Planfulness sits within the conscientiousness domain of the Big-Five personality traits and is posited to be a relatively stable individual difference (Ludwig et al., 2018). Planfulness is composed of three sub-components: (1) Temporal orientation, which refers to the tendency to be attuned to the future consequences of present actions, (2) cognitive strategies, or situating behaviors in line with goals, and (3) mental flexibility, or the ability to anticipate and handle obstacles interfering with goal progress.

Planfulness scores are related to measures of grit and conscientiousness, but explain unique variance in self-reported ability to achieve one’s goals (Ludwig et al., 2018). Specifically, those higher in planfulness who set a personal goal and report on their progress have been shown to make more progress on their goals than those with lower levels of planfulness (Ludwig et al., 2018). Planfulness can predict objective goal-directed behavior as well. Among students who reported a physical activity goal, those higher in planfulness swiped their student ID card to access the campus gym more across a 20-week period compared to those lower in planfulness, even when controlling for conscientiousness and other related constructs (Ludwig et al., 2019). Planfulness was thus associated with taking goal-oriented actions across time.

While an individual’s level of planfulness relates to their pursuit of goals that are important to them, it is not yet known how levels of planfulness might relate to goals during a major setback such as that experienced during the pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic represents a roadblock to goal pursuit. A vast majority of individuals reported that their goals became more difficult in the wake of the pandemic (Vowels et al., 2022), and they stopped believing that they could carry out their goals, often resulting in goal abandonment (Ritchie et al., 2021). A strong relationship between planfulness and grit could suggest that planfulness may also be able to predict an individual’s ability to persist in working toward goals when faced with a setback. Planning in general has been investigated as a coping strategy (e.g., “I’ve been thinking hard about what steps to take”) during setbacks, but its effects on mental health have been mixed (see Eisenbeck et al., 2022). Given that planfulness involves skills such as orienting to the future, deploying cognitive strategies for goal achievement, and displaying mental flexibility, it could serve as a bulwark in the face of severe disruption.

Subjective well-being is a construct encompassing satisfaction with one’s life, high positive affect, and low negative affect (Diener et al., 2017). High levels of subjective well-being are associated not only with mental wellness but also with better physical health and longevity (for a review, see Diener et al., 2017; Heintzelman and Tay, 2018). Stress, on the other hand, is negatively associated with well-being (e.g., Ng and Diener, 2022). Meaning in life, which relates and contributes to well-being, has been emphasized as an important coping mechanism and protective factor when faced with both extreme and everyday stressors (Ward et al., 2023).

The COVID-19 pandemic was a major worldwide stressor which wreaked havoc on mental health. Studies reported a surge in rates of depression (Bueno-Notivol et al., 2021; Giuntella et al., 2021), and many adolescents reported feelings of anxiety and changes in their well-being (Pigaiani et al., 2020). Along with general declines in overall well-being and reported happiness, there were fears about financial stability (VanderWeele et al., 2021) and academic outcomes for adolescents (Pigaiani et al., 2020). Additionally, stress specifically related to the COVID-19 pandemic negatively impacted meaning in life, consequently resulting in decreased well-being (Arslan and Allen, 2022).

As the long-term effects of the pandemic continue to be investigated, it will be easier to uncover the ways in which it is similar to, and different from, other stressors that we encounter. Interestingly, Zhang et al. (2021) analyzed social media posts and found that pandemic severity, based on the location of the user, negatively impacted well-being by increasing negative affect. The authors argued that the pandemic differed from other stressors due to the unique circumstances of the lockdown, including decreased time around friends and family outside the house and the inability to separate work and home life due to work-from-home measures (Zhang et al., 2021). While this pandemic may be different from more common, everyday stressors, previous work has shown that constructs such as meaning and well-being are related to extreme stressors (and specifically stress related to COVID-19) as well as common, everyday ones (Ward et al., 2023).

Another factor that can promote well-being is routine. Routines contribute to our sense of coherence and meaning in life (Heintzelman and King, 2019) and can serve as a buffer or protective factor in difficult times. Many people saw their typical routines disrupted during the pandemic, and the enactment of routines was even more predictive of meaning in life during pandemic lockdowns than in pre-pandemic contexts (Mohideen and Heintzelman, 2023). Many people also experienced a lack of physical activity relative to pre-pandemic times that was detrimental to mental health (Giuntella et al., 2021).

