PDF Summary:Get It Done, by Ayelet Fishbach

Do you struggle to achieve your goals? In Get It Done, psychologist Ayelet Fishbach explains how to make them easier to pursue using the science of motivation. She provides tips for setting goals that motivate you, maintaining that motivation throughout the journey, and juggling multiple goals at once. Whether you want to exercise more, save money, or advance your career, Fishbach’s strategies can help you finally get it done.

In this guide, we’ll first explain how to craft compelling goals. Then, we’ll discuss how to overcome motivation slumps and how to improve your chances of success by working toward multiple goals at once and collaborating with others. Along the way, we’ll supplement Fishbach’s insights with advice from other productivity experts to boost your goal pursuit efforts.

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(Shortform note: In The Gap and the Gain, Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy argue that focusing on past progress (what they call “Gain-thinking”) is better for your mental health and happiness than focusing on what you have left to do. When you measure backward against your past self, you’re using an internal reference point that can’t be influenced by social media, other people’s achievements, or external pressures. This makes you more intrinsically motivated and optimistic, which research shows can actually prolong your life and improve your physical health.)

When to Focus on What You Have Left to Accomplish

Fishbach suggests you focus on what you still need to accomplish in three situations:

• When you’re experienced (like having played the guitar for several years)
• When you’re already committed to the goal (like improving your skills in a sport)
• When the goal is very important to you (like buying a house)

Fishbach writes that in these situations, you already care deeply about a goal, so you don’t need to remind yourself that you’re committed to it. Instead, to stay motivated, you must look at what you still need to accomplish. This prevents you from becoming too complacent with your current progress and pushes you to keep working hard. For example, if you’ve written a novel and want to get it published, you should focus on the remaining steps, like editing and finding an agent, rather than celebrating the completed draft.

(Shortform note: While Fishbach says that this forward-looking approach to measuring progress is more motivating for certain people, Sullivan and Hardy contend that it harms your well-being over time. When you constantly measure yourself against future goals—what they call “Gap-thinking”—you create a cycle where you’re never satisfied with your current progress. This creates toxic stress that accumulates in your body and mind and damages your immune system over the years. This may be why many high achievers feel burned out despite their success—they’re trapped in a mindset that never allows them to feel accomplished.)

Tip 3: Make Goals Enjoyable to Pursue

According to Fishbach, another way to overcome motivation slumps is to make your goals more fun to pursue. She explains that you’re more likely to achieve your goals when you’re driven by intrinsic motivation—when you do an activity because it feels enjoyable in itself, not because you want some separate reward or outcome.

Fishbach explains that activities feel more intrinsically motivating when they provide immediate rewards. For example, if you start gardening to get fresh vegetables but find that you enjoy tending your plants each day, you’ll likely stick with your hobby longer than people who only garden for the vegetables they’ll get months later. The instant enjoyment motivates you to continue the activity more than delayed rewards.

(Shortform note: In The Art of Impossible, Steven Kotler explains that it feels better to pursue intrinsically motivating goals because they generate more pleasurable neurochemicals like dopamine and serotonin than extrinsically motivating goals. Each time you work on these goals, your brain associates the activity with these pleasurable feelings, creating a positive cycle that keeps you motivated. In contrast, when you pursue goals just for external rewards or because you have to, your brain doesn’t produce the same chemical response, making it harder to stay motivated.)

There are several ways you can increase intrinsic motivation:

1. Choose enjoyable paths toward your goals. If you want to improve your diet, picking nutritious foods you actually like, such as sweet berries or crunchy nuts, works better than forcing yourself to eat foods you hate.

(Shortform note: Choosing enjoyable paths doesn’t just increase intrinsic motivation; it also reduces the mental effort required to stay on track. In Switch, Chip and Dan Heath say that predetermining the specific actions you can take that support your goal reduces decision fatigue, which can cause you to revert to old habits. Therefore, it can be helpful to create clear rules, such as “every breakfast must contain at least one fruit or vegetable,” and make a list of fruits and vegetables you like, as Fishbach suggests, to make working toward your goal as frictionless as possible.)

2. Add fun elements to boring tasks. For example, you can arrange colorful vegetables into patterns on your plate or try new recipes with friends to make healthy eating more pleasant.

(Shortform note: Figuring out your gaming style can make it easier to spot ways to inject more fun into boring tasks. In Feel Good Productivity, Ali Abdaal suggests you think about how you’d approach life if it were a video game. For example, you might enjoy exploring, making others laugh, or competing against others. Once you figure out your gaming style, approach each day with that mindset.)

