On Setting Goals
I’ve fallen into a digital decluttering and productivity rabbit hole recently, spurred by having been without a church office manager for several months and feeling like I was drowning—more than normal—in email and other organizational administrative tasks (I think I counted three hours managing email on some Tuesdays coming back into the office after my day off). I felt like I was spending all day bouncing logistical emails back and forth and wasn’t able to give nearly enough attention to repeating big ministry things I needed to do (like producing quality sermons) and the growing list of significant ministry projects I would identify (like revising producing our customary or doing one-on-one member asset mapping). And then, taking a really hard look at my time use, I realized that most of my extra time was going to obsessive Twitter engagement in which I would, ironically, regularly critique Twitter exchanges for flattening or over-simplifying nuanced and complex topics rather than actually producing my prescribed long-form arguments. This isn’t the post where I get into what I think are some of the more critical evaluations Christians should have with their use of digital media, only the explanation for why I’m on my productivity kick—but don’t worry, now that I’m not spending so much time bemoaning social media on Twitter, I’ll probably get around to actually writing that post.
I do want to talk about goals today. I could hardly avoid the question of effective goal-setting when all my reading for a few weeks focused on topics like quality, meaningful work, and better time management.
By all accounts, I shouldn’t have worried myself with a goal-setting method. Not only had I adopted a particular modification of SMART (specific, measurable, assigned-to, realistic, time-bound) goals offered me by the Episcopal Church Foundation through vestry effectiveness training, I strongly encouraged vestry after vestry I consulted with as Canon to the Ordinary in South Dakota to adopt SMART goals as part of my work in congregational development. Surely, it wasn’t my lack of knowledge, but rather my lack of follow-through.
The SMART goal principle is that too often goals fail to actually make anything different in someone’s life or within a group because they are too vague or rely on vibes to judge their effectiveness, don’t have anyone actually following up on them, don’t have a due date, or just were implausible given available resources.
Thus, in church world, an unSMART goal would be “we want to grow our congregation” while a SMART version would be “Chris will implement programs that will double the number of people attending the Wednesday night Eucharist within a year.”
Surely my own lack of follow-through accounted for some significant part of my inability to set and stick to goals. But this inability to successfully implement SMART goals seemed to be a problem with every group I worked with. We would set our three vestry-retreat goals and even have a plan to check in regularly on whether progress was being made toward the goals and at best the check-ins would be like pulling teeth and no progress would be made. At worst people just stopped answering my calls and emails… and no progress was being made. I think it reasonable to expect that a goal-setting system that is meant to improve how many goals are set and achieved would actually lead to achieving at least some of them.
Basically, my reignited interest in better time management and more meaningful work outcomes led me to reflect on what theretofore remained an implicit awareness that SMART goals weren’t working for me. But this led me to do a little more intentional digging and I found out that SMART goals have some identified limitations that could lie behind my experience of their failure. To begin with, SMART goals revolve completely around outcomes with no regard for what processes will let you achieve that outcome. This focus is a problem first because outcomes can be largely or even completely outside of your control. You can use all the best practices that are most statistically correlated with your desired outcome and still not attain that outcome, especially with highly complex goals that touch on lots of people and factors outside your control like increasing membership size or involvement.
This exclusive focus on outcomes is doubly problematic because it can lure you into thinking all the work is done once you identify the outcome you want. Once you develop a desired outcome, you still have to figure out what you’re going to do to get there. Ostensibly, in determining if the goal is realistic, you’d think through whether there are plausible means for achieving your desired outcome, but even in situations where people didn’t just do quick gut-checks to see if something was “realistic,” you’re still faced with the real problem of decision paralysis in which people endlessly debate different viable paths for realizing the “realistic” goal without ever actually doing anything. You may have a vital outcome identified and know exactly who is responsible for it and know exactly when it needs to be done, but if all that time-bound period is spent weighing the merits of various means of accomplishing this vital outcome, you’ll never actually make any progress toward it.
Of course, one can rightly point out that this is the result of misapplying SMART goals. At least one article (critical of the widespread use of SMART goals I might add) pointed out that this method was developed in business circles in the 80s and worked really well in a world where you need to make sure quarterly reports got done on time, but worked much more poorly when applied to the broader and more subjective horizon of personal and group improvement.
Fair enough. That still leaves those of us looking to engage in projects of broad personal and systemic improvement looking for another method.
