How to write an if-then plan for stopping something

Updated 2 September 2026

• The form is when X happens, I do Y, and both halves have to be concrete enough to point at.
• Gollwitzer and Sheeran's meta-analysis of 94 studies found a medium-to-large effect of implementation intentions on goal attainment.
• For stopping, the action half cannot be “nothing”. There is no such action, and a plan to do nothing is a plan with no cue for anything.
• Put the action before the situation completes wherever you can: make the tea before you sit down, not after you have sat down.
• One plan for one situation. A plan covering four situations is four plans written badly.
• The best action halves are boring, physical, and available in that exact room.

Why if-then and not a resolution

A resolution — I am going to drink less this month — is a statement about a period. Nothing in it tells you what to do at half past six on Thursday, which is when the question actually gets asked. An implementation intention names the moment and answers it in advance, so that at half past six on Thursday there is nothing left to work out.

Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran gathered 94 studies of this and found a medium-to-large effect on whether people carried out what they had intended. The size is not the interesting part; the mechanism is. The claim is that the specified situation comes to cue the specified action directly, so acting stops requiring a decision at the time — which is exactly the resource you do not have in the situations that matter here.

Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119.

The half people get wrong

Almost everybody writes a good if and a bad then.

The bad then is an absence. “When I sit down after dinner, I do not pour one.” That is a rule, not a plan, and it has the defect the whole approach exists to fix: at the moment of use it hands you back a decision. There is no such thing as beginning to not do something, so there is nothing for the situation to cue.

The fix is to name a thing you would be doing instead, and to screen it with one question: could I start this within ten seconds, where I will actually be? Making a pot of tea passes. Going for a run does not, at half past nine, in the rain, from a sofa. The point is not that the replacement is worthwhile. The point is that it occupies the same ten seconds.

Put it before the seam, not after

Most of these situations have a seam — a moment where one thing ends and the next has not started. Sitting down. Getting in the car. Finishing what you were watching. The seam is the last point at which you are still deciding anything, and a plan placed after it has already missed.

So “when I sit down after dinner, I make tea” is weaker than “when dinner finishes, I put the kettle on before I sit down”. Same intention, ten seconds earlier, and those ten seconds are most of the difference.

Three worked examples

Weak: I will not scroll in bed. Better: when I go upstairs, the phone goes on the charger in the hall. The action is physical, it happens before the situation completes, and it does not require you to be sensible at midnight.

Weak: I will smoke less at work. Better: when I step outside for a break, I walk to the end of the road and back. Same break, same door, the twenty minutes accounted for.

Weak: I will stop buying things when I am fed up. Better: when I open the app in the evening, I put it in the basket and close the tab. That one is unusual in that the replacement is a version of the thing, which is fine — the plan only has to survive the next ten seconds.

Where to keep them

Written down somewhere you will see in the situation, and nowhere else. A plan in a note you never open is a resolution with extra steps. The reason a plan for one situation beats a list covering five is partly this: one plan can be in front of you at the moment it is for, and five cannot.

Working out which situations to write plans for is its own job, and usually a surprising one. There is a method on how to work out the situations it happens in.