3. Enjoy the moment. When eating healthy foods, focus on the taste and texture if you enjoy them or appreciate how it feels to nourish your body rather than just thinking about the health benefits.

(Shortform note: Russ Harris in The Happiness Trap calls enjoying the moment connection and says it’s a skill you must exercise, since our minds often drift to thinking about the past and the future. Therefore, he recommends you intentionally try to enjoy the moment when doing something unpleasant, like noticing the texture of dishes as you clean them. This not only makes the task more enjoyable, as Fishbach suggests, but also trains you to be more grounded in the present.)

Use Rewards Wisely

According to Fishbach, rewards can also make goal-pursuit more enjoyable, but you should use them wisely. While rewards can motivate you, they shouldn’t be your only reason for doing something. If you only work for rewards, you might lose your natural interest in the activity.

According to Fishbach, the best rewards are uncertain: Research suggests we tend to be more motivated when we don’t know exactly what reward we’ll get. When rewards are unpredictable, we remain interested even after getting small prizes because we think a bigger prize might come next time. Fixed rewards, like getting the same allowance every week, eventually become boring and lose their motivational power.

(Shortform note: While Fishbach doesn’t explain how to create uncertain rewards for yourself, other experts describe a reward system you can use: Write down various prizes on pieces of paper and place them in a jar, then draw one randomly each time you complete a task. Choose rewards that appeal to you personally. However, when you’re first building a habit, it may be a good idea to reward yourself every time you complete the task to create a positive association. Once the behavior feels more natural, you can switch to the variable reward system.)

Tip 4: Strengthen Your Self-Control

Fishbach says that, to push through motivation slumps and stick to your goals, you must strengthen your self-control. She defines self-control as choosing between what you should do versus what you want to do in the moment.

Since you won’t always feel motivated, you should strengthen your self-control by:

1. Keeping distractions out of reach. Identify what usually distracts you and remove it from your environment. For example, if you want to eat healthy, don’t buy chips and cookies when grocery shopping; if you’re studying for finals week, delete social media apps from your phone. When you can’t completely avoid a temptation, Fishbach suggests you distance yourself from the temptation by imagining what you’d tell someone else to do in this situation or imagine looking back on the choice from the future.

2. Focusing on the benefits. Instead of thinking about what you’re missing out on, remind yourself of the benefits of sticking with your goal. For example, think about how saving money now will help you take that dream vacation next year. This simple change in thinking turns your focus from what you’re giving up to what you’re gaining.

3. Making important choices early in the day. Your self-control becomes depleted throughout the day, making it harder to make good choices later in the day. Schedule important decisions and challenging tasks for the morning when your self-control is strongest.

Why You Shouldn’t Rely on Your Willpower

While Fishbach emphasizes strengthening self-control, relying too heavily on willpower might set you up for failure. In Willpower Doesn’t Work, Benjamin Hardy argues that willpower is much weaker than most people think. Many believe willpower works like a muscle that gets stronger with use, but Hardy says it’s easily depleted and has strict limits no matter how much you train it. Additionally, modern life constantly drains your willpower through endless decisions—what to wear, what to eat, which notifications to check—and temptations like social media, junk food, and entertainment. By the time you need willpower for your important goals, you’ve already used most of it up on smaller choices throughout the day.

Hardy recommends that instead of fighting an uphill battle against your limited willpower, you should design environments that automatically push you toward success, which can include keeping distractions out of reach. One way to do this is to create separate spaces for work and rest to maximize your effectiveness in both areas. This is because when you try to be productive in places you associate with relaxation, like your bedroom, your brain receives mixed signals that require extra willpower to overcome. Similarly, trying to unwind in spaces you associate with work creates mental conflict that prevents true rest.

Tip 5: Deal With Criticism

Lastly, Fishbach recommends you learn how to handle criticism and failure, which can be demoralizing and challenge your motivation.

Your response to criticism can be affected by two factors:

• Commitment: When you deeply care about a goal, criticism pushes you to work harder. However, if you’re unsure about a goal, criticism makes you doubt whether it’s worth pursuing.
• Skill: When you’re new to something, you need encouragement to keep going, while experts usually seek constructive criticism because it helps them improve.

When you understand these patterns, you can adjust your expectations and responses to criticism. If you’re a beginner, don’t be surprised if criticism is demotivating. Remind yourself that harsh feedback doesn’t mean you should quit—it just means you need more practice. If you’re experienced, you can actively seek out criticism to improve faster.

Emotional Factors Affecting Your Response to Criticism

In Thanks for the Feedback, Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen say that your natural emotional patterns play an equally important role in how criticism affects you. Your individual reaction to any criticism depends on three factors that make up your emotional temperament: your baseline mood, how strongly you react, and how quickly you bounce back.