The COVID-19 pandemic thus represents an extreme stressor which led to decreases in well-being and a general decline in mental health. Research will continue to uncover these effects and shed light on factors which can help protect well-being in the face of a stressor.

Previous work with planfulness has been limited to examinations of its relationships with outcomes entirely in the goal domain. However, planfulness may share relationships with other important psychological outcomes including stress and psychological well-being. Indeed, committing to and perceiving progress toward attainable personal goals over time has been shown to promote psychological well-being (Brunstein, 1993). Further, more concrete progress toward goals across a semester has also been tied to increases in well-being across this same time period (Sheldon and Kasser, 1998). This link between goal progress and well-being suggests that individual differences that promote goal progress or protect against goal disruption may also relate to well-being.

Furthermore, variables related to planfulness, including conscientiousness, relate to greater positive affect and life satisfaction, and can serve as a buffer against stress by promoting effective coping (Bartley and Roesch, 2011; Duckworth et al., 2012; Sun et al., 2018). Grit, a perseverance for long-term goals (Duckworth et al., 2007), is another construct tied to both planfulness and goal achievement, and has also been positively associated with psychological well-being (Arya and Lal, 2018) and negatively associated with stress (Lee, 2017). The current study adds to this literature by probing a potential relationship between planfulness and the psychological outcomes stress and psychological well-being. We hypothesized that planfulness would positively relate to psychological well-being and negatively relate to stress.

In the current study, we aimed to examine the relationship between planfulness, stress, psychological well-being, and perceived goal disruption during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to sharing relationships with goal pursuit, stress, and psychological well-being, planfulness may be an individual difference which could serve as a buffer for these outcomes in difficult setback situations. The current study is the first to look at planfulness as a potential protective resource. Specifically, we measured students’ psychological well-being, perceived stress levels, and goal disruption in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. We investigated the relationships between participants’ perceptions of the personal impact of the pandemic (a stressful situation or setback) and these outcome measures, and the influences of planfulness on these relationships.

In summary, the current study builds on previous planfulness research to make three central contributions. First, we move beyond the existing scope of examined correlates by testing relationships between planfulness and stress and psychological well-being to build an understanding of the psychological relevance of individual differences in planfulness. Second, we examine the relationship between planfulness and goal markers in the context of an extreme setback, namely, the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, we test the potential protective power of planfulness in buffering against the negative psychological impacts of major life setbacks by examining planfulness as a moderator of the relationship between perceived pandemic impact and goal disruption, stress, and psychological well-being.

We hypothesized first that higher planfulness scores would be correlated with higher levels of psychological well-being, lower stress, and lower reported goal disruption. We further hypothesized that students higher in planfulness would be more protected against the negative psychological impacts of COVID-19, and thus that planfulness would serve as a buffer against the effects of the pandemic on these constructs. This study thus provides more insight into how planfulness may be a protective factor during a real-life setback, as well as how it may be related to psychological outcomes in addition to goal-related outcomes.

We recruited a sample of 199 undergraduate Psychology students at Rutgers University-Newark to complete online surveys in exchange for extra credit in a course. Participants completed surveys at three timepoints throughout the semester. The current analyses focused on timepoint 2 (mid-semester) because this is when the primary constructs of interest were measured. Twenty-five participants did not complete the survey at timepoint 2, leaving N = 174 for the present study (N = 105 in the Fall and N = 69 in the Spring), age M(SD) = 23.03 (4.37). One hundred twenty-five participants (72%) identified as female, 35 (20%) as male, and 14 (8%) did not provide an answer. The option to write in an alternative gender identity was provided, but no participants selected this option. The sample was racially diverse: 52 (30%) participants identified as Hispanic/Latinx, 65 (37%) identified as White, 33 (19%) as Black, 24 (14%) as Asian, 1 (0.6%) as Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander, 18 (10%) as “Other,” 19 (11%) selected that they preferred not to answer, and 14 (8%) did not answer. Newark was a COVID-19 hotspot throughout the pandemic (Armstrong and Tully, 2020; Okoh et al., 2020) and thus this sample represents a population that experienced the effects of the pandemic quite intensely. Furthermore, all students in the sample were attending their college classes in a fully remote setting. A post-hoc sensitivity analysis using G*Power 3.1 (Faul et al., 2009) indicated that given N = 174 and a desired power of 0.8, the current study was powered to detect effect sizes at least as large as R² = 0.053.

