Successful self-regulation is key

Today, I summarize an excellent new piece of research by Jeffrey Paulitzki (University of Waterloo). Jeffrey just defended this research for his doctoral degree. He did an outstanding job. The focus of his research, and my podcast, is how we need to understand both habits and self-regulatory ability in goal pursuit. Although intentions do predict behaviour, both our habits and our executive function (self-regulatory ability) are crucial to our success. I also introduce listeners to Temporal Self-Regulation Theory. You will hear more about this in future podcasts as well, because it is a good framework for thinking about goal pursuit and the gap between intention and action that we know as procrastination.