Conquering Your Impulses to Reach Your Goals

You’re probably more impulsive than you realise. Ever been unable to focus on a task, stopping to check emails, make phone calls, or hang out on Twitter? Ever munched down a snack without even thinking whether you needed it? Ever bought something that caught your eye at the checkout?

It might help to define what an impulse is. There are several definitions; in humans, an impulse can be a general tendency or inclination (as in “the creative impulse”), but the definition I’m interested in here is:

“A sudden spontaneous inclination or incitement to some usually unpremeditated action” (Impulse, Merriam-Webster)

So what’s the problem with acting on impulse? Why not simply relax, go with the flow, and enjoy the moment?

Well, you’d probably enjoy yourself in the short-term – but you wouldn’t be getting anything “bigger” out of life. Impulses don’t take a long term view. They tend to be driven by your mood at a particular moment: especially when your mood’s slightly negative – bored, irritable, or distractible. In your work, career or studies, impulses are likely to focus on quick, easy wins, rather than on more challenging long-term goals.

Impulses Drag You Away From Your Goals

Take a moment to think about one of your life goals, or, if you don’t think that you have any goals, pick one of the resolutions you make every January. Three of mine are:

• Maintain a healthy weight
• Save up towards buying a house
• Finish the novel I’m currently writing

I imagine your goals might fall into similar categories like your health, your financial situation, or your long-term projects.

The problem is that it’s fairly rare that impulses ever help towards these big goals. I don’t generally get a sudden impulse to go for a jog, for instance – but the impulse towards reaching for a snack is often present. Similarly, I’ve never heard of anyone saving on impulse, socking money into a savings account on the whim of the moment.

Of course, your goals are probably things you enjoy working on – there will be, or at least should be, plenty of times when you’re having fun along the way. But that sometimes means subjecting a momentary whim to more rational planning.

Your impulses can undo the progress you’ve already made towards a goal. Maybe you’ve planned a week of healthy meals, but when it gets to dinner time, you find yourself craving pizza. Perhaps you were going to put a lump sum into savings this month, but you’ve seen your friends playing with their new iPhones and you just can’t resist buying one too.

(If impulse spending is a particular bugbear for you, you might want to read a couple of my articles over on Dumb Little Man: How to Stop Your Impulse Spending and Your Cash: Gone in 60 Seconds – Learn to Control Online Shopping.)

Alternatively, impulses can derail you while you’re actively working towards a goal. Perhaps you want to find time to write a book, but you only ever manage a few sentences at a time before a thought like “I need a coffee” or “I wonder what’s on TV?” pops into your mind.

Impulses Make You Inefficient and Ineffective

A couple of weeks ago, I asked “Are You Too Efficient to Be Effective?” Impulses have the unfortunate tendency to destroy effectiveness and efficiency. Perhaps you’ll recognise some of this in your own day (I know I do):

• Checking emails when you’re “stuck” on a big piece of work
• Getting distracted by what colleagues are up to (or family members, if you work from home)
• Surfing the internet, looking for low-value entertainment because you’re bored
• Working without any particular plan, just doing whatever seems pressing at any given moment
• Spinning your wheels, working on projects in a random, haphazard way, tackling whichever task feels most appealing
• Avoiding tracking your progress towards your goals … because you know you’ve gone precisely nowhere

You might well be familiar with the four quadrant approach to time management:

Impulses tend to push you away from Quadrant 2: either you’ll have a strong desire to work on something that seems urgent (regardless of how much it really matters, and without any regard to avoiding letting important tasks become urgent in future), or you’ll simply give in to the impulse to slack off and do nothing in particular.

So given that impulses can destroy your ability to make progress towards your goals – in all areas of your life – how do you conquer them?

Controlling and Conquering Your Impulses

This is the three-step method that I use to get impulses under control – and to rise above them:

1. Preventing (avoid letting impulses arise)
2. Labelling (recognising that something is an impulse)
3. Delaying (making the impulse wait)

Here’s how it works:

Preventing

How do impulses arise? What sets off that little tick in your brain which says I think I’ll stop working on this project and watch television, or the one that tells you go on, have a piece of cake, or the one that insists buy yourself some new CDs, you can afford it…

Many impulses can be traced back to some sort of external stimuli: something in your immediate environment that’s triggered off a thought. For example:

• Impulse to zonk out in front of the TV: You were focusing on creating a website, but your partner puts on the television in the same room, and the noise distracts you.
• Impulse to stuff face with cake: You aren’t especially hungry, but one of your colleagues has just brought in a gooey chocolate birthday cake.
• Impulse to splurge on DVDs: You’re checking your email to see if a colleague’s got back to you, and there’s a promotional message from Play.com, telling you that there’s a sale on.

