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Working Smarter with SMART goals
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- Peter Drucker, a highly influential figure in modern management theory, laid the foundations for SMART goals
- Hewlett-Packard, Xerox, DuPont, and Intel all credit the system with their growth and successes.
- SMART goals are intended to help handle the everyday tasks that accompany your job, education, hobbies, side projects, and skills
When I first went to UC Irvine, one of my first classes introduced SMART goals as a way to approach our educational journey, so I’ve decided to share the approach and my experiences with it here.
In 1954, Peter Drucker, one of the most influential figures in modern management theory, published The Practice of Management to introduce his Management by Objectives (MBO) strategy. Within it, Drucker outlined a system of management that aligned individual goals with the goals of an organization with a structure for continuous evaluation and rewards.
The system proved to be very popular among corporations that turned into giants. Hewlett-Packard, Xerox, DuPont, and Intel all credit the system with their growth and successes. Drucker was a staunch believer in setting specific goals with plans to achieve them, followed by evaluation and rewards. The five steps include:
Review organizational goal
Set worker objective
Monitor progress
Evaluation
Reward
In 1981, George T. Doran built the SMART goal approach on Drucker’s MBO. SMART goals essentially takes the principles in MBO and makes an easy-to-remember acronym to guide goal-setting.
SMART goals are intended to help handle the everyday tasks that accompany your responsibilities. It can apply to hobbies, side projects, or education as well as your job.
S: Specific
The 5Ws and How is a good way to frame this goal.
Who is working on the goal (do you have partners)? Who are you accountable to for the goal? Whose help or cooperation might be needed? Who is impacted by your actions?
What are you setting out to achieve? What actions will you take? What do you need in the way of help or resources? What resources do you already have? What constraints do you have?
Where are you going to be working on this goal? This one may seem less important than the others, but visualizing yourself working can help you brainstorm about the other questions. It can also help keep you committed to your goal by associating somewhere you’ll be with the work you have to do.
When are you going to work? When do you need the work done by? When do you have to issue progress reports? When do you have any other time-sensitive constraints kick in?
Why are you working towards this goal? Why do you benefit from this goal? Why do others benefit from this goal?
How are your actions going to further your progress towards this goal? This may sound similar to what, but it can be easy to assume some action you’ve planned is going to help further your goal. Make sure you’re challenging your own assumptions and really thinking through the connection between action and outcomes.
M: Measurable How will you track progress towards the goal and if the goal is met? (How much? How well?
Having clear criteria for your goals has a few advantages. It lets you check the pace of your work, design actionable plans, and stay motivated as you see your goal get closer.
If your goal is simple, like a certain amount of money to earn or weight to lose or paintings to make, then you can monitor your progress by simply comparing one number to another.
If your goal is long-term or complex with multiple stages, you should consider breaking it up into milestones that each have their own SMART goals.
Measurement can be tricky in a lot of situations. For example, if your goal is a coding project, you might be tempted to use the number of lines of code you’ve written as a way to track progress. A lot of companies (rumors say even Elon Musk) use lines of code or number of changes to try and track productivity.
However, any programmer will tell you that the best code is concise and easily understood, and that lines of code don’t correlate with complexity or impact. So we have to be careful and challenge our assumptions about our metrics to make sure we’re measuring something meaningful. A checklist of features you want to add to your project might be a better way to monitor progress.
A: Achievable Is the goal doable? Do you have the necessary skills and resources?
This relates to the How we discussed before. It can be easy to feel intimidated when evaluating this, because the idea that the goal under your responsibility isn’t doable can be worrying. However, remember that this is a normal part of challenging yourself with worthwhile goals.
Consider what you need to do the goal in full honesty, see where you might fall short, and remember that you can bridge that gap.
R: Relevant How does the goal align with broader goals? Why is the result important?
Contextualize this goal within the broader scope of your life. Consider how your values and commitments align with this goal, and how meeting this goal furthers your direction. If you have trouble at this step, it might be because your broader goals aren’t very concrete. They might be lacking details, or you might be uncertain about whether the broader goal is the right one for you.
T: Time-bound What is the time frame for accomplishing the goal?
A goal without a timeline is a wish. Whether you’re motivated by a hard deadline like a project due date or keeping a reasonably challenging pace, you want to have some rough idea of a schedule for completing parts of the goal. If you have a year-long goal, you should check-in with yourself month-to-month or so to make sure you’re further along enough than you were before. It can also help to share your goals with other people as well for some accountability and validation. Social commitments and a sense of urgency are natural sources of motivation for people.
Start by listing out your major responsibilities, then design SMART goals for each one. You’ll have to make some judgment calls about the scope of your goals as they relate to your responsibilities.
