Here is an excerpt from an article written by Jim Bright that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) February 24, 2007. Jim has written many interesting articles that support the Goal-Free Living concept (in fact he mentions Goal-Free Living in this article, but I did not bother including that part below). Enjoy.
Support for goal setting can be found in highly controlled laboratory studies where participants reliably perform better when they set or are given goals. The trouble is life is not a highly controlled laboratory and so soon as you let in all the other pesky bits it can play havoc with goals. Mark Tubbs from the University of Missouri, writing in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 1986, examined 87 studies on goal setting and found a clear pattern of results: under laboratory conditions goals work, in real-life settings they are far less effective. One of the central ideas in goal setting is goal commitment. Goal setting, so the theory goes, will be effective only if you truly want to achieve your goals. So perhaps this explains why goals can be less effective in real-life settings – your commitment wanes over time.Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case either. As reported in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 1998, John Donovan and David Radosevich from New York State University examined goal commitment and performance in 12 studies over 20 years, involving 2000 participants – and found goal commitment accounted for next to none of the performance.