Welcome to Design Your Life x5!

In this ongoing series, in each essay, we explore one different idea that helps you to design your life (e. g. productivity, goal setting, time management, mindfulness, tools, frameworks, etc.) in 5 main points.

Designing your life means holistically reflecting on and understanding your past, organizing and focussing on your present and shaping your future.

🎯 SMART Goals

🗒️ #1 What is it?

Let's imagine you want to want to set a goal and achieve it. How do you define and formulate that goal?

That's right where SMART Goals come into place. SMART is an acronym and (usually) stands for the words Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound. These five dimensions ensure that the goal is clearly defined.

There are a couple of reasons why we don't achieve our goals, but one among them is that the goal is just insufficient defined. We can solve this with SMART Goals.

✔️ #2 How to use it?

• Think about any goal you want to achieve.

  • Example: I want to be an author. (Note how this formulation is really generic, so in the next step we will define that goal more)

• Define the following criteria for this goal:

  • 🤌 Specific: Be as precise and clear as possible about the goal. Go through the different Wh-Questions and try to find an answer.

    • Example: I want to publish a book about how mindfulness can make you a happier person.

    • Note how we added a concrete topic.

  • ☑️ Measurable: Define the criteria you can use to measure the progress and whether you have achieved the goal.

    • Example: I want to write a book with 1000 pages about how mindfulness can make you a happier person and self-publish it on Gumroad.

    • Note how we added multiple criteria that can be checked off: Writing, 1000 pages, self-publish on Gumroad.

  • 🏔️ Achievable: Your goal needs to be realistic. It's always good to get out of your comfort zone, but still, it needs to be possible for you to achieve. If it's too big, think about breaking it down into smaller goals.

    • Example: I want to write a book with 250 pages about how mindfulness can make you a happier person and self-publish it on Gumroad.

    • Note how we broke down 1000 pages to 250 pages to make the goal more achievable.

  • 👍 Relevant: Be honest and ask yourself how important that goal is for you. It's all about the Why question. We should have an intrinsic motivation to reach that goal. otherwise, it will be difficult in the long term to work towards that goal.

    • Example: I want to write a book with 250 pages about how mindfulness can make you a happier person and self-publish it on Gumroad because by sharing my own experiences and learnings with the world I hope to help more people to become happier.

    • Note how we added an answer to why we want to achieve that goal.

  • 🕰️ Time-Bound: Here you define the deadline by when you want to have achieved that goal.

    • Example: I want to write a book with 250 pages about how mindfulness can make you a happier person and self-publish it on Gumroad by the 1st October 2022 because by sharing my own experiences and learnings with the world I hope to help more people to become happier.

    • Note how we added a deadline here. You could also add a start date.

• Now, you can go on and define your tasks, habits, milestones or projects to reach that goal.

🤔 #3 Why it helps to design your life?

It helps you in shaping your future. Goals are a very important concept to shape our future, and SMART Goals helps to gain clarity and define them in a better way.

Goals in general, care more about the WHAT and not the HOW. But it's really important that we define the direction we want to go. Having goals are great here as a north-star we can always refer to.

Several studies prove the positive effects of having goals, such as being more successful and motivated. When designing your life, they are a necessary concept to define your dream life and find a way to transform your current life to this dream life.

👍 #4 Pros & Cons

• ➕ You gain much more clarity about the goal, which can even motivate you more.

• ➕ The goal becomes measurable, you exactly know when you have completed it and also can estimate your progress.

• ➕ By defining the goal in a SMART way it feels already be a lot more achievable than a vaguely formulated goal.

• ➕ It increases your probability of success to reach that goal.

• ➖ It's not really suitable for visionary ideas, where exactly the nebulous idea itself gives room for so much greatness.

• ➖ Sometimes it can be really tedious to define every dimension for each goal, especially if you set many goals.

• ➖ As with any goals, they can create some pressure and possibly demotivate you when you can't keep up with the necessary progress or don't achieve that goal.

💡 #5 Tips

• Remember the goal cares more about WHAT you want to achieve, not HOW you achieve it. They should be a north-star for you.

• That's why it's helpful to think about the HOW after setting the goal: What habits, tasks or projects will get you there?

• Break your goals down - yearly into quarterly, quarterly into monthly, monthly into weekly. It's very tedious, but achieving smaller goals is much easier and more motivating.

• Make your goals present, write them down, maybe create a poster. If we always look at them, they stay in our mind and we are more likely to work on the goals.

• There are even extensions and additional criteria, so it might be helpful to research them and see if you want to apply more. However, it's all about getting clarity. So you don't have to exaggerate it. 🙂