Have you tried many plans for losing weight or gaining wealth? Do you keep trying at a relationship wondering if you should quit or if you just need to try harder? Many of our wishes require hard work and persistence to achieve, as well as a good plan. Relationships also require that you're with the right person. How do you figure out if you have the right plan to succeed or the right person for you, and when you need to change your plans?

You have to give your plan enough time to work. Often people want nearly instant results, so they change plans too often and fail to get results. Sometimes also, people will "throw good after bad," spending too much time at something that they wish would work, but doesn't quite work.

These problems are largely remedied by using a simple technique. When you are trying something new, for instance to change a habit or make some gain in income or health, after you decide on your plan, commit to working on it for a certain time before assessing if you have made progress, need to adjust, or should quit. This will keep you from being impatient and giving up too early what might be a very good plan.

It will also help prevent your wasting your time. For example, say your wish is to be married. You begin a relationship. You decide that you will know within a year if they are the right person to marry or not. But at a year, the other person is not ready to marry, and you are comfortable as things are, but the relationship is not great. This would be your chosen signal that it is time to see if you can find someone better.

If you want to see if eating dairy products helps or hinders your digestion, you might decide that you must do without it for three weeks to give it a fair trial. A new job might take six months to see if it works or not. If you begin a business and you wish to try it for two years, then you should make sure the investment money will not run out in that time. The time should be right for you.

The key is to decide how long you will try something before you begin, as this is the time when you will make the clearest decision about how long to try before changing your course of action.