I’ve been thinking about personal goals lately. I think, at least in this aspect, personal management is basically the same as organizational management:

Peter Drucker popularized management by goals (sometimes called “objectives”). Previously, managers said “do your best”: employee intervention emphasized behaviour like tardiness and team engagement; they believed the right behaviour leads to success.

Under management by goals, managers and workers collaborate to establish goals, then managers monitor performance and remove barriers, giving the workers flexibility to achieve the goals. Obviously the level of collaboration, style of performance monitoring and flexibility given to workers will differ according to project and organizational culture. But the general idea of guiding with goals is well supported.

The key challenge in management by goals is setting the goals. A very popular set of criteria for goals uses the mnemonic “SMART”:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

These are redundant because specificity and time-boundedness are necessary but not sufficient conditions for measurability (“did you or did you not achieve something specific by some time?”). Relevancy means that the goal is in alignment with personal and organizational objectives (which should just be bigger goals, eh?), and values. Research suggests achievability is the criteria most linked to goal success: people work hardest when their goals are challenging but not impossible.