SMART Goals: Meaning, Examples and How to Write Them

SMART goals are goals written so that five questions have a clear answer before you start: What exactly will be done, how will you know it is done, is it within your reach, why does it matter, and by what date. The letters stand for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound. A SMART goal is not a checklist you tick once and file away. It is a test you run on a wish before you give it a single week of your life.

Most wishes fail the test on the first pass. “Get in shape” names no measure. “Grow the business” names no date. “Read more” names nothing at all. That is not laziness. It is how people talk about what they want, and talk is where every goal starts. The SMART criteria translate that talk into a sentence a calendar can hold. Everything below gets worked through on one example: Dana, 34, an ER nurse in Denver who works three twelve-hour shifts a week and wants to finish her first half marathon.

What SMART goals are and what the acronym means

SMART is an acronym, and each letter names one criterion a goal has to meet before it counts as a goal rather than a hope. Specific: the goal names one result, not a direction. Measurable: a number or a yes-or-no event shows whether it happened. Attainable: the result is within reach with the time and money you actually have. Relevant: it matters to something larger than itself. Time-bound: there is a date. Five criteria, one sentence. Whoever gets all five into the sentence has a SMART goal. Whoever misses one has a wish with good intentions.

The SMART goals meaning gets lost the moment people treat the acronym as a form. Anyone who writes “Specific: yes, Measurable: yes” down the margin of a goal has filled out a form. Anyone who rewrites the goal until a stranger could check it on the due date has used the method. The difference shows in one test. Could someone who does not know you read the goal on the deadline and say, without asking you a single question, whether it happened? Dana's first version was “get back into running this year.” No stranger could check that. Her final version was “finish a half marathon in Denver on October 17 in under 2 hours and 15 minutes.” A stranger with the results page could check it in ten seconds.

That is the whole method. The five letters are not five separate jobs. They are five angles on the same question: Would a stranger know?

The five SMART criteria, letter by letter

Each criterion fixes one way goals go soft. Taken together they leave the sentence no room to hide. Here is what each one asks, and what it caught in Dana's first draft.

• Specific. What exactly, and what is not included? “Run more” is a direction. “Finish a half marathon” is a result with an edge: 13.1 miles, one race, one day. Specific does not mean detailed. A specific goal can be short. It only has to name one result that cannot be confused with its neighbor.
• Measurable. How will you know? The measure is a number, a date or an event that either happened or did not. “Run faster” fails. “Under 2:15” passes. A measure also needs a baseline, and this is where most drafts quietly break. Dana timed a 5K in April: 34 minutes. Only with that number did 2:15 for 13.1 miles, about 10:18 per mile, become a real stretch instead of a random one.
• Attainable. Is it within reach with the hours you have? Dana works three shifts of twelve hours, which leaves four days and a tired body. Three runs a week fit. Six do not. Attainable is the letter people get wrong in both directions. Too timid, and the goal changes nothing. Too bold, and it dies in March.
• Relevant. Why this, and why now? Dana turns 35 in November and wants proof that shift work has not taken her fitness. That is her sentence. Relevant also means relevant to the rest of your year. A goal that competes with everything else you want is not relevant. It is a distraction with a deadline.
• Time-bound. By when? Not “this year.” A date. October 17. A date does something no other letter does: it counts backward. From the second week of January that is 40 weeks, and 40 weeks can be cut into quarters, months and Tuesdays.

Here is Dana's goal before and after, letter by letter. Notice that the SMART version is not longer. It is simply checkable.

Where SMART comes from, and what Doran actually wrote

The acronym first appeared in print in November 1981. George T. Doran, a consultant and former director of corporate planning, published a two-page article in Management Review titled “There's a S.M.A.R.T. Way to Write Management's Goals and Objectives.” His letters were Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Realistic and Time-related. Assignable meant: name who will do it. Realistic meant: state what can be achieved with the resources at hand. Doran also wrote a sentence most summaries leave out. Not every objective, he said, has to meet all five criteria. The acronym was a prompt for managers writing objectives, not a law.