Importantly, I don’t have any deep emotional investment in seeing SMART goals go out of existence. If SMART goals give you consistently good results, I wouldn’t recommend fixing something that isn’t broken for you. They’re a tool and if the tool helps you efficiently achieve worthwhile goals, even if it’s in a way the designers of the tool didn’t intend, that’s great. But if you’re finding yourself in a place similar to mine, initially enamored of SMART goals but finding them unable to deliver the goods, then let’s explore what may be a more effective system.
As I alluded to above, others have found the SMART system inadequate for goal setting. Diving into various proposed SMART alternatives, the three acronym systems that seemed most promising were CLEAR (collaborative, limited, emotional, appreciable, and refinable), SUCCESS (subjective, urgent, committed, concrete, evaluate, shared, and support), and PACT (purposeful, actionable, continuous, trackable).
All three alternatives brought out the need to have some real skin in the game—the goals you make should really matter to you and your organization somehow. Building this emotional hook and sense of urgency into the goal-setting process is going to make you much more likely to actually stick with goals that take time to produce results such as getting healthier, learning a language, or changing an organizational culture. SMART goals of course can be subjectively meaningful, but there is nothing inherently built into the goal-setting process to make sure they are.
Now, you may say “but Chris, aren’t there some things that just need to get done that don’t really command your deep passion or interest? There are those activities that, while monotonous, repetitive, or otherwise dull, just need to get done for you or your organization to survive or function in a healthy way. These sorts of individual or institutional hygiene activities aren’t really goals though—except in the broadest definition of goals as things that you aim to do. In the narrower, colloquial sense of goals as significant milestones or accomplishments that help you live into your purpose, these routine activities are much better described as tasks. And this, indeed, may be a place where SMART is better suited to helping such things get done. If there are truly one-off tasks that just need to get done, make that task SMART. And for tasks that you know will prove routine or repetitive, think of turning them into SMART protocols or automations. Think: “My vestry report has to be distributed by one week before the vestry meeting each month. I will have a vestry report of 250-600 words written at least ten days before the monthly vestry meeting.”
CLEAR was the first method to get cut from consideration. While it gets that goals need an emotional hook, it still suffers from SMART’s focus on output rather than process. It also doesn’t build in any process for actually periodically refining—only that your goal should be refinable. SUCCESS had a lot going for it: It has built-in expectation of periodic check-ins about whether you’re on track, it keeps you doubly engaged by making goals urgent and subjective, and it uses the psychological principle that you’re much more likely to adhere to a goal that’s shared with others (that’s what the shared aspect means). But ultimately, I know myself enough to know I won’t succeed with SUCCESS. The acronym is clunky and difficult for me to remember, in part probably because it doesn’t use all the same parts of speech.
PACT has the real advantage of focusing on the consistent process rather than outcomes and was easy to remember. However, like SMART and CLEAR, it doesn’t have a built-in system for evaluating whether the process is actually moving you toward a desired outcome.
So, my proposal is for a modified version of PACT that draws on some of the content from SUCCESS: USE PACT.
This new acronym means:
Urgent—In a world of limited temporal and attentional resources, make sure you focus first on the first things that need to be done. Of all the things you can be spending time on, is this the one that needs to be done first? You should probably be thinking along the lines of a deeper time-scale version of the Eisenhower Matrix and making sure that you’re looking at the urgent and important quadrant. Don’t make goals related to urgent but unimportant tasks. Also, remember that urgency is a relative thing. You can and should have long-term goals, but even with these, focus on the ones that are more urgent. Say I were looking for a way to focus an extra hour a day. I just applied for a job starting in eight months that requires me to speak Bulgarian and I also have an idea for a book but hadn’t approached any publishers. That hour should go to learning Bulgarian and not writing a book. That said, if for whatever reason you had three hours a day to fill, there’s no reason you couldn’t make both working toward the book and learning Bulgarian goals.
Ultimately, I think the urgency piece as it relates to anything but hard-and-fast, immediate deadlines is really more about the subjective experience of urgency—is this something that you really feel drawn toward getting done ahead of other things? Urgency is less about comparing things on an objective timeline and more about the felt need to complete it—urgency as burning passion, a sense that this is important enough to move to the front of the line.
Stated–You need to let other people know you have committed to the goal. Robert Cialdini talks in Influence about how the consistency principle explains the phenomenon whereby people are much more likely to stick with a commitment if it is expressed to others either in speech or writing. Do both if you can.
