Will college students who set goals for themselves work harder and perform better? In theory, setting goals can help time-inconsistent students to mitigate their self-control problem. In practice, there is little credible evidence on the causal effects of goal setting for college students. We...

Get specific -- Seize the moment to act on your goals -- Know exactly how far you have left to go -- Be a realistic optimist -- Focus on getting better, rather than being good -- Have grit -- Build your willpower muscle -- Don't tempt fate -- Focus on what you will do, not what you won't do

This paper provides a simple autonomy-based model of human motivation in which a decision maker with divided selves must perform some task. The key presumption of the model is that the brain is not a unitary system which is equipped to achieve a single goal in a systematicmanner; rather, it...