You got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.
➤ Yogi Berra
To get where you want to be—to learn and grow in your career and personal life—you’ll need to set some goals. But goals by themselves aren’t enough to guarantee your success.
Goals are great things, and you may have many of them: lose weight, find a better job, move to a bigger house (or a smaller one), write that novel, learn to play the electric guitar, write a killer Rails application, or learn all about Erlang.
But many goals never get past that stage—the lofty, generalized “I want to be better at xyz.” Weight loss is a prime example. Most people would like to be trimmer and fitter (especially those of us who spend a great deal of time sitting on our duffs behind a keyboard). “I want to be trim and fit” is not a very well-defined goal (although it may be a great vision—a long-term, desired state).
How much weight do you need to lose? How much weight do you want to bench-press? By when? Are you going to focus on limiting calories or increasing exercise? Similarly, it’s a fine thing to say you want to “learn Erlang,” but what does that mean? How well do you want to learn it? What do you want to be able to do with it? How will you start?
To help you focus on your goals—and be in a better position to attain them—allow me to suggest an old favorite from the consultant’s bag of tricks: using SMART objectives to meet your goals.[99]
In this case, SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-boxed. For any goal you have in mind (losing weight, deposing your boss, conquering the world, and so on), you need to have a plan: a series of objectives that will help get to your goal. Each objective should have the SMART characteristics.
We tend to be a bit fuzzy on the terms goals and objectives. Just to be clear: a goal is a desired state, usually short-term, that you’re trying to reach. An objective is something you do to get you closer to that goal. But don’t get too hung up on the terminology; different folks use these terms slightly differently.
Objectives move you to your goal.
Here’s how to be SMART.
First, an objective should be specific. That is, it’s not enough to say “I want to learn Erlang.” Narrow that down to something concrete, such as “I want to be able to write a web server in Erlang that dynamically generates content.”
How do you know when you’re done? That has always been one of my favorite consulting questions. To have any chance of meeting an objective, you have to be able to measure it somehow. Measurable goes hand-in-hand with being specific. It’s hard to measure something general and abstract but much easier to measure something concrete and specific—using actual numbers. If you think you can’t measure your objective, then it’s probably not specific enough.
But be sure to take small bites and measure steady, incremental progress. You can’t expect to lose fifty pounds in a week or learn a whole new programming language and all its libraries in a weekend. Measure your objectives, but stage them in increments.
“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
➤ E.L. Doctorow
You don’t have to see where you’re going; you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you.
I’d love to climb K2. It would be cool to have lunch with the Dalai Lama. Oh, and establishing a lasting peace in the Middle East would be quite the accomplishment.
Ain’t gonna happen.
At least, not by my hand. These are fine goals and objectives, but they aren’t realistic. They are probably not attainable by me under any reasonable set of circumstances.
A goal or objective that you cannot attain is not a target; it’s just a maddening, soul-sucking frustration. Some things are just not possible for most people—competing at an Olympic level, for instance. Others are possible, but at a disproportionate commitment of time and resources (say, running in a marathon).
So, be reasonable about it. You might be able to write “Hello, World!” or a simple application in a new language by next week, but you’re probably not going to be able to write a complete web application framework and user interface builder with a neural net optimizer.
Make each next objective attainable from where you are now.
Does this really matter to you—is it important to you, and are you passionate about it? Is it something that’s even under your control? If not, then it isn’t relevant.
It needs to matter and be something that you have control over.
This is perhaps the most important one. It means you need to give yourself a deadline. Without deadlines, a goal will languish and be perpetually pushed aside by the more pressing exigencies of the day. It will never happen.
Again, take small bites. Give yourself frequent, small milestones. You’ll be more motivated when you meet them and encouraged to rise to meet the next one.
| Recipe 25 | Create SMART objectives to reach your goals. |
It can help to specify your objectives personally (“I”), positively (“I”), and either in present tense, or with a definite time statement (“I will do zyzzy by date”).
With apologies to John Donne,[100] no objective is an island, entire of itself. Your objectives have to make sense in the larger context, which might include the following:
This extends the ideas of attainability and relevance. Dropping ten pounds in a week is attainable in a local sense but unwise to the whole system because of overall, long-term health concerns. Similarly, objectives that include all-nighters throughout a project might meet the project’s goal and be attainable, but at disastrous cost to the developer community, their families, and eventually the business itself.[101]
So in addition to looking at goals through a local lens, consider the impact they may have in the larger context of your work and life.
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Make your SMART objective list. |