wee doors banging

I wasn’t going to write this post, I was going to keep this to myself . But then Phil over at The Blind Leading The Blinds wrote more or less exactly what I had been thinking, so what the hell, here we are.

Did you make any New Year Resolutions? 2010 is now almost a month old, how are they working out for you so far? Were your resolutions wooly and vague enough that you’re finding it difficult to answer? Maybe you’re not being SMART.

Phil wrote about setting SMART objectives – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timed – so that it’s easy to track your progress against the goals and resolutions you’ve created. It’s a practice that’s often found in business but it can be just as easily applied to your personal life.

The idea is that you set specific targets and deadlines that can be measured, to help with motivation and focus and so you can actually know if you’ve succeeded or … not. For example: instead of resolving to “get fitter”, be SMART and say “I will get fit enough to complete this 50Km cycling event in May“. See the difference?

However, as good a tool as SMART goals are, your life isn’t a business (as a rule) so I also think that, when you’re talking about personal goals, some latitude is permissible and you can set general principles as well. Ones that maybe aren’t so specific or even measurable.

For example, I regularly stay up too late and would like to do something about that particular bad habit, but I know that setting a SMART goal to “be in bed by midnight” (or whatever) would fail hard on the M, A and R criteria; I can’t be that rigid about it, nor am I going to record at what time I hit the hay (seriously, who does that?). However, I think that by stating the non-SMART general principle of “going to bed earlier” it will help me keep it in mind, and so perhaps make some progress without having a specific or measurable goal.

I’ve set myself a mixture of SMART and non-SMART (someone invent an acronym for that, please) goals, principles and nice-to-haves for 2010 and I should be publishing them on this blog in some shape or form soon.

But what do you think? What are your resolutions, hopes, goals and so on for 2010, and are they SMART? What can you change to make them that way? Have a think.