Five Frameworks to Build Powerful Goals
Setting SMART goals is one of the most popular ways to set goals, and for good reason, it's an excellent method for really working out how to get from A to B. Also because of the acronym it's pretty easy to remember. Now I'm going to take a slight detour here so that we can combine this section with an updated version of SMART goals called, SMARTER goals.
So let's start with what SMARTER stands for
S - Specific
M - Measurable
A - Achievable
R - Relevant
T - Time-bound
Okay, let's take a look at how this might look when we're setting our goals. So in our initial brainstorming session, we might come up with something like, I want to write a book. Now we can take the goal of writing a book and put it through the SMART framework.
We'll start with making specific.
Okay, what kind of book. Let's say a novel. Okay that's better but let's get a little more specific, let's say we want to write a fantasy novel, okay now we're getting there, but this goal is a bit misleading that way so let's reword it to be, I want to write the 1st draft of a fantasy novel.
Now let's make that novel measurable, how long is this novel going to be... okay I'm back... you didn't see it but I just totally got sucked down a rabbit hole looking at how long the average fantasy novel is, so let's just say about 80,000 words - it's way more complicated than that, but this fine for our example.
Next... well... let's get a little messy here, because when I'm working through this framework I rarely go straight down the letters, and it doesn't really make sense to. Here, I'll show you why. So typically up next we'd be looking at making it achievable - what are the specific actions we'd be taking? But I think for that question to really have any weight we also need to understand our time frame. If I decided I wanted to write that novel in two months then I'm going to need to be writing quite a lot every day. But let's say my time frame is 6-months, well that significantly changes things. So let's make this time-bound by giving ourselves a 6-month deadline. Now we just have to do a little math, so we've got roughly 24 weeks in 6 months, which means that if we want to write 80,000 words we need to be averaging just over 3,333 words per week. Let's round that up to 3,500 words a week to give ourselves a bit of breathing room and there we go, we've made our goal achievable.
And this just leaves us with relevance. While this is an easy step to skip it's possible the most important one - this is the why behind your goal. What makes this goal important to you? Why is it relevant to your life? If you can't answer this question there is a good chance that you're going to find yourself drifting away from your goal. We need a clear why to thing we're doing, especially the things that are hard and take a lot of time. So make sure you don't skip this step and be as specific as possible. For writing a novel it could be something like, I've always dreamed of being a novelist, or because I have a story to tell and it deserves to get out of my head.
Okay, so there we go, we've taken write a novel and made it into a SMART goal, but... what if we could make it... smartER? Well, dear reader through the magic of adding more letters to an acronym we can make this happen. So just like a SMART goal a SMARTER goal is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound, but we are also going to add the steps of Evaluating and Readjusting.
So one of the biggest weaknesses of SMART goals is that they tend to be fairly rigid - they don't have a lot of flexibility built into them once you get going. With the SMARTER framework, we try to correct for some of that by adding in times when we're going to evaluate how we’re doing and then use that to readjust the goal. For our write a novel goal we could add in that we're going to evaluate how we're doing every month and then use that to help determine if we're on track and if we're not then we can figure out what needs to change. Maybe we're not writing enough words per week or we discover that what we want to write is much longer than 80,000 words. We could then adjust our time frame to fit reality better.
This is a good framework to start with because it can exist inside other goal frameworks.
However, as you can see with just this section, SMART goals take a lot more effort to put together. Now, I could see it easily argued that it's worth it to put that much effort into defining your goals... but I also tend to be a realist about things. If I'm not going to put the effort into going through all the steps of a SMART goal then it's probably not the right goal framework for me.
Now we're going to get into the business world, but with a little tweaking I think that we can leverage these frameworks as well.
First up we've got OKRs, which stands for Objectives and Key Results. The idea here is to first start with a more vague object and then to define how you are going to get there with the key results. What I like about OKRs is that it does let you really just jump into things with those goals that you kind of know you want to go after. For example, you could start with something like "Be more effective with time management."
I'm sure this is something that a lot of us might aspire to, but on its own, the phrase "be more effective with time management," doesn't give us a lot of direction. That's where we start our second section where we're going to breakdown things down into the key results and milestones we want to see to achieve that objective.
So our could write that like:
Spend 15 minutes every morning prioritizing my day
Look over my daily plan 5 times a day
Use the pomodoro technique every day for the next 4 weeks
And to be clear here, this is a modified version of the OKR framework to work for individuals instead of as a business. The benefit for us here is that we can use the objective lens to better connect to the why of our goals.
If we look back to last week's episode we can easily see how Key Results are just another way of thinking of process goals → although, to be fair in the OKR framework they are very purpose-driven. By combining a number of these Key Results we can really drive our actions so that we're fulfilling these goals that might otherwise be a bit nebulous.
