Smart Office Pro

Quick intro: this is one in a series about SMART goals.

When you’re on a 7,445 mile road trip*, do you just drive from here to there nonstop?  No.  It’s too long.  You break it up into stages along the way and drive each stage.  After you reach a milestone, you start working towards the next one.  You can measure your progress as you go.  When you reach the last milestone, you’re done!

Working towards a goal is just like taking a long road trip.  One of the advantages of a measurable SMART goal is the milestones that help you measure your progress towards your goal.  You have a better picture of where you’re going, and you’ll always know where you are.  It’s the map to your success.

How to make a goal measurable

To turn a request or assignment into a measurable goal, just add two or three major milestones to the goal statement.  A milestone is the end of a major stage of work towards reaching the goal.  Think of the major steps it will take to achieve the goal.  Those are the milestones.

There should be more than one major step, but fewer than five.  If you think of more than five steps, you’re probably diving too far into the details.  Or you’ve been assigned a huge project that’s going to take years and megabucks to complete.  But even with a huge project, you still need to boil it down to a few milestones you can include when you state the goal.

For example, let’s say your boss asks you to “demonstrate Microsoft OneNote at a team meeting.”  That sounds like a goal, but it doesn’t sound SMART yet.  How would you measure progress towards that goal?

Setting the milestones backwards

“Begin with the end in mind.”  Steven Covey

The final milestone for a goal is usually obvious.  It’s completing the assignment.  For the “demonstrate OneNote” example, the final milestone is demonstrating OneNote.  Work backwards from completing the assignment to discover other milestones.

The other milestones may take a few minutes of thought.  Don’t get stuck here.  This isn’t rocket science.  Unless your goal is to launch a Winnebago to the moon.  Seriously, your manager wouldn’t have assigned this to you if she didn’t think you could do it.

Is this assignment similar to any other goals you’ve achieved?  Yes?  What milestones helped you reach that goal?  Maybe this new assignment can use the same major steps.

Here’s another tip.  Milestones that you put in your goal statement are usually single words.  They’re action verbs that often show up on good resumes and status reports.  Here’s a good list of action verbs.

Back to the example of demonstrating OneNote.  Just starting the software and talking about it without preparation is a recipe for disaster.  Maybe your teammates won’t throw tomatoes.  But they won’t love you for it.

So a major step is preparing for the demonstration.  Developing visual aids, writing what you want to say, and creating a handout.  Sum that up in one word, “develop,” and you have your middle milestone.

Taking another step backwards, what do you need to do before you can develop the demo?  You need to figure out what features to cover in the time you have, and any activities to include in the demonstration.  Choosing from the list of action verbs, that sounds like “design.”

Rearrange and rewrite the goal statement

Adding the major steps makes the goal statement “Design, develop, and deliver a demonstration of Microsoft OneNote.”  Now you have a map of where you’re going.  The milestones help you measure progress towards the goal.

Here’s an article from the Harvard Business review that says you’re more successful when you set a series of milestones.

How do YOU make a goal measurable? Please answer in the comments.

* The 7,445 mile road trip is to drive through 48 states in the U.S.

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