Productivity, Goal Setting, and Goal Achievement

We work towards a scientific foundation for devising strategies, software tools, and interventions for helping people to become more productive, to set better goals, and to achieve them more effectively. We build a rigorous theoretical foundation in synergy with devising productivity tools, and training courses, and evaluating them in field experiments.

Goal setting can help people become substantially more productive and successful. But which goals should we set, and how should we go about setting them? We will develop a formal theory of optimal goal setting and computational methods for deriving optimal subgoals. We evaluate this theory in behavioral experiments and devise strategies, tools, and interventions to make effective goal setting easier for people.

Goal achievement often requires us to strategize, plan, and follow-through on our plans for extended periods of time while overcoming motivational obstacles, persisting through setbacks, and solving many problems along the way. We will develop and evaluate theories as well as practical tools for helping people overcome those obstacles and achieve their goals -- including cognitive prostheses for goal achievement.

Publications

  1. Lieder, F., Chen, O., Krueger, P. M., & Griffiths, T.L. (2019). Cognitive Prostheses for Goal Achievement. Nature Human Behavior.
  2. Lieder, F., & Griffiths, T.L. (2016). Helping people make better decisions using optimal gamification. In Papafragou, A., Grodner, D., Mirman, D., & Trueswell, J.C. (Eds.). Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, pp. 2075-2080. [Article]
  3. Callaway, F., Lieder, F., & Griffiths, T.L. (2017). Helping people choose subgoals with sparse pseudo rewards. The 3rd Multidisciplinary Conference on Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making. [Extended Abstract]
  4. Reichman, D.1, Lieder, F.1, Bourgin, D.D.1, Talmon, N., & Griffiths, T.L., (in revision). Goal Pursuit for Computationally Bounded Agents: The Network Structure of Goal Systems Predicts Human Performance. DOI:10.13140/RG.2.2.22023.91043. 1These authors contributed equally.