Precommitment
The Basic Idea
Imagine you decide you want to get into better shape and you therefore start going to the gym. This is a goal you make in your head, without telling anyone. Although you might have the best intentions, as the days go by, you don’t find yourself making it to the gym. Why did your resolution fail?
One reason is because you had no kind of commitment to going to the gym: you didn’t buy a gym membership; you didn’t tell someone else who could hold you accountable; you didn’t even outline the specific days of the week and times of the day that you would go. Without a prior commitment to an activity, we often fall victim to procrastination. Unfortunately, planning for the future doesn’t come naturally – putting something off until tomorrow, on the other hand, does.
Precommitment is a strategy to ensure we reach the goals we set out for ourselves. It is employed by various businesses to ensure customers and clients follow through on their word; for example, you are asked to sign a lease prior to moving into a new apartment to hold you accountable to that decision.1 It’s unlikely you would back out of your lease after signing it, just as would be less likely to avoid the gym after signing a gym membership.
To precommit is to choose now to limit your options later, preventing yourself from making the wrong choice in the face of temptation. Publicly announcing your goal is a common form of precommitment.
– Nick Winter, blogger and writer, in his 2013 bookThe Motivation Hacker2
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
