Writing goals

Specialists recommend writing goals down because this process allows you to achieve thinking clarity and identify the things that are indeed important for you. Experts share tips and words of advice to help people write achievable goals that will make their life better. Here are some of the elements that you need to pay attention to when writing goals.

Formulate every goal in a positive way and without doubt! 'I will... ' NOT 'I hope...' or 'I might...'.

Every goal should strictly involve you and your behavior, not someone else.

Write down methods, measures and resources for successful completion.

Include the specific goal when you will start working on the goal as well as the time frame for its completion.

Divide big goals in smaller, measurable targets.

Writing goals might seem really complex, particularly when you see the list growing and growing. Is this going to be that hard? There are numerous worksheets and forms available online that you can download and use for writing goals down. Just print them, take an hour off and give your life a bit of thought. You could choose to deal with different goals on different days. Thus if you have both professional and personal goals, you need to dedicate time to both of them to write everything down and make an action plan.

There are also online guides to writing goals that you can use for motivation, tracking or monitoring progress. They also help you avoid being led astray as it often happens in life. There are people who don't like writing goals down, because they consider they have everything planned in their mind. Well, our mind can play us so many tricks that we can't rely solely on good memory and mental focus to pursue goals. Scientists agree that writing goals gives strength to objectives as if they become more tangible. You will also enjoy a higher sense of clarity in thinking.

Talk to a specialist!

If for some reason you think you could do well with a bit of guidance from a pro, you can turn to a life coach. These professionals are specialized in business coaching, financial coaching, personal coaching, personal development life coaching and lots more. Don't start from the premises that the specialist will serve you the right goals on a plate. He/She is there to guide you through the steps of self-understanding, self-awareness and writing goals, and then he/she stands by your side while you pursue the goals, helping you stay focused and motivated.

Time management

Do you feel like you are wasting precious time in regular activities? Do you think that you are not very efficient at your work? This could be happening because you don't have conscious control over the time you spend in certain activities. Time management is precisely about increasing efficiency and productivity by organizing the schedule, prioritizing and setting goals for home and work activities. Specialists have even designed courses with techniques and methods meant to assist people complete projects successfully and within the planned amount of time.

Create a task list!


Task lists help with time management because you know at all points what you've got to do throughout the day. You can create such task lists for personal and professional purposes. You'd be surprised to see how well they support goal setting and goal pursuit, as they help one go through the smaller targets required before objective achievement.

Set priorities!

Prioritizing is one other thing you depend on for successful time management. If you know your priorities for personal life and work, you can first deal with them, and only then take care of the rest. Planning to do critical work tasks on your spare time will make you feel like compromising and sacrificing your personal life for the sake of the job. You'll experience a conflict and that will definitely cause a negative feeling.

Using software for time management!

Smart tools designed for time management come with built-in task hierarchies that often classify larger tasks into sub-tasks for more efficiency. Such programs support multiple methods of filtering and ordering the tasks in the lists, and they allow for multiple users to work with them. Task and time management software is now used in numerous companies, law firms and various institutions increasing work productivity and allowing employees to finish their projects more successfully.

Don't waste your time!

Sometimes people take time management to such an extent that they apply it even to routine daily activities such as taking a shower or brushing the teeth. Listing such tasks represents a waste of time, and not in the least an example of efficient time management. Leave them out of the task lists.

Simply staying organized and learning methods to remain focused on the important matters actually make a different for successful time management. Everybody wastes time every now and then, it's not that serious unless you experience organizational difficulties on a regular basis.

Smart goals

The idea of 'smart goals' is totally subjective. Who decides what's smart and what isn't? A goal that is reachable for one person proves totally impossible for another individual. Therefore, whether in career or in personal life, goal setting should be self-focused. You know your capabilities, you know your wishes and aims, you just have to work towards making those 'smart goals' come true.

Employer set smart goals

Some companies are still run in a traditional way, with targets and professional goals set by the employer for every department and every employee in particular. There are salary raises and bonuses at the end of the 'race' if the set goals are reached, if not, penalties follow. This system has its ups and downs, and modern management strategies generally veer away from such an approach.

