How to Set Achievable Goals

If you want to give your brain a decent chance at meeting a goal, productivity folk wisdom insists that it had better be SMART—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Based:

• Specific goals have a pre-defined outcome, rather than being left vague (e.g., get more sleep, not just "be healthier").
• Measurable means the goal has a quantifiable target so you know clearly when you're moving toward or away from it (e.g., "sleep eight hours per night" not just "sleep more").
• Achievable goals may be challenging, but they're not literally impossible. Setting a goal of eight uninterrupted hours of sleep per night when you're about to welcome a newborn or adopt a puppy may be not meaningfully achievable, and may leave you feeling and sleeping worse instead of better. 
• Relevant goals are related to your values and purposes in life, not just goals you've heard other people adopt or think you "ought" to achieve. If you're functioning well on seven hours of sleep per night, don't waste energy setting an eight-hour sleep goal. 
• Time-based goals have a deadline, rather than being thought of as open-ended bucket list or "someday" tasks. Notoriously failure-prone New Year's resolutions typically have a scope of one year, but that's too long for most goals and most people. Instead, chunks of progress can more likely be made and noticed on timescales of one to six months.

As a life coach, I’ve seen the power of SMART goals in practice. Setting a SMART goal, rather than a vague one, increases the likelihood that you’ll achieve it. “Goals” without Scope, Measure, Feasibility, Meaning, and Timescale are mentally more like dreams, hopes, or mere thoughts than approachable targets of action. 

As a philosopher, though, part of me resists submitting to the SMART goal framework for every type of undertaking. What if you want to become more generous, or patient, or kind? Or if you want to experience more ease and calmness in your life? In the moral tradition reaching back to at least Aristotle, developing our virtues is the fundamental task of self-improvement, not an emergent or reductive one. 

In practical terms, there’s also the problem of Goodhart’s Law: "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” There’s a fine psychological line between setting a small SMART goal about giving away money as part of the lifelong journey toward true generosity versus obsessing over arbitrary milestones in a moral act of missing the point. The point is not to make, say, a one-time donation of $500; it’s to develop a durable character trait of generosity that persists and manifests itself over time, and the SMART goal of giving away $500 this year is merely evidence that that might be happening.  

So, while you could try to shoehorn qualitative goals into the SMART goals box, it may feel a bit absurd—and also may not work. When overused, SMART goals run the risk of turning us into short-sighted, robotic, box-checking task-completers when what we want may be closer to its opposite. 

Fortunately, we can reconcile the difference between SMART quantitative goals and more qualitative goals by understanding what makes a goal work psychologically, and why. Widely-beloved Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman provides a thorough rundown of this science in an episode of his podcast, “The Science of Setting and Achieving Goals” (which was also synopsized in Every). 

One goal circuit with multiple parts

When we talk about “goals” in the context of productivity, they typically have a specific meaning: medium- to long-term targets of effortful action, often dependent on an extensive and/or complicated chain of preceding events. 

In the absence of well-formulated goals, your behavior is likely to revert to its mean—behaving thoughtlessly in accordance with pre-existing habits (whether good or bad) and in response to local environmental pressures (from your boss, coworkers, and family, again whether for better or worse). 

However, in another sense, everything we do on purpose can be thought of as furthering some goal: dropping a piece of paper into the wastebasket, emptying clean dishes from the dishwasher into your kitchen cabinets, driving your car from home to the office. We just don’t think of those as “goals” per se because there is much less uncertainty about how to do these tasks, and whether they can or will ever get done. Much of the time, we pursue these implied goals implicitly, without self-consciousness and friction. Even people who struggle with heftier career and personal goals, like getting a promotion or losing weight, succeed at them. 

As Huberman explains, there is only one brain circuit behind all of this goal-driven behavior, whether the particular goal at hand is large or small, and whether novel or routine. If you can learn to work with and not against your internal goal machinery, you can expect to reap significant recurring rewards. 

Four brain structures work together (or against each other) when you attempt to pursue any goal. Your evolutionarily ancient amygdala scans and instantaneously assesses potential rewards and threats, while another ancient part (the basal ganglia) serves up a kind of “go!” or “no go!” motor control signal to your body. 

More evolutionarily recent, “higher” brain areas add self-directedness and flexibility to this inner mix. The bilateral prefrontal cortex, which takes over 20 years to fully develop, facilitates the “executive” functions, like planning and overriding habits in order to fulfill a plan. Last but not least, the orbitofrontal cortex allows you to understand the relationship between actual or possible behaviors you take now, and what will happen later as a result. The ability to do “if X, then y” thinking helps us refine and update plans, rather than having to do costly trial and error each time.