Coaching Homework That Clients Actually Complete

If your clients are not doing the between-session work, the instinct is to conclude they are not motivated. Usually they are. The assignment is just badly designed.

Completion is a design property. Here are the rules that move it.

1. Smaller Than Feels Serious

The most reliable predictor of completion is size, and coaches consistently over-scope because commitments are made in sessions, where clients are at peak energy and the week ahead looks emptier than it turns out to be.

Halve whatever the client proposes. Then halve it again if they are in a difficult period. "Open the document and read the first page" completes. "Draft the proposal" does not — and a completed tiny task produces more momentum than an abandoned ambitious one, because it changes the client's belief about themselves rather than just the state of the document.

2. Attached to Something That Already Happens

"Reflect on this during the week" has no trigger, so it never starts. "Before you open your laptop on Monday" does.

Anchoring new behaviour to an existing routine is one of the better-supported findings in behaviour change, and it costs nothing to apply — see also our piece on behavioural activation, which works on the same principle of acting first and letting motivation follow.

3. Defined by Completion, Not Effort

"Think about your boundaries" cannot be finished. "Write down three things you will say yes to and two you will not" can.

Unfinishable assignments generate low-grade guilt all week and produce nothing to discuss. If you cannot state what "done" looks like in a sentence, the client cannot either.

4. Chosen by Them

Ask "what would be useful to do before we speak?" before you suggest anything. Client-generated assignments complete at noticeably higher rates, and when they do not, the failure is more informative — you learn something about their judgement rather than about your idea.

If they propose something unworkable, negotiate the size rather than replacing the substance.

5. Written in Their Words

Capture the commitment verbatim, including the vagueness. "Look at the budget sometime this week" and "open the spreadsheet Tuesday morning" have very different completion odds, and if you tidy the first into the second in your notes, you have edited out the exact information that would have told you it was not going to happen.

6. Followed Up Before the Session

An assignment nobody asks about until the next session is an assignment with a two-week feedback loop. A short mid-week check-in shortens it to days, while the task is still live and the client has not yet constructed a story about why it did not happen.

The Assignments Coaches Like Least

There is a pattern worth noticing: the assignments that work best are frequently the ones that feel too small, too obvious, or insufficiently insightful to be worth a coaching session.

"Notice when it happens and write down the time." "Send one message." "Do the thing you have been avoiding for ten minutes, badly."

These feel unsatisfying to set, because they do not demonstrate your value. They complete, and completion is what produces change. Elegant assignments that go undone produce nothing but a slightly awkward opening to the next session.

What to Do With a Completed One

Ask what they noticed, not whether it worked. The point of between-session work is rarely the output; it is the information the attempt generates. A client who tried to say no once and found it harder than expected has produced better material than one who succeeded easily.

Keeping that thread across sessions is what makes the work cumulative rather than episodic — the reason a consistent weekly check-in outperforms an occasional detailed one, and what Interlude is built to keep running without adding to your admin.