SMART Goals Templates for Work

The Smart Goal setting framework is a great way to bring structure and trackability for managing progress against your objectives. The acronym SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-Based. In order to be a SMART goal, the goal needs to meet all five of these criteria. If you'd like to learn more, here's an in-depth explanation of Smart Goals including examples.

Example Smart Goals Guide

If you're rolling out Smart Goals within your organization, it's helpful to write a guide that is available to all team members to get everyone on the same page. Notejoy makes it fast and easy to get your team on the same page to set SMART goals and establish them with pinned notes and templates.

Smart Goals Guide

We're leveraging the SMART goals framework for goal setting.

Key Deadlines

X/XX - please draft your Smart Goals in this notebook
X/XX - deadline for review with manager
X/XX - finalized Smart Goals ready for the entire team
X/XX - first check-in on Smart Goals progress for entire team

Action Required

Review the deadlines and information about Smart Goals in this document, and then head over to draft your own Smart Goals at the Smart Goals Template note pinned to the top of this notebook.

What are Smart Goals?

The acronym SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-Based. In order to be a SMART goal, the goal needs to meet all five of these criteria.

Specific

Specific goals are well defined and clear on what needs to be accomplished. What exactly do you want to achieve? The more specific the description, the less room there is for interpretation between a good and bad result.

Measurable

Measurable goals have clearly identified how you'll evaluate whether or not you are successful or not. Often, this also means breaking your goal down into quantifiable evidence of whether it's accomplished or not. Eating healthier is not a goal, however eating vegetables twice a day and dessert only once a month, is.

Attainable

Attainable goals are realistic about what is possible given the availability of resources, knowledge, and time. Ideally, it should stretch your abilities but remain in the realm of possibility to get done.

Relevant

Relevant goals are important to you and will make a material impact on achieving your larger objectives. Does it make a difference to your overall objectives if this goal is met? While many goals are worthwhile expenditures of time, it may not always be the right timing or match to current needs.

Time-Based

Time-based goals lock goals into a specific timeframe and specify when they will be completed by. This also ties into the M for measurable goal because in order for a goal to truly be measurable, it needs to be time-based.

What are some examples of good and bad SMART goals?

Good: Onboard 10 customers into product beta by end of Q1.
Bad: Onboard customers into product beta.

In this example, the bad goal fails several Smart Goal criteria by not being specific, measurable, or time-based. If you were to onboard 2 customers in the next five years, it would technically fulfill the goal because it isn't specific about when it needs to happen (end of Q1), and what success looks like in a measurable way (10 customers).

Good: Deliver 2 or more team presentations and ask peers for feedback
Bad: Work on improving presentation skills

In this example, it's not specific or measurable what "work on improving presentation skills" means. By breaking it down into a smaller goal of delivering 2 presentations to teams, it makes it a much more concrete and measurable goal.

Example Smart Goals Template

For your own individual goals, it can be as complicated or as simple as you'd like. Here is a simple template below to get started. If you're using this in Notejoy, you can leverage our template functionality to make it easy for the team to leverage a shared template of your choice. See our guide on using Notejoy for Goals for more.