What are SMART Goals? Are Your Goals SMART Enough?

What are SMART goals?

Setting goals and striving to achieve them are part of life. However, for both individuals and businesses, setting goals in the normal way can create so much vagueness and unclarity.

The reason we, as people, set goals is to have a clear sense of direction for where we want to be in life, work, business, or whatever field. Setting too general and unrealistic goals can diminish our efforts when it comes to execution. 

The SMART Goals Format comes here as a good tool to help in the process of setting up goals in a way that actually helps us. SMART Goals is an acronym for: 

• S: Specific
• M: Measurable 
• A: Achievable
• R: Relevant/Realistic 
• T: Timely

Before you start setting up your goals using the SMART method, do this

This step is important, and it depends highly on the goals that you are setting. But generally, it is important that you clarify where you are now before you start making your goals. 

We have two cases: 

• Case 1: A totally new goal
• Case 2: A goal is a continuation of the execution of a bigger goal. 

Case 1: For a totally new goal. You will have to do so much research to understand what a realistic star would be. Here you are at level zero. It’s like playing a game, and you just start the game. You are now at level zero. So you can go and start implementing the SMART Goal format in this case directly. 

Case 2: For a continuation of the execution of a bigger goal. Here, you need to know exactly where you are in order to proceed and continue setting up your new SMART goals under that big goal. 

Example of a SMART Goal

Problem: You spend so much time on social media scrolling and consuming content. This resulted in you neglecting important tasks and, therefore, feeling anxious.

So what SMART goal can we set? 

Let’s start:

Specific: 

• Who? In this example, the person involved in the goal is you. 
• What? You spend so much time on social media, which causes you to neglect tasks and makes you feel anxious. At this stage, if you do not know “what,”  you need to do more research to understand the problem you are trying to solve by setting a SMART goal.
• When? You can be more specific in the When section. However, you should give some clarification on when the problem or solution should happen. 
• Where? This question might apply more if the goal is a business goal. However, in our case here, it’s possible that where this problem happens more is at home at your desk, or maybe at home on your favorite sofa. 
• Why? You want to reduce time spent on social media so you can focus on completing essential work. This will reduce your anxiety. This is why
• Which? This question can be tricky; not all might need to answer it. You can try to understand what can be a barrier to achieving the goal. You want to reduce time spent on social media, but a large portion of your work is related to social media, as maybe you are a social media manager. In this case, reducing time spent scrolling through social media might be a problem. 

Measurable:

• So what metrics are you going to use to measure your progress? Also, is this a big goal that requires a few milestones? If that is the case, what are the milestones you need to achieve? 
• Now, returning to our case, since the problem is related to spending so much time consuming content on social media, the metric to measure and use as a success indicator will be time. 
• At this stage, you might need to start measuring how much time you are spending on social media. 
• For example, you spend so much time on Instagram. You can go to “Settings and Activity,” then scroll to Time spent. You can then see how much time you spent on the app in the week for each day and the average for that week. 
• But in case you don’t know, you can start making observations about your day. Each time you start scrolling through social media, you start a timer. Then you will know by the end of the day how much time you spend on social media. 
• Now, let’s say you spend around 4 hours a day consuming content. What next?

Achievable: 

• What would be an achievable goal since you are spending around 4 hours a day on social media?
• A total stop from social media might be possible, but it will be so hard to achieve compared to only reducing the time you spend by 25%. In our case, an achievable goal can be to reduce the time you spend on social media to 3 hours daily instead of 4 hours. Which gives you 1 hour more to work on essential tasks. 
• But again, this differs by individual; some might be so addicted to social media that a 25% reduction can still seem too big. Others might think a reduction of 75% is more possible for them. If so, you just go with the goal you see as most achievable with what you have. 

Relevance/Realistic:

• The relevance criteria refers to: is the action you are taking relevant to the broader goal? This makes more sense in a business goal as it can refer to the action you are taking that is that is relevant to the business objectives. 
• However, in our case, increasing productivity can be the overall, broader goal. So is reducing the time for social media to align with the broad goal of increasing productivity. Yes, it does. 
• But is this goal realistic? Yes. You are trying to reduce 25% of the overall time spent on social media. If your goal is not realistic for your situation, make sure to pick a goal that is more realistic to reach. 

Time-bound: 

• Setting a goal without mentioning when it will be executed reduces its chances of being achieved. 
• At this step, you need to think about and state your deadlines. When you want to start the execution,. 
• In our example, let’s say you want to start tomorrow. You will give yourself a period of time that ends on [you state the date]. In this period, you will be measuring how much time you are spending on social media. You want to immediately reduce the time from 4 hours daily to 3 hours starting tomorrow.
• At the end of the week, you will analyze your data and decide whether you want to reduce or continue with the same rate. 

5 Steps to Write SMART Goals:

As explained in the earlier example, to write a goal in the SMART framework, you need to go through all five steps.