This is a great framework to quickly build out your goals into more robust and actionable ideas, but it will require some tweaking as you go. Additionally, it's really easy to get carried away with the number of key results you're looking for - ideally, you want to aim for around 3-5 results for each objective, otherwise, it's easy to overwhelm yourself. A good idea with OKRs is to build them into shorter time frames so that reviewing them at least every month or so and then you can decide if you want to change those key results you're looking for.
Similar to OKRs, are KPIs - yeah I know, we're really hitting up the acronyms this episode - anyways, KPIs are Key Performance Indicators. These are the metrics that you measure and track depending on your goals. They are about measuring progress and we can kind of think of them like the GPS for our goals.
If we take our novel writing example from the SMART goals sections, we could have a KPI of our hours writing. I can say with some certainty that the more hours per week I spend writing the farther along I'll be in writing my novel.
Or we could have something like tracking how much water I drank throughout the day or how much sleep I'm getting.
And yes, these absolutely look like the Key Results from OKRs - the difference being intention of what you're doing. Even though with both of them we're trying to look at the leading measurements - the things that we go to create an outcome - KPIs are still a bit more lagging. They're focused on measuring what happened while OKRs are a bit more about what we're going to do.
This doesn't mean that OKRs are necessarily better for goal setting than KPIs and they can both have their place in your own personal goal setting. With KPIs we better identify areas that we want to improve in while we solve and improve our processes with OKRs.
In my original vision for this episode I had thought that I'd go through 5 or 6 different frameworks... but one of the keys for this podcast is that I don't want to waste your time - so I'm going to skip a lot of the frame works that I just don't think are that useful for personal use.
One of the frameworks that I was on the fence about is the BHAG - or Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals. It's a term coined by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in their book Built to Last - the idea behind the BHAG (which, yeah, is a terrible acronym) is a goal that is a focal point and guides everything else you do. These are things that big companies use to plan out their thinking 10 to 25 years into the future.
Woah, Woah, Woah... 10-25 years into the future? That might be a bit of a stretch on the planning front. Yes, I know. In 25 years I'm going to be 61, my kids are going to be adults - I don't have a good picture of what my life is going to be like at that point. However... I might be able to picture some of the things I might want to have in my life at that point. Maybe there's a place I want to live or there's a kind of job that I want to get - maybe there are some financial goals I want to hit for retirement.
The point of a big, hairy, audacious goal is that it is long term - there are some things in life that take a lot of time to reach. If I decided I wanted to go back to school and get a Phd that would be a huge undertaking - I mean, it probably wouldn't take me 25 years, but hey who knows with ADHD, right?
And it really doesn't have to be something on that time frame, but it can. The idea is that we're looking at those more long term goals that aren't going to be completed in a single year or even a couple of years.
Do you need a goal like this in your life? No, but it is also a way to create a vision of where you want to go with your life. It's a way to set aim at what you want. Of course, sometimes we don't have that vision of what we want our life to look like. With ADHD we have a fairly short time horizon - that is at a certain point when we're looking towards the future time no longer has meaning to us. There is a certain period we can look forward to in time and go, yep I can visualize that - I can totally conceive what that's going to be like. Typically an adult has a time horizon of around 8-12 weeks. With ADHD our time horizon can be as short as just a couple of weeks, meaning that it can be really difficult for us to plan out farther than that because it just doesn't seem real to us. So I understand that setting a goal that we realistically wouldn't be able to complete for at least 5 years to be a bit of a hard pill to swallow.
But one thing that ADHD folks are good at is using their imagination, and that's exactly what we can do here.
And I'd like to add another concept to think about here and that's the Japanese ideology of ikigai, which is about finding the joy of life through purpose.
Ikigai is what gets you out of bed and keeps you going throughout the day.
The best way to understand ikigai is through a Venn Diagram
The Ikigai Venn Diagram consists of 4 overlapping circles - What you love, What the World Needs, What you are Good at, and What you can be paid for - coming together in the middle you get Ikigai.
And here's where I think we can combine this idea of a big, hairy, audacious goal → if we can find that combination of what we love, what the world needs, what we're good at and then what we can realistically be paid for we can create a goal that will help us build our life towards ikigai.
If we can create this goal then the rest of our goal setting can fall into place because we know what we're trying to build our life towards. It's easier to say no to the things that aren't moving us in the right direction because we actually know what direction we want to go in.
And I understand if this feels like it's a bit too much of a commitment. These goals aren't set in stone and as we get older our tastes change - that's okay. We're just trying to give ourselves a little direction and figure out that next thing that we just really want to do and then give ourselves the tools to pursue it.
This Episode’s Top Tips
SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. You can make them SMARTER by adding a step to Evaluate our goals and then to Readjust them.
Using the Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) framework, we're looking for the specific things that we can do every day that will naturally lead us to reaching our goals.
A big, hairy, audacious goal is something that exists on a large time frame and will push us out of our comfort zone. We can use these big goals to help guide our thinking behind the other goals we're setting.
Ikigai is the Japanese ideology of finding the joy of life through purpose. We can use this idea to help create the kinds of big goals that are going to have real meaning behind them.