In each of these cases, the impulse is triggered off by a particular event. If your partner hadn’t put the television on, you’d probably not have thought about watching it; if your colleague hadn’t been celebrating a birthday, it wouldn’t have crossed your mind that you wanted to eat cake. And if Play.com didn’t have a new sale on every week, you’d have been happy with your current CD collection.

So what can you do? You can diminish the chance of impulses arising from your environment, where possible. If you know your “quick email check” always leads to a half-hour session of web-browsing, then set strict limits on how frequently you’ll check emails, and how long for. If colleagues are putting your diet in jeopardy by wafting home-baked goodies under your nose, then explain to them that you’re serious about losing weight, and that you could use their help. If you work from home and your partner or kids are distracting, come up with an arrangement (such as working with your door closed) that sends a clear signal that you’re not to be disturbed.

Labelling

There are plenty of impulses that you can’t easily prevent, however. These come from within, especially when you’re working on a difficult, tedious or draining task and get the urge to stop and take a break, or to switch to something easier.

When you’re working on something and you find yourself thinking “I’ll just check my email”, recognise that the thought’s an impulse – label it as one.

The act of labelling forces you to think about how you’re thinking. Have you ever caught yourself automatically opening your email program, or switching on the television, or reaching for the cookie jar … without consciously realising what you’re doing? Labelling means that instead of simply responding to the stimulus (whether an externally or internally provoked thought), you create a gap between the stimulus and your response.

As soon as you notice an impulse drifting into your mind, label it. I’ve found that this step alone is a powerful one for staying on task and focused.

Delaying

Sometimes, the impulse will be one that you can label and dismiss: perhaps the urge to idly surf the web. It’s not something that you need to do at any point – and it’s not necessarily of much entertainment value to you either.

The trickier impulses to conquer are ones which your brain tells you do need action. They rarely need to be done instantly, but you might need to take care of them within an hour or two. This could cover a whole range of things which pop into your mind as an impulse to “do X”:

• Checking your email
• Booking tickets
• Making a particular phone call

These impulses tend to linger in your mind, even as you try to press on with the task at hand. You might worry you’ll forget them, or you might be thinking that they need to be done urgently.

I find that it helps to ask the question “Can this wait?” Usually, it can. Jot down a very brief note to remind yourself to take care of it, then simply deal with it when you finish what you’re on, or when you reach a natural break.

Delaying also works well for impulses that aren’t work or task related, especially if you’re fighting against impulsive spending or impulsive eating. Perhaps you have the urge to buy a particular DVD or pair of jeans – or perhaps you really crave chocolate. Give yourself a “cooling off” period (for purchases, waiting till the next day works well; for food cravings, make yourself wait at least half an hour). This is a powerful technique because it ties in with labelling: recognising that your desire is a sudden inclination rather than an actual need. Even a few seconds can be enough:

Any time you are about to spend any money at all, count to ten slowly and spend that time considering whether or not you should actually spend the money. It’s quite simple, isn’t it? It’s something that anyone can do, but it’s something that most of us never even consider doing as we’re writing a check or handing items to the checkout clerk.

(Trent Hamm, The Ten Second Rule, The Simple Dollar)

So, How Impulsive Are You?

You can probably think of examples of occasional impulsive behaviours in your own life – but you might have little idea of how much of your day is impulse-driven. A good technique to figure this out is to keep a time log for a couple of days. The way I like to do this is by using a modified version of Dave Navarro’s system in 30 Hours A Day:

• Use a spreadsheet (or notebook) marked in 15 minute intervals
• Jot down (each time you reach the end of a task, not every 15 mins) what you did during each time slot. I just put “ditto” marks on rows where I was continuing with the same activity
• Mark any times that you reacted to impulses, or times when you had an impulse that you successfully labelled and resisted

When I’ve done this, I’ve been surprised how often I do tend to act on impulse: I’ll be planning to sit and write for an hour or two, but I’ll end up checking emails, Twitter, putting on music and so on, every few minutes.

What impulses are the ones you need to conquer? Do your impulses tend to originate from external events (like other people), or internal ones (like boredom or stress)? How do you deal with them?
Further reading:

If you found this article useful, check out my action-focused series on meeting your goals:

Meeting Your Goals #1: Getting Focused

Meeting Your Goals #2: Making a Commitment

Meeting Your Goals #3: Tracking and Measuring Your Progress