Soft vs Hard Commitments: What a Gym Contract Teaches Us About Project Failure

Discover why soft commitments kill projects with the gym example. Learn to design hard, clear agreements that reduce waste and boost delivery success.

Before we jump into the article, here’s something for you: If you’re not a subscriber yet, you can still grab PMC’s free guide: Leading Better Project Conversations.

It’s packed with strategic questions, feedback tips, and a simple roadmap to lead project conversations that actually move things forward.

✅ Strategic questions to align teams and stakeholders
✅ Feedback prompts to handle issues before they escalate
✅ A clear step-by-step conversation roadmap for project success

---

Imagine this: It’s January, and you’re determined to get in shape.

You walk into the gym, and sign that monthly membership contract $70 a month, feels like a commitment to the “new you.”

It’s easy to picture the future: early morning workouts, renewed energy, and a slimmer waistline.

For the first couple of weeks, you show up. Of course!

But then work gets busy. Your enthusiasm fades. Soon you’re paying every month without even stepping through the door. '

The gym isn’t chasing you, and you’re not canceling.

Why?

Because cancelling feels like admitting failure, and keeping the membership keeps hope alive, even if it costs you.

Now think about your projects at work. Those kickoff meetings were filled with big promises. The roadmap timelines look so neat on the slides. The shared Notion pages are full of tasks and deadlines.

Everyone nods in agreement. But six months later, the project is stuck, behind, or worse, still limping along even though no one believes in it anymore.

Just like that gym contract, teams commit to big ideas with optimism, but without the rigor to make those commitments real.

The result? Wasted time, wasted morale, wasted opportunity.

This article explores how the same cognitive forces that keep people paying for unused gym memberships quietly sabotage our projects, and what smart project managers can do to design commitments that really work.

We often treat commitments in projects as equal. A kickoff agreement, a roadmap timeline, a shared Notion page, these feel like real decisions.

But they aren’t. Many of them are what behavioral science would call soft commitments, easy to make, hard to measure, and even harder to reverse once we realize they no longer serve us.

That distinction between soft and hard commitments helps explain why so many projects slowly fail. And surprisingly, one of the clearest illustrations of this comes from outside tech or business. It comes from a study on gym contracts.

In the now-famous paper "Paying Not to Go to the Gym", researchers Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmendier tracked thousands of people across three health clubs.

What they discovered about human behavior, overconfidence, inertia, and sunk costs, maps directly onto project delivery failures.

---

This is a premium article for paid members. Want to unlock more practical systems to help you lead projects with clarity and confidence?

Subscribe now and get 20% off your first year.

Paid subscribers unlock:

🔐 Weekly premium issues packed with frameworks and/or templates
🔐 Access to special toolkits (including the Starter Pack with your subscription)
🔐 Strategic guides on feedback, influence, and decision-making
🔐 Exclusive content on career growth, visibility, and leadership challenges
🔐 Full archive of every premium post

Plus, you get a Starter Kit when you subscribe, which includes:

🔓 Kickoff Starter: Kickoff Checklist, Kickoff Meeting Agenda Template, Project Canvas Deck, Kickoff Email Template, Sanity Check Sheet

🔓 Stakeholder Clarity: Stakeholder Power Map, Expectation Tracker Sheet, Backchannel Radar Questions, First Conversation Checklist + Script

🔓 PMC Status Report Survival Toolkit: Status Report Checklist, 1-Page Status Email Template, RAG Status Guide (Red–Amber–Green done right), Bad News Script Cheat Sheet

---