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Experts’ Advice to the Goal- Oriented: Don’t Overdo It

I’VE never liked the idea of a bucket list — that increasingly popular concept that we should tally up all the things we want to do before we die and, well, do them.

Whether it be swimming with dolphins (an oddly common choice), writing a book, trekking through Nepal or all three, it’s not that the ideas are inherently bad. Rather, it is already too easy to reduce lives to a series of goals that we aim for, reach and then move on.

But goals are good, right? Aren’t we always told they’re the best way to get to where we want to be?

It turns out that that’s not necessarily true, personally and professionally.

I’ll get back to the bucket lists in a bit. But first, let’s look at what some of the research tells us about goals.

“We know goal-setting is a very powerful motivating force,” said Maurice E. Schweitzer, a professor of operations and information management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

“Whether it’s a runner who wants to set a certain time or a salesperson aiming for a number of sales, goals give us meaning, purpose and guidance.”

But, said Professor Schweitzer, who co-wrote a paper in 2009 “Goals Gone Wild,” which appeared in the journal Academy of Management Perspectives, things got a little out of hand.

“The proponents of goals focused on the benefits of the goals, not the harm, and too many businesses went too far, saying ‘Here’s what we want you to accomplish,’ and implicitly saying, ‘We don’t care how you got there.’ ”

And that, he said, can lead to, among other things, unethical behavior.

Lisa D. Ordóñez, a professor of management and organizations at the Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona, described experiments that proved this point. In one, participants were asked to create as many words as possible using letters — sort of like the game Boggle. In one group, the participants were given a goal of nine words, and if met, they would receive some money. In a second group, they were given a goal but no financial incentive. And those in the third group were simply told to try their best.

The students who participated were given a chance to check their words in a dictionary to make sure they were true English words. They threw out the worksheets, and turned in the answer sheet that only stated how many words they had finished.

But the academic researchers running the experiment had a code to match the worksheets with the answer sheets and discovered that both groups that had been given a goal of creating a certain number of words — whether or not money was involved — cheated 8 to 13 percent of the time. Those in the third group rarely did.

“It’s not that goals are bad,” said Professor Ordóñez, who was also a co-author of the “Goals Gone Wild” article. “We’re just saying be careful.”

For example, a lot has been written about tying teachers’ merit pay or jobs to how well their students do on standardized tests. The goal is to find a way to evaluate teachers’ abilities. But this has led to a number of problems, including, in some cases, teachers cheating to raise students’ scores.

“Part of the larger problem is, How do we measure performance?” she said. “We want to put our money where we are better served — I get that. But what we end up measuring is not always the most important thing but the easiest to measure.”

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The goal was to get Ken O’Brien, the former New York Jets quarterback, to throw fewer interceptions. The remedy didn’t work quite as imagined.Credit...Kevin Reece/Associated Press

Gary P. Latham, a professor of organizational effectiveness at the University of Toronto, has long studied the positive effects of goals. It’s not that goals are bad, he said, but that problems arise when the values that underlie them and the process to achieve them are skewed.

“If you’re going to be overly reductionist, then you’re behaving stupidly,” he said. “You can have multiple goals for complex behavior.”

Professor Schweitzer agreed that it’s a problem when goals become too narrowly focused.

Besides possibly leading to unethical behavior — a lawyer being told to bill a certain number of hours a week will be tempted to fudge the numbers — too much emphasis on goals can inhibit learning and undermine intrinsic motivation, he said.

“If the goal is to earn a certain score on a math test, then that goal takes over,” Professor Schweitzer said. “A love of learning or understanding of the elegance of math gets beaten out.”

And goals can have unintended consequences. A 1999 article on the use of incentives that appeared in The Journal of Economic Literature tells an anecdote about Ken O’Brien, the former New York Jets quarterback who had a tendency to throw interceptions early in his career. As a result, he received a contract that penalized him every time he threw the ball to the opposing team. It worked — he threw fewer interceptions. But that was because he threw fewer balls overall, even when he should have.

“Goal-setting is like powerful medication,” Professor Schweitzer said. “You need to make sure how appropriate it is and keep monitoring it to determine, ‘Is this goal too specific? Is this goal too stressful? Is it pushing many people beyond the normal bounds of what they should be doing?’ If so, then you need to rethink that goal.”

Professor Ordóñez said she recognized that dilemma in her own life. While on a recent sabbatical, she wasn’t working out, so she decided she needed a target to aim for and began training for a triathlon.

“It forced me to get out of bed at 5 a.m.,” she said. And while the training was good for her, she was also aware she had less time to spend with her husband. And while she is glad she’s going to take part in a triathlon, she said she wanted to make sure that one goal did not overshadow other important aspects of her life.

And this leads us back to the bucket lists. What troubles me is that rather than enhancing our lives, they can too quickly become the entire point.

“Setting these goals is a way of focusing one’s attention, rather than asking, ‘Why do I pursue these goals?’ ” said Miroslav Volf, director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture.

While a life without any goals would be aimless, it might not be a bad idea to jettison some overboard once in a while.

Roz Warren, a humorist, recently wrote an essay that appeared on the Booming blog of The New York Times about how, at almost 58 years old, her goal now “is to try to hang on to what I’ve got.”

She swims and walks, but is not going to take up yoga or lift weights. She’s not going to finish (or start) books she “should” but really doesn’t want to. And she may never learn to operate a Jet Ski.

Some readers applauded her decision, while others angrily thought she was embracing stagnation, Ms. Warren told me.

“I’m trying to let go of a lot of stuff I think a well-educated person ought to know,” she said, like recognizing important works of classical music or art or identifying most trees and flowers.

“And I’m at peace with that. I’m not living life ticking off boxes.”

E-mail: shortcuts@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: Experts’ Advice To the Goal-Oriented: Don’t Overdo It. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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