SMARTER goals: Writing and tracking goals for success

BLUF: Making and tracking goals provide direction and accountability to guide your life choices. Make sure goals are SMARTER and within your control to give you the best chance of achieving them!

But first, a confession: I’ve never set personal goals before.

WAIT WAIT, don’t leave! I swear I’m not a nut job making this stuff up on the fly. The irony is that I’ve made individual and team goals in my job for years. However, not once have I sat back when January rolled around and made personal goals for the year.

Why are goals important?

Life is busy and full of things to occupy your time. Working that job, shuttling around your kids, taking care of pets, having fun with friends, binging Netflix and scrolling endlessly through social media just to name some options. It’s not hard to blink, have a year go by, and wonder “what did I do in the last year?”

Enter goals. A goal is something that you want to achieve. It’s an end point that’s important to you. You don’t see soccer players running up and down the field endlessly kicking the ball in random directions do you? Their efforts are focused – towards the goal. Making goals forces you to step back and think about what is important to you. What do you want to accomplish and why? Making and tracking those goals then focuses your efforts in the direction of the things that you want to accomplish.

Setting SMART goals

You may have heard of SMART goals before –Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

One disclaimer about SMART goals is that there are a multitude of different words that have been used for each letter of the acronym. I’m not here to judge which is right or wrong but offer up my preferred words and approach.

• Specific – The wording of the goal needs to be clear about what you want to accomplish.
• Measurable – There has to be a way to quantify if you’ve achieved the goal or not. Lose weight is not a measurable goal. Lose 10 pounds is a measurable goal.
• Achievable – Your goal can be a stretch but it should be something that you are capable of doing. If it’s impossible, how is that going to motivate you to try?
• Relevant – A goal needs to be aligned with something that you really care about accomplishing. Don’t make an exercise goal if getting in shape isn’t important to you. You have to be honest with yourself here when making your goals.
• Time Bound – When will you complete the goal? You need to give yourself a deadline or life will happen and nothing will get done.

This page goes into more detail about creating SMART goals if you need a little more help.

Keep things in your control

One big mistake I see is people making goals that are NOT fully in their control. You need to set goals where you control the outcome. “Get promoted to manager of the customer service team in the next year” ticks all the boxes in the SMART criteria, but it’s a bad goal. Why? You don’t have full control over being promoted. You could work your butt off and the company could hire a friend of the CEO instead. A better high level goal would be: “Build all necessary skills and experience in the next year to be promotable to manager of the customer service team.”

Sports goals can be equally difficult to keep in your control. You may want to win your local golf club championship this year as a high level goal, but is that in your control? No, it’s not. You can’t control a professional golfer entering and playing far better than you. No, don’t even think about control things by Tonya Harding them.

Instead, a better high level goal could be “Train and practice to maximize my chances of winning the golf club championship.” This would then be accompanied by sub-goals such as:

• Practice putting 5 hours a week.
• Practice chipping 3 hours a week.
• Play at least one round on the course from the championship tees a week.
• Average hitting 60% fairways in regulation by the championship.
• Average hitting 60% greens in regulation by the championship.

Setting SMARTER Goals

Pursuing FI is about doing things just a little bit better. Why have SMART goals when you can have SMARTER goals? I see your average old acronym and raise you an ER!

You’ve written your SMART goals at the beginning of the year and start working on achieving them. How do you know if you’re on track? Like any good project you need a way to monitor progress and adjust course if needed. Evaluate and Re-Adjust for the win!

• Evaluate your progress – You need a way to regularly monitor your goals and track your progress. Pick a cadence – weekly, bi-weekly, monthly and track your progress against the goal. This helps keep you accountable and keeps your eye on the prize. You made these goals because they were important to you. Right?
• Re-Adjust – No goals are perfect and life is full of surprises. After evaluating goals you may realize that a goal you made isn’t achievable. Or a goal that you thought was important to you, isn’t anymore. Or you want to add something new. DO IT! It’s far better to modify goals and keep after it than it is to quit. And if you quit one goal it’s far to easy for that mentality to snowball into other goals. Re-Adjust your goals and keep going.

Action steps:

1. Think about what you want to accomplish over the next year. Don’t worry about formatting things as goals, just put things in plain English.
2. If something is a large goal start to break it down into smaller goals. The ManagingFI.com section of my goals really represents a larger goal of “Grow the ManagingFI blog views.” I didn’t know what was possible so I didn’t worry about making the high level goal SMART, I made SMART sub-goals.
3. Rewrite all goals to make them SMART. Be especially sure that they are measurable, time bound and within your control.
4. Put your goals into a tracking spreadsheet or some other format where you will be able to track progress.
5. Decide how often you will review progress against your goals. I will be tracking monthly but that might be too short or too long of an interval for you.
6. Review progress on that interval. No exceptions. Be honest with the numbers and the progress. If something is falling behind then it either needs to become an area of focus to get it on track or a goal needs to be re-adjusted.
7. POST your goals someplace where you will see them DAILY. Your office, your desk, your mirror. You need reminders of what you’re working towards to stay on track.

Here is an example of my 2021 goals. Hopefully these will give you some ideas and kick start your effort. As I previously wrote, my spending needs some work so that’s an important goal.

Want this Excel goal setting template? Download here: Thank you to the RetireBy40 blog for the format inspiration.

Did this help you? What is your plan for creating SMARTER goals that you can control?