Step1: Specific

Your goal needs to be specific. Please do as much research as possible to understand the topic at hand before you go through goal-setting. Yes, it is still possible to make a broad goal, but you need to keep in mind some details about this goal. If you are trying to solve a problem, that can be a good start.

Gather as much information about the problem. A good way to achieve that is to ask the following questions: 

• Who
• What
• When
• Where 
• Why
• Which 

You can be more specific and ask questions like:

• What needs to be accomplished?
• What is your action plan?

The example mentioned earlier uses this method to gather more details about the problem at hand. 

Step 2: Measurable

If you set a goal, make sure you have a way to track your progress toward achieving that goal. It is up to you if you want to track results or actual work.

Whatever you decide to track will be your metric for the success of this goal. Sometimes what we choose as a metric does not really reflect the actual goal. Some basic questions you need to answer are: 

• What metrics are going to be used to track the progress of this work?
• If this work is hard to track, what are the most related metrics that can be used to reflect success? 
• How will you know you have achieved the goal?
• Does your goal require you to divide it into milestones? 

Once you know the metrics you are going to use to track your progress toward this goal, you need to understand and clearly state what stage you are at in using these metrics.

Taking the social media example, you will need to start measuring how much time you actually spend right now on social media. 

Step 3: Achievable

Whatever goal you are going to set needs to be achievable. Stretch Goals is the name given to far-reaching goals. When using the SMART framework, you should choose realistic goals.

The definition of achievable depends highly on where you are now in regard to your goal and what skills you have. On an individual level, your goals need to be realistic given your skills and resources.

Do you have enough time to achieve them? How much time can you actually allocate? If you see your goal being far reached with the limited resources you have, it’s time to make a more achievable goal. 

Maybe even divide the work into more milestones. You want to be able to actually achieve the goal. Also, always focus more on the work you have control over than on the results you have no control over. 

For both individuals and businesses, resources are limited and scarce. For most individuals, when setting a goal, the most scarce resource they need is time. For businesses, human power management and budgeting are the two most limited resources. 

In general, you should be asking questions like: 

• What skills are needed in order to complete the task?
• What resources will be needed? 
• What challenges might you face? 
• Is your goal realistic in comparison to the resources, skills, and challenges that might arise? 

Step 4: Relevant/Realistic

You want your goal to be relevant to your other goals and align with your overall goal. Also, you want to choose a more realistic goal depending on where you stand. The following questions can help in deciding whether it is relevant or not: 

• Does this goal support a long-term vision of myself? 
• Does achieving this goal contribute to my broader goals and priorities?
• Does it align with my core values?
• Does this goal excite me? 
• Am I internally driven by my genuine interest in realizing this goal, or is it due to external pressure?

Step 5: Time-bound

Time is a limited resource, and stating exactly when you want to start working toward the goal and when the deadline or duration will be is important.

Stating “I will start exercising” is not the same as “I will start exercising tomorrow at 7:30 am for 20 minutes, and I will keep exercising every day at 7:30 am for a period of 10 days.”. 

You see, the first expression is not time-specific, which in fact diminishes future efforts toward realizing that goal. However, the second expression states exactly when you will start exercising, for how long, and what the duration of this exercise is.

Maybe at the end of the 10 days you want to analyze your performance and execution of the goal. You want to answer the following questions: 

• How long, realistically speaking, would it take to achieve this goal?
• What is the deadline?
• Do you need to break down the goal into milestones?

What are stretch goals?

It is a goal that stretches your known limits. Stretch goals are targets that are ambitious, challenging to achieve, and require novel solutions in most cases.

A stretch goal is beyond the capacity of what can be considered achievable. The energy and work required to achieve an incremental goal or an easy goal is so much less than that of a stretch goal, in which you will be required to get out of your comfort zone.

Stretch goals are not achievable 100% of the time, but even if you don’t achieve them, the result from the energy and work done can sometimes be more than incremental goals.

The purpose of a stretch goal is to inspire and motivate others to reach higher results, not to actually reach the stretch goal itself. 

Stretch goals can present a paradox because if the goal is too hard and unrealistic, you will lose interest and get unmotivated, and if it is too easy, it is no longer a stretch goal that will help you stretch your limits. 

Examples of stretch goals

• You exercise once per week. A realistic goal might be to try to increase it to twice per week. A stretch goal will be to exercise five times a week. 
• Let’s say you only speak English and you want to learn Chinese. You have difficulties remembering new things. In this case, a stretch goal would be to learn 500 words per month. While a more achievable goal might be 100 words per month,. 

Stretch Goals vs. Smart Goals

I believe that both stretch goals and SMART goals should go together, whether they are for individuals or businesses. While SMART goals provide clarity and focus, stretch goals push beyond normal expectations towards better results.

SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound, which means they provide clear steps and timelines towards the goal while at the same time providing clear metrics on how to assess your progress. 

Combining Stretch Goals with Smart Goals

• First, start with a stretch goal.
• Second: Divide that stretch goal into many milestones.
• Third: Use SMART Goals for each milestone from your stretch goal.