1) Baseline mood: Your baseline is your default emotional state—some people are naturally upbeat while others tend toward pessimism. People who usually feel good respond more strongly to praise, while people who often feel down react more intensely to criticism. However, no matter what your baseline is, criticism often feels more impactful than praise. This is because we’re wired to respond faster and more strongly to threats than we do to pleasures.

2) Reaction: When someone gives you feedback, your emotions move away from your normal state. Some people’s emotions swing far from their usual mood, while others barely change.

3) Recovery: After the initial reaction, your recovery time determines how long it takes to return to your baseline. Some people shake off criticism within minutes, while others carry it for months. These recovery patterns create cycles—if you hold onto positive feelings longer, you’ll find it easier to handle future setbacks.

While brain chemistry influences these reactions, Stone and Heen emphasize that you’re not completely controlled by your wiring. The thoughts you have about feedback can make it seem worse than it is. You might remember every past mistake, think everyone agrees with the person criticizing you, or imagine terrible things happening because of this feedback. Understanding these patterns helps you recognize when your emotions are exaggerating the feedback’s significance, which then allows you to respond more effectively, whether you’re a beginner needing encouragement or an expert seeking improvement.

How to Improve Your Chances of Success

Now that you understand how to set effective goals and maintain motivation, let’s discuss how to realistically pursue your goals. We often struggle to achieve our goals because life is complex: We have limited time and energy, competing priorities, and many distractions. However, you can improve your chances of success. In this section, we’ll cover how to make progress on multiple goals at once and leverage social support to work toward your goals more effectively.

Tip 1: Find Activities That Serve Multiple Goals

Fishbach challenges the idea that people should focus on just one goal at a time. She says that trying to complete goals one at a time isn’t practical because most of us don’t have enough time to accomplish everything we want to do. For instance, you can’t realistically wait to finish your education before starting to date or put off exercise until after establishing your career—many important life goals need to happen in parallel.

To pursue multiple goals, understand how your goals affect each other. Some goals naturally work together, like eating healthy and training for a sports competition. However, other goals can work against each other, like wanting to spend more time with family but also wanting to work extra hours for a promotion.

Fishbach suggests you look for opportunities where you can work toward multiple goals at once. For example, when you join a tree-planting volunteer group, you get to exercise, meet new friends, and have fun all at once.

Pursuing One Goal at a Time Versus Multiple at Once

Experts disagree over whether you should tackle multiple goals simultaneously or focus on one at a time. James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, argues that you should concentrate on one goal at a time because of how we form habits. Studies show you’re two to three times more likely to stick with a habit when you make a specific plan for when, where, and how you’ll do it—but only if you focus on one goal at a time. This is because new habits require a lot of conscious effort at first and only become automatic and require less mental energy after about 66 days of repetition. When you try to build multiple habits simultaneously, you spread your mental resources too thin and none of them stick.

Others, however, echo Fishbach’s belief that you should pursue multiple goals at once. In Someday Is Today, Matthew Dicks says that focusing on just one goal limits your full potential. He argues that pursuing multiple goals has two main benefits: First, it allows you to stay productive because when you get stuck on certain projects, you can work on others. Second, it makes you more creative because you can mix and match your knowledge and experience from different fields to uncover unique ideas.

Manage Conflicting Goals

When your goals conflict with one another, Fishbach explains that you can either compromise or prioritize one goal over the others.

1. Compromise: Find a middle ground where you partially satisfy multiple goals at once. For example, if you want to be a novelist, you might choose a part-time job to make some income while still allowing time to write, giving some time to each goal rather than fully committing to one. This approach works well with goals with diminishing returns (where additional effort produces less benefit). For example, after studying for several hours, the value of each additional hour decreases, making it sensible to switch to another activity like exercise.

(Shortform note: When compromising on multiple goals, it can help to define levels of success for those goals. In Start Finishing, Charlie Gilkey explains that you can’t give 100% to multiple projects simultaneously. Instead, he suggests you categorize your success targets into three levels: small successes that are just “good enough,” medium successes that make you proud, and great successes where you’ve given your all and achieved something remarkable. Recognize that not everything needs to be a great success—you can save your best work for the projects that truly matter to you while accepting “good enough” results for less meaningful goals.)

2. Prioritize: Choose one goal over others, at least temporarily. If a goal connects strongly to your identity or ethics, prioritization often makes sense, like prioritizing creative work over financial stability. Prioritization is also helpful for goals that require completion to be useful. For example, when pursuing a medical degree, you can’t become half a doctor—the program requires your full commitment to complete it.

