Self-control describes the psychological process of inhibiting one’s desire for an immediately available reward in favor of another, longer-term one. It is considered to be core component in successfully encouraging health-promoting behaviors, such as exercising, and avoiding behaviors detrimental to long-term health, such as consuming large amounts of junk food. It is therefore a popular topic of study for those interested in developing interventions to encourage lifelong health and well-being.

The Planfulness Scale (Ludwig, Srivastava, & Berkman, 2018) is a 30-item measure that assesses the tendency for people to exhibit patterns of thoughts about goals that have been shown to encourage goal achievement in laboratory research. It weaves together previous work from achievement and personality psychology to provide an easily distributed metric of whether people tend to use evidence-backed goal-encouraging habits. The original aim of developing this scale was to inform intervention research.