More than a month has gone since I wrote down my resolutions for this year. It's time to revise how things are going and to what extent I'm working towards the achievement of my resolutions.
I have to say that, for the first time, I feel like making some kind of progress regarding New Year's resolutions. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I followed a series of steps. I didn't just write down general resolutions, hoping they would keep me focused; instead, I thought about how to make every resolution an achievable goal, easy to measure and track.
I went even further: I created specific daily, weekly and monthly to-dos with the help of Habitica. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you can check Habitica.com and discover a task management app based on gamification with a pretty big community of users.
Maybe I can dedicate another post to Habitica, but for now I want to focus on some advice about creating SMART goals that help you achieve them.
SMART Goals
Chances are that you have heard about this acronym. It stands for Specific, Measurable, Actionable/Achievable, Relevant and Time-based. As you can see, these are the features that a goal should have in order to help you complete it.
Let's see two examples of a similar goal, and compare them according to the different characteristics of SMART goals:
A: "I want to get in touch with my relatives more often".
B: "I want to call or text some relative of mine at least once a week".
As we can see, the first goal (A) does not motivate us to take a specific action, whereas the second one (B) specifies what we have to do (call or text). B is a specific goal.
Likewise, B has a clear actionable element (call or text are things easy to be done), which is also achievable (it is not something out of our reach). A, on the other hand, does not have a clear actionable element (get in touch is a pretty vague description). B is actionable (and achievable).
Not only that, by specifying that I want to call at least once a week I am making B measurable (it is easy to keep track of it, this is, to check if I have done it), and also time-based (every week I will check if I have accomplished my goal). B is both, measurable and time-based. A, however, does not clarify when or how to track it... again, A is too vague.
Finally, the relevance of the goal is in its nature. In this case, both A and B are relevant, since are based on the same concept: communicating with our relatives is important to us.
As I have said, this is the principle I have used for my New Year's resolutions, and it's working like a charm. I encourage you to try it!
If you do, let me know how it went in the comments section!
Image by Gerd Altmann in Pixabay
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