When you set a goal, it should be “S.M.A.R.T.,” or so suggests the standard advice (even some of ours!). That stands for Specific, Measurable, something, something, Time-bound—there’s disagreement on what a couple of the letters stand for, which is your first hint that maybe they’re not that important.
It turns out the SMART goals framework doesn’t encompass all the ways that goal-setting can help us. If you ask me, you actually shouldn’t turn every goal into a SMART goal. Here’s why.
SMART goals weren’t invented for self-improvement
Let’s take a minute to consider the history. As much as we hear SMART goals discussed in the context of fitness goals or new year’s resolutions, you’d think they sprung from the realm of self-improvement. But no: Their origins are in the management world. In 1981, business consultant George Doran wrote an article entitled “There’s a S.M.A.R.T. way to write management’s goals and objectives.”
In this article, Doran argued that goals are often nebulous, and that a goal that is specific and clearly stated will be more effective. The SMART acronym was intended to provide structure to goal-setting, so that managers could deliver their orders to workers with clear targets and measurements in place.
That structure makes a lot of sense when a goal is really a communication tool used between people on a team. “The boss wants this thing, by this date, and here’s how we’ll know when we’ve achieved that” is a lot better than, “the boss wants us to do better.”
But the SMART framework doesn’t make a lot of sense for individuals setting goals for themselves. In fact, the letter A originally stood for “assignable,” in the sense that you could assign the goal to a specific worker or team, which obviously isn’t going to work when the task at hand is getting your butt off the couch to run more. Fitness and self-improvement gurus have simply rewritten the acronym and changed its focus.
What does SMART stand for?
Originally, Doran said that a SMART goal ideally has five qualities:
Specific
Measurable
Assignable (to an employee or group)
Realistic (given your resources)
Time-related (having a timeline)
Doran never said that all goals need to fit the SMART criteria, and in fact emphasized there are plenty of appropriate goals in the workplace that only tick off a few of these boxes. He also said SMART goals can and should live alongside more abstract goals.
But the self-improvement industry took the basic structure and ran with it, judging goals by how well they align with a new set of SMART criteria. You’ll see different definitions, but they tend to go something like this:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable or Attainable (this is equivalent to Realistic in the original definition, and is here because Assignable doesn’t make sense for individuals)
Relevant (to your interests—this is a new addition, since Realistic got renamed and they needed another R)
Time-bound (having a deadline)
That’s one metric removed (assignable), one added (relevant), and one subtly changed (time-bound rather than time-related).
All that said, I don’t think focusing on SMART goals is as helpful as it’s made out to be. The structure can be limiting, shift your focus to things that aren’t your actual goals. Here’s what I mean.
The downsides of SMART goals
SMART goals are often thought of as an improvement on vague statements like “I want to get in shape,” but I would call them more of a bait-and-switch. By the time you’re done defining your goal, you end up with a pass-fail test with a deadline and a metric. Is this really what’s going to motivate you?
When you make a goal Specific and Measurable, you learn to focus on certain actions—arguably a good thing—but lose sight of things that don’t fall into those categories. If you only want to lose weight, and you’re counting the pounds, what happens to your ability to retain muscle mass and strength? What happens to your ability to enjoy food without obsessing over calories? What happens to the types of exercise you would normally find fun but that don’t provide the maximal calories-burned-per-minute? You get tunnel vision, and that’s not necessarily a good way to approach a goal.
When you make a goal Attainable or Realistic, you’re not allowing yourself to dream big. If you’re aiming to improve, wouldn’t you want to try something that’s a challenge specifically because you might fail? How much do you think you’ll ever succeed if you only stick to “goals” that you are 100% sure you can attain?
Finally, making a goal Time-bound is setting an artificial barrier. What happens if you get to the deadline and haven’t done the thing? Was it all for naught? If you’re talking about a corporate quarterly deadline, maybe. But if you’re working on your own goals for your own reasons, time doesn’t really matter, does it? Self-improvement doesn’t have a finish line. If you couldn’t get to 100 pushups by X date, aren’t you still stronger than when you started? Couldn’t you keep working and see if you can get to 100 pushups in another month? Choosing a deadline doesn’t mean that you “should” be able to achieve the goal by the deadline.
Consider SMART goals to be benchmarks or minimums
When you ditch SMART goals, you may be a bit lost at first—admittedly they do provide a good structure for clearly stating something you want to work toward. This thing isn’t your overall goal, but perhaps it can be helpful as part of the process.
So think about setting some time-bound, measurable tests as minimums to be sure you’re on track. That turns them into process goals, not outcome goals. For example, you might commit to running four times a week over the next month. That’s not the same thing as a nebulous goal like “getting better at running,” but it’s not a traditional SMART goal like “run a half-marathon in two hours or less on April 20th.”
Think bigger when you set your real goals
What kind of goal would you set if it didn’t have to be realistic or rigorously specified? As I’ve written before, I think it makes the most sense to think of fitness goals (or any goals, really) in terms of a question. Deliberately remove one or more of those SMART parameters and push yourself to see what you can achieve when it’s no longer a pass/fail test.
Take away the deadline and ask: How soon can I get to a [goal weight] deadlift? Or take away the specificity requirement and ask: How fast can I run by the time this race comes up? Or take away the measurement aspect, and see what happens if you just do stuff. Have fun. Push yourself. What will happen? How will your life change? You don’t need numbers you can track on a spreadsheet to try things and see how they turn out.