Paul Meyer's SMART goals

Each of the letters in the word SMART is the initial of a major feature of Paul Meyer's project management system. In the approach he took to smart goals, they stand as follows:

S - Specific
M - Measurable
A - Attainable
R - Realistic
T – Timely.

These are the features that should define any goal, in order for one to be successful in personal and professional endeavors.

Goal setting improves with the SMART approach!

By taking a closer look at your short and long term projects and plans you can determine whether they include smart goals or not. In order for goals to be specific, you should know what to do, and what strategies to use in order to attain the goal. How will you measure the results? This is another dimension of smart goals setting that allows you to determine the level of success.

Smart goals are attainable because when deciding on a certain objective to follow, people seek methods, they change their attitude and plan things ahead so that they go through all the steps necessary to be successful. When the person grows and expands to match goals that seem very far, they become more attainable.

Realistic smart goals are those for which the person has the ability to work. There is a difference between high goals and realistic ones. Only you can determine how high you can go, particular as you make serious efforts towards meeting the objectives. If the goal is unrealistic, all of your efforts will be in vain, not because you are doing something wrong, but because the goal is out of your reach. And last but not least, every goal needs a time frame, which defines the amount of time necessary for the goals to be achieved.

Short term goals

There are good bits and bad bits about short term goals, it depends on whether you consider them steps for a long term objective or you are interested in tomorrow, and you don't care about what lies beyond it. Even when you set a large-scale goal, it needs to be broken down into smaller targets that are easier to achieve. Let's say that you need to lose thirty pounds. It is impossible to shed that much weight in a short period of time. You should therefore set short term goals and get step-by-step closer to the initial objective.

Create priority lists!

Understanding which tasks are more important proves vital when it comes to short term goals. When you write down a list of priorities, you find out quickly where you need to invest energy first, and you see the bigger picture as well as the small steps to be taken in order to achieve the objectives.

Short term goals as stages towards bigger objectives!

All experts speak of the necessity to break down big objectives in smaller ones, so that you progress gradually towards final achievement. These smaller targets are in fact short term goals. If you understand this development of the plan, pursuing the larger objectives becomes much easier.

The limitations of short term goals

It often happens that you look forward to a quick completion of your plans, to an objective that can be achieved within a short period of time. However, pursuing only a short term objective without paying attention to the long-term implications of your plan could work against you. Let's take the same example with weight loss.

People often follow crash diets to get rid of the extra pounds quickly. Fitness thus becomes a short term goal. However, even if they reach their objective, once they return to a normal diet, the tendency of the body is to pile back the weight. Without a clear long-term fitness strategy, weight loss short term goals become a failure.

When you take the time to set your objectives, make sure you start with the big ones, and then continue with the smaller goals that serve as moments on the path toward the more important ones. If you fail to acknowledge this, you may have the unpleasant surprise that you are unsuccessful in the end. Then, you'll get under the impression that goal setting in general proves ineffectual, which would be a distorted reality, not a truth in itself.

Smart goal ideas

Do you need some SMART goal ideas? Before the SMART system became known and started being implemented worldwide, people would just write down their goals and hope they would achieve them somehow. The Internet now helps you with whatever difficulties you may have setting short and long term objectives. The majority of successful smart goal ideas depicted online are examples to illustrate how the combination of the five SMART factors affect objectives. They should be smart, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely.

Smart goal ideas for students

Students can plan their studies for exams as well as revision based on a combination of the five SMART factors. e.g. 'I will finish reading the novel by Friday, next week'.

Smart goal ideas for professionals

People use goal setting in their careers all the time. Management positions also require intense planning and goal setting, particularly when one is working with full departments of people, coordinating and guiding. Business plans should thus include short and long term goals together with all the strategies and steps to be taken towards achieving those goals. Sometimes, the various sections of the management plan are entrusted to different departments that have to work together towards meeting the objectives.

