Setting Achievable Goals
The new year is just around the corner! Now is the perfect time to start thinking about what you want to achieve in 2024. How do we ensure we meet our goals? SMART goals is a place to start. Following this formula will make sure that your goals have a fighting chance.
SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time based.
S: This part in the formula is the goal itself. What specifically do you want to achieve?
M: How will you measure that you achieved it? Setting an open ended goal won’t get you there. There should be a clear picture of what success looks like here.
A: Your goal has to be attainable. Setting unrealistic goals for yourself can lead to feelings of doubt and failure if you do not succeed. The same is true if you are setting goals for your team to tackle in the new year. If that’s the case, consider meeting with the people the people who will be accountable to make sure they feel confident in their ability to get the job done to the degree you are asking. In the same vein, do not set goals that you do not have the resources to tackle.
R: Relevance is key too. Why is it important? What does completing this goal mean to you or your organization? How does this goal align with the big picture either for you or for your team?
T: Time-based. We’re talking about setting goals for the upcoming year, but you can make your goal achievable on whatever timeline works for you. Open ended goals allow for you to push them off until a later date until they eventually get forgotten or discarded. Creating time based benchmarks keeps you accountable and makes tracking your success much easier. Make sure you have a clear start and end date.
Below are some recommendations to set you on the right path.
- Take the time to write out responses to each of the categories that make up SMART goals so you have evidence of your expectations as you work towards your end result.
- Hang your goals up somewhere you can see in the space you will be working on them. If there are clear first, second, third, steps write yourself a checklist to motivate yourself through progress!
- Break your goals down into smaller goals. Bigger goals are not achievable in a day or a week. Looking at an intense goal as one task is daunting and may make you procrastinate the work since you know it won’t get done any time soon.
- Tell someone about your goal! Having someone in your corner who knows what you’re working towards and when you plan to complete it makes you more accountable and gives your goal a bigger sense of urgency. Plus, they will be proud of you when you complete your goal!
A final note, some people in the industry call a goal an overarching, easy to understand…well…goal. And an objective is what is actually specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time based. These are semantics, but no matter what you call it, if you don’t know if you reached the goal because you don’t know what the end goal actually looks like, then all the corporate speak doesn’t matter anyways!