(Shortform note: In The One Thing, Gary Keller suggests you first find your life purpose. Then, decide what goals to prioritize by asking yourself a series of questions that work backward from your ultimate purpose: What’s the one thing I can do in five years, this year, this month, this week, today, and right now to reach that bigger purpose? This creates a domino effect, where each small priority builds toward your larger goal. Then, once you identify your priority, you must protect it fiercely by blocking off at least four hours daily for focused work and treating that time as sacred.)

Tip 2: Work on Goals With Others

In addition to learning to juggle multiple goals, you can also get motivation and support from other people. Fishbach explains that we tend to adjust our behaviors around other people’s behaviors, preferences, and goals. This can be both helpful and hurtful: It can be helpful if others working toward similar goals alongside you motivates you to increase your efforts to match theirs. On the other hand, it can be hurtful if you relax your efforts because you feel satisfied by the progress someone else made, blurring the line between their achievements and your own. For example, if a business partner lands a big client, you may share in the sense of achievement and feel like you don’t need to work as hard to find new clients yourself.

(Shortform note: Psychologists explain that we have a natural drive to evaluate ourselves by comparing our abilities and achievements to others. According to the social comparison theory, we make two types of comparisons: upward comparisons with people who are doing better than us, and downward comparisons with those who aren’t doing as well. When you compare yourself to someone more successful, it can either inspire you to work harder or make you feel discouraged and give up if the gap is too large. Similarly, comparing yourself to someone less successful can boost your confidence, but it can also cause you to overestimate your skills.)

To ensure that other people will help you instead of hurt you, Fischbach gives two tips.

Leverage Social Facilitation

Fishbach writes that we often perform better when others are watching—a phenomenon known as social facilitation. Observers make us more alert and energized, which helps us do simple tasks better. (However, this doesn’t apply when we’re doing something difficult or new because having people watch us can make us nervous and cause us to perform worse.)

(Shortform note: You don’t physically need to be with others to leverage the social facilitation effect. “Study with me” videos, where content creators livestream themselves studying for hours, can provide a similar motivation boost. These videos make it feel like you’re sitting with a study partner, and they often include timers, ambient sounds, and aesthetic room setups to create an immersive experience. Psychologists suggest that these videos help you stay focused because you see the creator studying on your screen whenever you’re tempted to check your phone or browse websites.)

Fishbach adds that people watching us also makes us take our actions more seriously. This is why making a promise in front of others (like declaring a New Year’s resolution at a party) usually motivates us more than making the same promise to ourselves—we feel a stronger need to follow through when others know about our commitment. Research suggests you don’t even need real people watching you to feel this effect; simply having a photo of someone on your desk or being on a video call can make you work harder.

(Shortform note: Some experts argue that telling others about your goals can make you less likely to achieve them. When you announce a goal, people often shower you with praise or recognition for it. Your brain treats this praise as a reward, making you feel like you’ve already accomplished something before you’ve done the actual work. Researchers tested this idea with law students, and those who publicly shared their commitment to becoming lawyers spent less time studying cases than those who kept their goals private. So while having people watch you work can push you to try harder in the moment, be careful that announcing your big goals doesn’t give you so much satisfaction that you quit before you finish.)

Find Role Models and Anti-Role Models

Fishbach recommends you identify role models and anti-role models to encourage you as you pursue your goals.

• A role model is someone you want to be like. They embody qualities you aspire to develop and help you believe you could achieve similar success, giving you the confidence to pursue your goals.
• An anti-role model is someone you don’t want to be like. For example, watching a friend struggle with credit card debt could motivate you to manage your money more carefully.

How to Find Good Role Models

In Wanting, Luke Burgis provides guidance on which types of people to seek out and which types to avoid when identifying good role models. To find them, start by making a list of all people who influence your life, both nearby (such as family and coworkers) and more distant (like social media figures or historical personalities). Then, research them to determine if they’re worth following. The best models have real credentials and experience, meaning they earned their authority through years of practice or formal education in their field. Avoid following popular figures who only appear credible because they’re well-known, not because they have relevant expertise.

While Fishbach recommends you identify anti-role models, Burgis suggests you distance yourself from people who model desires that aren’t meaningful to you. When you stay exposed to people who model behaviors you want to avoid, their influence can slowly pull you toward unhelpful habits and mindsets.

For celebrities, influencers, or other public figures who model detrimental desires, you can unfollow their social media accounts and stop consuming their content. For people in your immediate circle that you can’t completely cut from your life, you should limit your interactions to only what’s necessary, avoiding deeper conversations about topics where they model the behaviors you want to avoid.