Smart Goal Setting

“The best way to waste your life, … is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch.”
–Chuck Palahniuk

How do you do smart goal setting? What kinds of goals are doable and what kind are like a dieter’s hangover after New Year’s? How do you reach goals without compromising your time, integrity and sanity? This process works for money, personal development goals, really anything you are looking to accomplish.

Smart Goal Setting Steps

1. Decide what really want to accomplish. It is easy to make wide sweeping generalizations like “I want more money”, “I want to be a better person” or “I want to be more organized”.

These kinds of goals are easy to make and not scary because they aren’t measurable. How to you quantify “better person”? The more unclear you make yourgoal setting, the less achievable the goal really is because the definition is fuzzy.

People make fuzzy goals because they are afraid to fail. That is a waste of time and not smart goal setting. You feel good about “goal setting” but are really spinning your wheels. Goal setting without a measurable gain is as much of a waste of time as what you were doing before you got your spiral bound notebook and started “goal setting”. Nail it down.

2. Decide what the most basic tangible unit of the goal is. Is it dollars saved? Is the goal measurable in pounds lost, miles run or minutes spent with your children? Write down what exactly you want to achieve in the most clear form possible. Something like “lose 30 pounds” “save $10,000″ or “run 5 miles a day” is measurable and clear.

Either you are 30 pounds lighter and $10,000 richer, or you aren’t. Don’t cheat yourself by going half way. Don’t let fear sabotage this exercise before you do any of the heavy lifting. Write the whole amount. Don’t put 15 pounds if you need to lose 30. Don’t put “run every day” if you want to get to 5 miles. Don’t chicken out. Aim big. The low hanging fruit just isn’t as sweet as the fruit at the top of the tree.

3. Decide how long you want to take to accomplish the entire goal. Make the amount of time reasonable but challenging. Next, divide the larger goal by the number of weeks.

A week is a good length of time that I use a lot. When I was trying to lose 80 pounds, I just worried about the one pound I had resolved to lose THIS week. Not the next 80 weeks. If I had been worried about the next 80 weeks, I would have quit under the sheer hugeness of that goal. I could handle the next meal and the next day, for the weigh-in next week, but the next year and a half would have just made me procrastinate or spiral into despair. If the goal is large and you try to eat the whole thing at once, you will choke.

If your goal is a money-saving one, decide on what dollar amount you would like to have accumulated after the incremental period of time you have chosen. Small periods of time are good. If you want to save $10,000 this year, figure out how much you need to save this week, and every week this year to accomplish the goal. Is it possible for you to save $192.31 ($10,000 divided by 52 weeks) this week with your current income? If you don’t even MAKE $192.31 in a week, you’re going to have to make much larger changes than the person who makes $1192.31 a week.

4. Figure out what your baseline is. With something like weight loss, this is easy. Strip down and hop on the scale. Gasp and write down the number. With money, figure out where you are in real dollar terms. Are you in debt? Do you have anything saved already? How much are you aiming for?

5. Make a wall chart like you did in grade school. This is great for visually seeing your progress during the long period time where you are slugging away but nothing much seems to be happening. If you’re embarrassed, put it on the inside door of your medicine cabinet or the back of your bathroom door. Make a graph with time on the X axis, and the units of what you are trying to accomplish on the Y axis. Somewhere on the chart, write your baseline.

6. Pick a day of the week to be accountable. It doesn’t matter what day, just one where you are ready to start and have the time to spend a few minutes reviewing your progress. Say you pick Saturday. Every Saturday at the time you choose, your task is to review your goal and how it went that week. Some weeks will go great and others will be less than great. Some weeks might even be dismal or show a backslide. The point is to keep going, no matter what you see. Every week where you are still charting your progress and being conscious about how things are going is a success.

7. Each week, review your progress. Chart the progress on your wall chart. If you accomplished the goal for the week, give yourself a star and stick it on the chart. Make this as fun as you can. Emotionally celebrate your successes. If you backslide, redouble your resolve but do not beat yourself up. You are trying to do something big that most people probably fail at. Just trying and sticking to something is noteworthy. Don’t make things harder by beating yourself up. Develop a healthy mental dialogue.

If your best friend called and said “I tried, but I didn’t lose any weight this week”, you wouldn’t say “wow, you cow, give up and hit the donuts”. You would try to be encouraging. Do yourself a favor. Align your mental dialogue so that it doesn’t sabotage you.

8. Study your goal as you go. Learn as much about it as you can, but don’t fall into the ‘read up, procrastinate, start goal later’ failure loop. If you aim to become an expert before you actually get anything done, you are just procrastinating and spinning your wheels. Throw yourself in and learn as you go. You’ll benefit more from the real life application than if you got a PhD in nutrition before throwing out the donuts. Smartgoal setting requires real life application AND learning new techniques.

9. Make small design changes in your life that allow you to accomplish the goal. If you are trying to eat better, aim for today and the week will take care of itself. If you are trying to save money, change your daily life so that you don’t browse through stores on your way home from work. Evaluate your daily Starbucks habit. Make yourself as knowledgeable as you can. Throw yourself in and then chart your progress. If something you try doesn’t work particularly well one week, try something else, while keeping the structure of evaluating your progress in place.

10. Keep going until you reach where you wanted to go. Getting a big goal accomplished makes you 100 times more confident about the next time. Self discipline is like a muscle. The more you work it, the easier it gets to bring bigger and better things into your life.

11. Review what worked and try to replicate your success formula for your next goal. No need to reinvent the wheel each time you want to accomplish something. Use the same mental encouragement you used to save $10,000 as you did to drop 30 pounds. No reason to reinvent the wheel with your personal mental dialogue. “Do it now” works for food and money and most everything else you could aim for.

About Failure

Think of it this way. No matter what you do, the time is going to pass anyway. You can start now, or not, but the time will pass regardless. You can get something done, even if it is half of what you originally intended, or you can still be at Step 1, trying to define your goal. Why not give it a try? Even if you fail miserably, you’ll have the self knowledge that you gained from the attempt.

Which is more of a failure, never trying or pushing as hard as you can and not quite getting there but knowing yourself much better?

I’d rather try and get my ass kicked than just stand there on the sidelines reviewing my options. Monday is an illusion that you can’t afford.

If you do get your ass kicked, then you are ready to try again, smarter and more aware. Smart goal setting requires enthusiasm and simplicity. Don’t over complicate and over analyze things before you start. Just do SOMETHING, ANYTHING, to get there. If one thing doesn’t work, tweak and keep trying.

Do the best you can, every day, and view it as lifestyle engineering. Applaud your own successes, and surround yourself with encouraging people.