Goal Setting

Goal Setting is where a goal starts. You give it a title, you say how important it is to you on a scale of one to ten, and then you shape it with five questions. What exactly do you want? How will you know you've done it? Why is it realistic for you now? Why does it matter to you? And by when? Those five are the SMART fields, and they're there for a reason. The thinking comes from goal-setting theory, the work of Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, which started in the 1960s and carried on for decades. Their findings were pretty blunt. Specific, difficult goals produce better performance than vague ones, and better than telling yourself just to simply do your best. You also need feedback on your progress, or the specificity stops mattering. So be specific here. A goal you can measure is a goal you can track. When you save it, the goal goes onto your goals page with every other goal you're working on. That's where it lives. Open it there to add the actions that will get you there. Move the progress score as things shift, and come back to it when it stalls. Set one goal properly, then use the other tools to work on whatever gets in its way. And then set another goal, and another, and another, until you make the changes that you want.