Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-Bound goals.
Bek's comment on my Body & Mind post reminded me of a concept I had heard about on another blog I read: SMART goals (see above). It's sort of a management concept - an attempt to quantify nebulous things like "goals." I think most of the implications of SMART goals should be pretty obvious, but you may want to take a minute to think about each part of the acronym, especially if you have a tendency to skip over details sometimes, like I do.
I realize as I'm writing this that your opinion of the usefulness of this framework will be heavily based on how you tend to analyze events and data. I personally like to quantify it, so that I can attempt to use other logical frameworks to determine success, failure, and possible future courses of action. I like to do this because I am not good at thinking about and weighing subjective information. In fact, I'm so bad at it that I kept wanting to use words like "quantities" and "data" to describe what I meant in that last sentence. I need to determine what I consider to be important about a subjective piece of information, quantify it, and process it that way. It's easy to understand this as a literal metaphor: if you need to go to "the store," it's going to be easier to do if you already know exactly how to get there. If you have to go look up the address, make sure they're open, and see if they even have what you're looking for... you just might get overwhelmed and just turn on the TV instead. SMART goals get rid of all of those barriers between you and getting stuff done.
So for me, a SMART goal is something that I can USE. If I only had vague & time-insensitive goals, I would stall when I tried to decide what to do about it. I would have to wait until it was turned into something more precise before I could do anything about it anyway...
If you find your brain working at all like mine, I am very deeply sorry. But! If that is the case, consider writing down your goals, asking if they fit the SMART criteria, and perhaps making any necessary conversions. Because it's much easier to ACT on something if it's ready to go. All of this is useful for To Do Lists, Bucket Lists, Life Goals, Shopping Lists, ANYTHING, really.
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2 comments:
nice. I have heard this concept and read about it a number of times but never had an acronym. I like that a lot. now i need to memorize that so I can use it as a part of the filter. Thanks Matt!
that is a really efficient idea. i like it. but i also think that the next step is to take really pie-in-the-sky goals and turn them into realistic goals.
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