Data were collected virtually using Qualtrics (Qualtrics, Provo, UT). The surveys contained several existing and ad-hoc scales designed to measure constructs including the target variables of the perceived effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on one’s life, planfulness, goal-disruption, well-being, and stress. The current study was part of a larger project investigating the effects of the pandemic on goal-related and mental health outcomes in undergraduate students. This larger project took place over two semesters (Fall, 2020 and Spring, 2021) with separate cohorts of students. None of the variables of interest differed significantly between the two samples as measured using independent-samples t-tests: Pandemic Impact: t(143.64) = 0.75 p = 0.46; Planfulness: t(155.15) = 0.999, p = 0.32; Stress: t(160.47) = −0.55, p = 0.58; Psychological Well-being: t(161.61) = 1.18, p = 0.24; Goal Disruption: t(146.8) = −0.53, p = 0.60. Thus, the two student samples were combined into a single sample for all analyses. As a result, this sample contains students from mid-semester in Fall, 2020 and Spring, 2021.

We used Pearson’s correlations to test our hypothesis that planfulness is negatively correlated with stress and goal disruption, and positively correlated with well-being. Additionally, we hypothesized that planfulness would play a moderating role in expected relationships between COVID-19 impact and goal disruption, stress, and well-being, such that students with high levels of planfulness might be buffered against these negative psychological consequences of the pandemic. We tested this prediction with moderation analyses using RStudio Team (2020) “lm” function (R Core Team, 2022) to assess whether planfulness modified relationships between pandemic impact and goal disruption, well-being, and stress. We also ran additional models including age and gender as covariates. To investigate the possibility that planfulness is related to well-being and stress through its relationship with goal disruption, an exploratory mediation analysis was conducted using Hayes’ PROCESS macro for R (Hayes, 2022) which tests for the presence of mediation using bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals. These analyses can be found in the Supplementary material for this manuscript (Supplementary Figures 1, 2).

We first examined correlations among our variables of interest (Table 1). Planfulness was positively correlated with psychological well-being and negatively correlated with stress, extending the web of beneficial outcomes linked to planfulness. Further, planfulness shared a modest negative correlation with goal disruption in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which extends the relevance of these cognitive tendencies to difficult life circumstances.

Next, we performed a series of regression analyses to investigate the moderating role of planfulness in the relationships between perceived pandemic impact and goal disruption, stress, and psychological well-being. Pandemic impact and planfulness were mean-centered and their product was computed to form the interaction term. Additional models were used including age and gender as covariates. These variables did not emerge as significant predictors and the pattern of results was the same for all regression analyses, so here we report results from the models without age and gender included. This also allowed us to include participants who did not report a gender. For visualization, all interaction effects were plotted at ± 1 standard deviation for planfulness (e.g., Aiken and West, 1991; Dawson, 2014) to represent relationships between pandemic impact and the psychological outcome variables at high and low levels of planfulness.

For goal disruption, there were main effects of pandemic impact (β = 0.35, SE = 0.54, p < 0.001) and planfulness (β = −0.22, SE = 0.10, p = 0.02), with high pandemic impact predicting higher goal disruption and high planfulness predicting lower goal disruption. Additionally, there was a significant interaction between pandemic impact and planfulness (β = 0.26, SE = 0.10, p < 0.01, R² = 0.25). This interaction indicates that at low levels of pandemic impact, highly planful people experienced less disruption of their goals compared to less planful peers, but that at high levels of pandemic impact, there was higher goal disruption regardless of planfulness levels (Figure 1).

For psychological well-being, there were main effects of pandemic impact (β = −0.21, SE = 0.06, p < 0.001) and planfulness (β = 0.59, SE = 0.10 p < 0.001), such that higher pandemic impact predicted lower psychological well-being, and higher planfulness predicted higher psychological well-being. There was no significant interaction between pandemic impact and planfulness (β = 0.04, BSE = 0.11, p = 0.70, R² = 0.22). Higher levels of pandemic impact were associated with lower levels of psychological well-being regardless of planfulness levels, and individuals high in planfulness maintained higher psychological well-being compared to those with low planfulness whether pandemic impact was high or low (Figure 2).

For stress, there were main effects of pandemic impact (β = 0.21, SE = 0.54, p < 0.001) and planfulness (β = −0.52, SE = 0.95 p < 0.001), with high pandemic impact predicting higher stress, and high planfulness predicting lower stress. There was no interaction between pandemic impact and planfulness (β = −0.12, BSE = 0.10 p = 0.21, R² = 0.21). High levels of pandemic impact predicted higher levels of stress, and highly planful individuals maintained lower levels of stress than less planful individuals regardless of pandemic impact levels (Figure 3).

