europe PMC and Crossref, we found no independent replication.

The funnel runs backward too: it starts at someday and works down to now. So this paper fits the funnel’s shape, but it tested planning steps, not the funnel itself.

Checking your progress

Partly Checking progress helps, but a weekly review in particular hasn’t been tested. A 2016 meta-analysis looked at 138 studies with 19,951 people. Interventions that got people to monitor their progress helped them reach their goals.

The effect was larger when people reported their progress to others or made it public, and when they physically recorded it.

A weekly review is one common way to do this. David Allen’s Getting Things Done calls the Weekly Review so critical that it deserves a set time and place. The ONE Thing guide has you set your weekly goals at the start of every week.

In a search of Europe PMC, we found no study that tests a weekly review on its own. So the habit of checking progress has support, but the weekly rhythm is a practice, not a finding.

What is weaker

“Write your goals down and you’re 42% more likely to reach them”

Partly In the study behind this figure, people who wrote their goals down did rate their progress higher. But the “42% more likely” wording doesn’t match what it measured. The figure is credited to a study by Gail Matthews, a professor at Dominican University of California.

Her own summary describes the study. In it, 267 people signed up (her 2015 abstract says 264), but only 149 finished. They were randomly assigned to five groups. These ranged from simply thinking about a goal up to writing it down, committing to actions and sending weekly progress reports to a friend. After four weeks, they rated their own progress.

• The written-goal group rated its achievement higher than the unwritten one.
• The group that sent weekly progress reports to a friend did best of all.
• The summary doesn’t print “42%”. But its average scores, 6.08 for written goals and 4.28 for unwritten, differ by about 42%.

That is a 42% higher average self-rating, not a 42% higher chance of success. A 2015 conference abstract of the study adds its own caution: measuring achievement by self-report limits how far the findings generalise.

Searching Crossref, we found the study as conference presentations (2007 and 2015) and the university’s summary, but not as a paper in a peer-reviewed journal.

“It takes 21 days to form a habit”

Doesn't hold up The 21 days come from a plastic surgeon’s remark about getting used to change, not from habit research. In Psycho-Cybernetics (1960), Maxwell Maltz wrote that it takes “a minimum of about 21 days for an old mental image to dissolve and a new one to jell”.

Maltz was writing about things like patients getting used to a new face after surgery. Studies that measured habit formation found much longer and more varied times. A 2024 review found medians of 59 to 66 days and means of 106 to 154 days across the four studies that timed it. Individuals ranged from 4 to 335 days. Our Atomic Habits summary covers this in more depth.

“Just visualize your success”

Partly It depends on what you picture. In a research programme that Shelley Taylor and colleagues at UCLA described in 1998, picturing the process for reaching a goal helped people make progress. Picturing the goal already achieved, the version drawn from self-help advice, did not.

Oettingen’s studies point the same way: enjoying a daydream about the result went with less effort. So the useful kind of picturing is of the steps and the obstacles. Our summary of As a Man Thinketh looks at the same split between expecting and daydreaming.

“Always act immediately”

The funnel ends with “right now”, and that can sound like a rule to act on everything at once. The research above doesn’t support a rule like that.

In Gollwitzer’s Christmas example, easy projects got done whether or not people had a plan; the plan mattered for the hard ones. And Locke and Latham report that on a new, complex task, a goal for results could get in the way of learning it.

A familiar “do it now” rule is narrower than it sounds. In Getting Things Done, David Allen says an action that takes less than two minutes should be done at once, because that is roughly the efficiency cutoff. It’s a rule of thumb for small tasks; our Getting Things Done summary covers it.

So the “right now” step seems most useful as a small first action that is easy to start, not as a rule to rush.

A worked example: writing a book

Here is the funnel filled in for an ordinary goal. It’s an example of how the steps connect, not a recommendation.

1. Someday: publish a book of family recipes and the stories behind them.
2. Five years: finish the book and get it printed for the family.
3. This year: write a full first draft.
4. This month: draft the first chapter.
5. This week: list the recipes for chapter one and talk to one relative about them.
6. Today: message an aunt to set up a call.
7. Right now: write down three questions to ask her.

Then the two research-backed extras:

• If-then plan: “If it’s Saturday morning after breakfast, then I write for thirty minutes before anything else.”
• Obstacle and plan: “The most likely obstacle is feeling the draft isn’t good enough and stopping. If that happens, then I’ll mark the page ‘rough’ and keep going until the timer ends.”

Notice how small the last steps are. “Write three questions” takes a few minutes. That’s the point: each step only has to make the next one possible.

Try it: plan your goal

You can plan your own goal with the steps below, on paper or in a notes app. Write one short line for each. If a step feels too big, make it smaller.

1. Someday goal: the one thing you want to do someday.
2. Five years: based on that, what can you do in the next five years?
3. This year: based on your five-year goal, what can you do this year?
4. This month: based on this year’s goal, what can you do this month?
5. This week: based on this month’s goal, what can you do this week?
6. Today: based on this week’s goal, what can you do today?
7. One if-then plan: “If [time or situation], then I will [action].”
8. The most likely obstacle, and what you’ll do then: “If [obstacle], then I will [response].”