Attainable and Relevant came later, as the method traveled out of corporate planning and into personal development. Paul J. Meyer, who built a career around goal setting and published “Attitude Is Everything” in 2003, carried it to people setting goals for themselves. In a personal goal nobody assigns anything, so Assignable gave way to Attainable, and Relevant took the place of Realistic in most versions you will meet today. Some add E and R for Evaluated and Reviewed and call it SMARTER.

That means: when a guide lists “the five principles of SMART goals,” it is quoting one version among several. The letters shift. The test does not. Every version asks whether a stranger could check the goal on the due date. Anyone who argues about Attainable versus Achievable has stopped setting goals and started collecting acronyms.

How to write SMART goals in seven steps

Writing the sentence takes 20 minutes the first time and five the second. The order matters, because each step protects the next from wishful thinking. Dana's answers are in every step.

1. 01

   Write the wish exactly as you say it

   Use the words you would say to a friend. Do not improve them yet. Dana wrote: “I want to get back into running.” That sentence is the raw material, and it is honest.

2. 02

   Name the result, not the activity

   Ask: What will be true when this is done? Running is an activity. A finished race is a result. Dana wrote: “Finish a half marathon.” If your answer is still a verb, ask the question again.

3. 03

   Measure your baseline, then pick the number

   Before you set a target, measure where you are. Dana ran a timed 5K: 34 minutes, just under eleven minutes per mile. From there, 2:15 for a half marathon means holding a slightly faster pace for four times the distance. Without the 34, the 2:15 would be a guess.

4. 04

   Count the hours you really have

   Look at a normal week, not an ideal one. Dana has four days off, two of them for recovery and family. Three runs, about 3.5 hours including warm-up. If the goal does not fit the hours, shrink the goal. Do not shrink the honesty.

5. 05

   Write down why, in one sentence

   “Proof before I turn 35 that shift work has not taken my fitness.” If you cannot write the sentence, the goal belongs to somebody else: your doctor, your boss, a feed. Keep it anyway if you must, but know it will lose every tie.

6. 06

   Set the date and count backward

   October 17 is 40 weeks away. Dana splits them: a 5K without stopping by March 31, a 10K by June 30, an eleven-mile long run by September 30. Each quarter gets a measurable result of its own.

7. 07

   Run the stranger test and write the final sentence

   Read the sentence as a stranger with the results page in hand. Could they check it? Dana's final version: “Finish a half marathon in Denver on October 17 in under 2:15, training three runs a week from January 11.” Then put it where you see it every Sunday.

Seven steps sound like a lot for one sentence. They are not seven sentences. They are seven places where a goal usually leaks, and step three is the one almost everyone skips. Anyone who skips the baseline ends up with a goal that feels SMART and measures nothing. Anyone who skips step four ends up with a goal that is SMART on paper and homeless in the calendar. Four ways to put a number on a goal with nothing obvious to count are laid out in measurable goals examples.

Five SMART goals examples for work and personal life

Personal SMART goals follow the same five letters as goals at work. Only the Relevant line changes, because nobody assigns the goal to you, so the reason has to be yours. Here are five examples across five areas of life, each with the vague version it started from and the measure a stranger would use on the due date. The work side, with examples by role and industry, is covered in SMART goals for work.

Look at what the five have in common. None of them says “try” or “more.” Each names a result, a number and a date, and each has a baseline hiding behind it: the current account balance, zero presentations given, two dinners a week, no Spanish. The family goal looks like an activity, and it is. Four dinners a week is a frequency, and frequency is a fine measure when the result you want is a habit. The money goal is the easiest to check and the hardest to keep, which is why the transfer sits on the first of the month, before anything else can claim the $400. More worked examples by life area, each with the measure spelled out, are collected under SMART goals examples.

The three mistakes that make SMART goals fail quietly

The method is simple, and that is its strength. Simple methods fail in simple ways. Most SMART goals that die do not die from a missing letter. They die from one of three habits that look like the method and are not. Which one is yours?