Our exploratory mediation analyses found significant but modest indirect effects of planfulness on well-being (b = 0.07, 95% BCa CI [0.001, 0.16]) and stress (b = −0.05, 95% BCa CI [−0.13, −0.0001]) mediated by goal disruption. Full results from these analyses can be found in the Supplementary material for this manuscript (Supplementary Figures 1, 2).

While our findings suggest that planfulness predicts outcomes outside of pure goal achievement, the current study had a few limitations that offer avenues for future research. First, while our use of self-reported perceptions of pandemic impact was intended to encompass the many different effects of the pandemic, this tactic introduces additional subjectivity into our conceptualization of pandemic-related adversity. This self-reported pandemic impact variable did not differ between participants who reported having tested positive for COVID-19 or relate to the number of people that the participant knew who had contracted COVID-19. It is clear that this measure of pandemic impact captured more than personal experiences with the COVID-19 illness itself, but encounters with other related challenges including financial or educational difficulties. While the self-reported impact variable appropriately captures a breadth of challenges related to COVID-19, it may also be affected by other unmeasured personality differences or coping strategies employed by participants that could modify the observed relationships. Additionally, this is a single-item measure, which did not allow for internal measurement validity. Due to data collection happening in the midst of the pandemic we were unable to use already existing scales to measure this and opted to prioritize face validity and ask participants simply about their perceived subjective experience, rather than trying to generate objective measures that would not fully capture this experience. Similarly, our measure of goal disruption was worded to reflect the impact of the pandemic on disruption of students’ goals, and future work should investigate these effects with a more general self-reported measure of goal-disruption or an objective measure of goal progress. Future research should thus examine planfulness processes in adversity by experimentally manipulating setbacks in controlled laboratory experiments and observing effect differences on general goal and psychological health outcomes by levels of planfulness. Relatedly, the results in our mediation analyses, while significant, were modest and should be replicated (perhaps again with a more domain-general measure of goal disruption).

Another limitation of this study is our use of a small convenience sample. As this study was conducted in a specific moment in time (Fall, 2020 and Spring, 2021) when college courses were being conducted remotely and many social distancing measures were in place, we are unable to collect more data to replicate these effects with a larger sample. Although it was quite racially diverse, our small sample also limits our ability to conduct more nuanced analyses. Specifically, there is strong evidence of the differential impacts of the pandemic among different racial and ethnic groups (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2022). While we found no difference in the pandemic impact variable or any of the dependent variables between White and Black participants or Latinx vs. non-Latinx participants, our study was likely underpowered to detect any such differences. This is an area that future research can explore.

As the science of planfulness continues to develop, there are many additional avenues for future research to build on the current work. First, additional research is needed to further investigate potential mechanisms accounting for the links between planfulness and stress and psychological well-being in both standard and adversity-ridden contexts. While the current study demonstrates that these relationships exist, future work can further uncover why they exist. One possibility is that planfulness impacts well-being and stress due to its relationship with goal progress and achievement. As a step toward investigating this idea our exploratory mediation analyses indicated that goal disruption mediates the relationship between planfulness and well-being and stress (Supplementary Figures 1, 2). Researchers could employ experience sampling methodologies to examine the extent to which planfulness-related actions of participants in real-life contexts relate to outcomes in the goal and psychological health domains. Another promising direction for future research is exploring interventions to foster planfulness. While it is a relatively stable individual difference, manipulations designed to promote planfulness could give individuals, and students in particular, additional tools for engaging with long-term goals and maintaining psychological wellness even in the face of setbacks.

The COVID-19 pandemic was an unprecedented disruption, leading to significant declines in mental health, and well-being. This context provided a unique opportunity to investigate factors which may have played a protective role against these adverse effects. The results from the present study demonstrate the importance of planfulness for progress toward desired ends as well as for psychological well-being and stress reduction in the midst of major life challenges. While future research will continue to show how the pandemic is similar to, and different from, other more common stressors, our results show that being high in planfulness confers many benefits for goal progress and mental wellness. Planfulness is associated with lower perceived stress, higher levels of psychological well-being, and lower disruption of goals. Furthermore, even when facing a setback as disruptive as a global pandemic, highly planful students exhibited lower levels of stress and higher levels of psychological well-being, pointing to the important value of planfulness for maintaining positive psychological health amid adversity.