https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-feeling-close-to-the-finish-line-makes-you-push-harder/

Everyone has goals they’re striving to achieve, even during a global pandemic. Maybe you’re a scientist working around the clock to find a cure for COVID-19 (if so, thank you and good luck!). Or maybe you’re stuck working from home and pushing hard to hit 10,000 steps a day while confined to a small, urban living space. Whatever it is you’re striving to achieve, science shows you’re likely to push harder the closer you feel to the finish line. When researchers first speculated about this tendency, they called it the goal gradient hypothesis. And it turns out to have interesting implications not only for predicting when we’ll push ourselves the hardest, but also for marketers hoping to convince us to buy our next cup of coffee or take our next airline flight (at least, once we start flying again).

Oleg Urminsky, a professor of marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, has been studying the goal gradient hypothesis since he was a doctoral student. Recently, Katy Milkman, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, got to chat with Urminsky in an interview for the podcast Choiceology.