Realistic and specific smart goal ideas

Being too general when you make the plan and set business goals has numerous downsides, particularly because it leaves you without a clear scale to use for measurement. Settling for increasing sales in the following quarter of the year is too general a goal. You need to formulate the objective as specific as 'increasing sales with 15% by September'. A car salesman should not set a goal such as becoming the number 1 dealer in the country. It's a lot more realistic to first try to become the number 1 car dealer in your town.

Applying the same rules to personal goals!

There are numerous smart goal ideas in the realm of personal life as well. Weight loss poses lots of challenges often because people set unrealistic goals. Wanting to lose a huge amount of weight in a short period of time is less attainable. It's more likely to lose 5 pounds in three weeks than in three days. There are plenty of smart goal ideas that apply to searching for a job, improving communication with your life partner, socializing and exercising more.

Commitment to your goals also makes a difference. You can actually get numerous smart goal ideas, yet, they can't work for you unless you adapt them to your needs.

Set goals

Lots of people don't set goals because they feel like they don't need to. However, few are those who are indeed happy and living an accomplished existence. Yet, for the average individual, goals can provide a target to aim for. When you set goals, you answer the basic needs of the subconscious mind that craves success and wants to seek it consciously. If you activate the innate success mechanism, you give yourself targets of your own choice, based on the things that you consider important or that you desire.

Set goals to remain focused!

We so often start our daily activities with a vague idea of what we have to do throughout the day. Focus is what helps us prioritize and bring the most important tasks upfront for dealing with. Just as a magnifying glass concentrates sun light and kindles a fire, the same thing can be analogically understood about the harnessed power of the human spirit and mind. When you set goals you understand how much you can achieve by focusing your time, effort and resources on a single objective.

Set goals to increase motivation!


There seems to be a direct connection between the way you feel motivated to do something when you plan it or you desire it and the actual effort you put into it. Working towards making dreams come true and seeing things happen for the better, becomes an even more powerful engine for the achievement of the larger goal. The more you accomplish, the more highly motivated you become, because your success-mechanism no longer operates unconsciously, but achieves its potential in the light of consciousness.

Create the road map from today to next year and beyond!

When you set goals, you set a path, you create the map for your actions, and you are going to use it to get through all the steps of the way. Sometimes changes may be required in the initial plan as you discover mistakes and face obstacles along the way. Based on the circumstances and situations that you experience, your strategies towards the set goals will have to change as well. Be prepared to show flexibility in such adjustments because they cannot be fully anticipated at the moment you write down your goals and make the plan of action.

Moreover, you might be a different person, ten months or three years from when you set goals first. Changes happen to us all, hence, denying variations in the set goals, represents turning our face from the truth.

Professional goals

Lots of people get stuck with a job and forget they've ever had professional goals that they used to enjoy fighting for. It's more common for people to set professional goals at the beginning of their career and then get lost in their work routine, going from paycheck to paycheck until the day they retire. What's sad in all this is that you could remain with a big feeling of failure that will haunt you. Thanks to the increasing insistence on setting goals, some people have the courage to wake up from their professional numbness and do something to feel fulfilled again.

Work occupies a deal of our life. We should not just spend eight exhausting hours at work, checking the time for the moment we can go home. And it goes the same tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow and so on. That's the vicious circle that we should not feel trapped in. Reality is nevertheless sad, and it often lacks perspective. Setting professional goals however could feel like a breath of fresh air. There are lots of reasons that could motivate you to make the decision of giving your career a boost.

You want to make more money and provide more for the family.

You want to continue your studies and complete your education to actually have access to better payment.

You take a personal interest in a certain activity, and you believe you can make good money and still love your job.

These are just examples of what people feel when they first take the time to assess their professional goals and needs. The Internet now even provides access to career assessment tests to help people figure out what professions would be most suitable for their education, skills, work experience and personal preferences.

You can download some of the numerous worksheets and forms for setting professional goals that are now available in .PDF format on the Internet. They are free and they definitely provide some guidance as to what you should do with your career. The moment you decide to take time for setting professional goals, you'll think about your career in depth, and understand what you may have missed before. It's an honesty exercise, otherwise it won't work for you.

Take a look at the various goal setting guides and find out how other people have been successful with such career planning, even if they started even lower than you.