• Measuring the activity instead of the result. “Run three times a week” is a plan, and a good one. As a yearly goal it fails, because you can run three times a week for 40 weeks and still not finish the race. Activity belongs on the weekly level. The yearly level holds the result.
• Attainable turned into timid. Anyone who has been burned by a big goal tends to write the next one so small it cannot fail. It also cannot change anything. Dana's safe version was “run a 5K.” She had done that in April. Attainable means within reach with effort, not within reach from the couch.
• A deadline so far away that nothing happens before it. October tells you nothing about Tuesday. A date 40 weeks out protects you from urgency for 36 of them. The fix is not a closer deadline. It is a chain of closer ones, and that chain is the next section.

SMART goals in the goal ladder: from year to day

A SMART goal with an October date is a yearly goal. It tells you where you will stand on October 17. It does not tell you what to do on Tuesday. That gap is where most goals are lost, not in the writing but in the 39 weeks between the writing and the date. The way to close it is to write the goal five times, once per time frame, and keep every version SMART in its own frame.

Dana's chain looks like this. Year: finish the half marathon on October 17 under 2:15. Quarter one, by March 31: run a 5K without stopping, three runs a week, 36 runs logged. Quarter two, by June 30: a 10K under 68 minutes. Quarter three, by September 30: one long run of eleven miles. Month, January: twelve runs, longest 3 miles. Week two of January: three runs, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, 8 miles in total. Tuesday: 30 minutes easy, 2.5 miles, before the house wakes up. Every level has a number and a date. Every level can be checked by a stranger. And every level answers to the one above it.

Two things change when the goal exists on all five levels. First, Attainable becomes a weekly question instead of a yearly guess. Dana does not need to know in January whether 2:15 is realistic. She needs to know whether three runs fit this week, and she finds out on Sunday. Second, progress becomes a count. At the end of January she has twelve runs or she does not. At the end of March she has one continuous 5K or she does not. The yearly goal stops being a feeling and becomes a sum of checked boxes.

This is the structure Gaapp is built around: a yearly goal at the top, quarter and month goals hanging from it, weekly goals under those, and one daily goal at the bottom. Each level shows what share of its goals is done next to what share of its time has passed. If the week is 60 percent over and one of three runs is checked, you see it on Wednesday, not in October. How to set the yearly level well is covered in annual planning, how to write the bottom level so you can check it off at night is in daily goals, and the whole chain from the first sentence to the last checkbox is in how to achieve goals.

When SMART goals are the wrong tool

SMART goals are good at one thing: turning a result into a checkable sentence. Three situations ask for something else, and knowing them saves you from forcing the acronym where it does not fit. Which framework fits which situation, from OKRs to the 12 Week Year, is compared in goal setting frameworks.

• Teams that want to stretch. OKRs, Objectives and Key Results, split a goal into a direction and two to four measures and expect you to reach about 70 percent of them. SMART expects 100. If you lead a team and want ambitious targets without punishing every miss, OKRs fit better. Each key result inside an OKR should still pass the SMART test. The OKR framework explains the difference level by level.
• Habits with no finish line. “Meditate ten minutes every morning” has no due date, because the point is that it never ends. Give it a SMART trial period instead: ten minutes every morning for 30 days, tracked. After the 30 days the habit either exists or you learned something about your mornings.
• Exploration. Anyone who does not yet know what they want cannot write a measurable result. “Figure out whether I want to leave nursing” is not SMART and should not be. Make the exploration SMART instead: three conversations with people who left, one shadow day in another field, a written decision by March 1.

In each case the acronym still earns its place one level down. The direction may stay open. The next step never does.

Your SMART goals template and three questions before you commit

A SMART goal fits in one sentence with five blanks. Fill them in order, because the order is the method. The template is written out below, followed by Dana's filled-in version so you can see how short the answer is allowed to be.

Before you commit the sentence to the top of your year, ask three questions:

• Could a stranger with the right document check this on the due date without calling me?
• Do I know today's number, the baseline this goal moves from?
• Have I written the first week, not only the last day?

Whoever answers no to the first has a wish. Whoever answers no to the second has a guess. Whoever answers no to the third has a goal that will wait until September. Fix the no, then commit. Ready-made goal sets that break a yearly goal down to the week and the day are available as templates, and every goal in them can be renamed or deleted.

In short: a SMART goal is not a checklist you pass once. It is the sentence a stranger could check on the due date, written five times, once for each level of your year.

Frequently asked questions about SMART goals