How to use this

The parts that hold up suggest a few things a plan like this can include.

1. A specific goal. “Write a first draft this year” gives you something to check against; “work on the book” doesn’t.
2. The next step written as if-then. It is tied to a time or a cue that already happens in your day.
3. The obstacle named in advance. The most likely obstacle gets its own if-then plan.
4. Backward planning for complex goals. Starting from the finish line, you ask what has to happen just before it.
5. Progress that is checked and written down. Weekly is a common rhythm; what the research supports is the checking.
6. Patience with the timeline. Habits usually take longer than 21 days, and in one study missing a single day did not derail habit formation.

Why it matters

A someday goal stays a wish until it has a next step. The funnel is one way to find that step. The research suggests what makes the step more likely to happen: a specific goal, a cue to tie it to and a plan for what might stop you.

Sources

The goal funnel

• Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results (Bard Press, 2013). We read short searchable passages of a later printing (John Murray, 2014) through Open Library, not the whole book.
• The ONE Thing, “A Kick Ass Guide to Goal Setting” (PDF guide), Exercise 1, “Goal Setting to the Now”.
• The ONE Thing, “Finding the Best Way of Doing Things” (the Focusing Question).
• KellerINK, “Goal Set To The Now For Your Year To Come”, 14 November 2022.

Goal setting

• Edwin A. Locke and Gary P. Latham, “Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey”, American Psychologist 57(9) (2002), 705–717, doi:10.1037/0003-066X.57.9.705.
• Lisa D. Ordóñez, Maurice E. Schweitzer, Adam D. Galinsky and Max H. Bazerman, “Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Overprescribing Goal Setting”, Academy of Management Perspectives 23(1) (2009), 6–16, doi:10.5465/AMP.2009.37007999.
• Edwin A. Locke and Gary P. Latham, “Has Goal Setting Gone Wild, or Have Its Attackers Abandoned Good Scholarship?”, Academy of Management Perspectives 23(1) (2009), 17–23, doi:10.5465/AMP.2009.37008000.
• Lisa D. Ordóñez, Maurice E. Schweitzer, Adam D. Galinsky and Max H. Bazerman, “On Good Scholarship, Goal Setting, and Scholars Gone Wild”, Academy of Management Perspectives 23(3) (2009), 82–87, doi:10.5465/amp.2009.43479265.

If-then plans

• Peter M. Gollwitzer, “Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans”, American Psychologist 54(7) (1999), 493–503, doi:10.1037/0003-066X.54.7.493.
• Peter M. Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran, “Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes”, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 38 (2006), doi:10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1.
• Paschal Sheeran, Olivia Listrom and Peter M. Gollwitzer, “The when and how of planning: Meta-analysis of the scope and components of implementation intentions in 642 tests”, European Review of Social Psychology 36(1) (2025; online 2024), 162–194, doi:10.1080/10463283.2024.2334563.

Obstacles and visualising

• Gabriele Oettingen and Doris Mayer, “The motivating function of thinking about the future: expectations versus fantasies”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83(5) (2002), 1198–1212.
• Wang et al., “A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Mental Contrasting With Implementation Intentions on Goal Attainment”, Frontiers in Psychology 12 (2021).
• WOOP my life, home and science pages.
• Shelley E. Taylor, Lien B. Pham, Inna D. Rivkin and David A. Armor, “Harnessing the imagination: Mental simulation, self-regulation, and coping”, American Psychologist 53(4) (1998), 429–439.

Planning backward and checking progress

• Jooyoung Park, Fang-Chi Lu and William M. Hedgcock, “Relative Effects of Forward and Backward Planning on Goal Pursuit”, Psychological Science 28(11) (2017), 1620–1630; corrigendum, Psychological Science 29(2) (2018), 312–313.
• Association for Psychological Science, “Trying to Get Ahead? Plan in Reverse, Study Suggests”, 30 August 2017.
• Benjamin Harkin et al., “Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence”, Psychological Bulletin 142(2) (2016), 198–229.
• David Allen, Getting Things Done (Viking, 2001), chapters 6 and 8, read as short searchable passages through Open Library.

Writing goals down, and habits

• Gail Matthews, “Goals Research Summary”, Dominican University of California (PDF).
• Athens Institute for Education and Research, Psychology Abstracts, 9th Annual International Conference on Psychology, 25–28 May 2015, p. 41.
• James Clear, “How Long Does it Actually Take to Form a New Habit?” (on Maxwell Maltz’s Psycho-Cybernetics).
• B. Singh, A. Murphy, C. Maher and A. E. Smith, “Time to Form a Habit: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Health Behaviour Habit Formation and Its Determinants”, Healthcare 12(23) (2024), 2488.

Checked October 2026.

Related: Atomic Habits summary · Getting Things Done summary · Mindsets checked