Evaluated—Ok, this is future-oriented: The point of this letter in the acronym is to build an evaluation method for your process into your goal. If you’re going to, say, use Assimil for learning Bulgarian, I would need to go beyond saying “I will study my Assimil book every day for an hour” to also say “I will evaluate whether I am actually getting better at Bulgarian every month and determine whether I need to change something about my method.” Adding an evaluation component to your goal will also force you to think through what metrics you have for achieving your purpose. In the case of language learning, it could be the difficulty of texts you can read, how frequently you need to make use of a dictionary when reading or writing, how often a speaking partner has to correct you, etc. You shouldn’t set this arbitrarily but instead should do some research on what accepted benchmarks for progress in your practice look like and use those. Then, if you’re not making any progress, or your progress is slower than what you expected, you can reflect on what you need to change. Perhaps you should try a different study location—or vary that location. Perhaps you need a supplemental audio or conversational component. Perhaps vocab is tripping you up and you need to look into more effective ways to memorize and retrieve words. Perhaps you’re just pushing yourself too hard and need to recalibrate your expectations. Or, and this should only be the last resort, perhaps you need to accept that on this goal you did everything right but were one of the unlucky ones in a world in which outcomes are not guaranteed even with perfect processes (if it really is the last, you should also evaluate whether there’s any value in continuing to engage in pursuing the goal).
Purposeful: Originally this was the place where the subjective hook happened: How does this process, this ongoing activity, fit within your broader sense of purpose in life? (As a side note, if you don’t have a personal purpose statement, which could be as generic as something like the baptismal covenant or as customized as a specific statement you have drafted to fit your individual circumstances, you need to adopt/create one.) I think this is right, but I want to make it a bit more directed. Your purpose in this particular endeavor should stand against the backdrop of a broader understanding of life purpose. But I’d think this part of the goal needs to be “goal-y,” a statement of something like your desired outcome, nonetheless understanding that it’s not guaranteed to happen. But without some sense of where you want to go, it’s hard to know what process you’re going to embark on to try to get there. In formulating the USE PACT statement, this is literally going to be a purpose clause: “I will use Assimil Bulgarian every day for an hour in order to learn Bulgarian.”
Because the purposefulness is really just about making sure that the process or ongoing activity you’re going to engage with has a purpose and fits within your overall sense of what you’re supposed to do with your life, this offers another place where PACT, whether original flavor or my modification, has advantages over SMART goals: You can make your purpose a moonshot that anchors several PACTs (or USE PACTs). In the case of learning Bulgarian, unless you were using a truly comprehensive method, this would probably look like “memorize 25 new vocabulary words every day” and “speak for 10 minutes every day” in addition to using the Assimil book. Becoming a professional golfer or writing a best-selling novel probably would not pass the “realistic” test for SMART goals but research on deliberate practice shows that they’re not impossible with enough time and (properly coached) effort. Knowing that no outcome is ever guaranteed, you can be as wild or restrained with your purpose as you want as long as you really put the work in to make sure it aligns with your larger life goal and find out what process(es) you’d need to implement to get there.
In fact, I think it’s probably better to have a much bigger horizon than what you would normally arrive at with a SMART goal. One of the big advantages of the original PACT approach over SMART goals is it moves you from a focus on achieving single, end goals to a continuous growth mindset. A more optimistic purpose will give you time to live into actually adopting and developing a practice rather than constantly coming back to the goal-setting table.
Significantly, the original site I saw proposing PACTs left the purposeful aspect of the PACT in the background. I think you should make it explicit.
Actionable: You’ll come back into the arena of the practical when you start thinking about what you’ll actually do. Regardless of how ambitious your purpose is, you need to make sure you include some behavior that’s within your control, a behavior that has some demonstrated connection to reaching the purpose you put forward.
Continuous: The actionable behavior you choose should have the character of a regular, well-defined practice, letting you lean into the continuous growth potential of PACTs. There’s a good chance that if there isn’t a (or a few) regular, ongoing practices associated with progress toward your purpose, you’re actually dealing with tasks rather than goals.
Trackable: Don’t confuse this with evaluation. Evaluation is the protocol you implement to periodically check and see if you’re making progress toward your purpose. Making your goal trackable means that you choose a practice or behavior that you can, well, track from day to day (as well as deciding on a way to actually track it). Don’t make this overcomplicated. Your tracking can be as simple as “did I study Bulgarian for an hour today: yes or no?”
Putting it all together, you can come up with a full USE PACT goal that looks like this:
“I will use Assimil Bulgarian every day for an hour in order to learn Bulgarian to a point where I can teach a college course in it. On the first day of the month, I will evaluate whether I am progressing by taking the ECL exam in Bulgarian to see if I am making progress and make adjustments as necessary. I will post this goal—including the frequency, purpose, and evaluation method—on my fridge and tell everyone in my family about it.”
This no doubt yields a significantly longer goal than most people are accustomed to—and it requires more preparation between having an intuition about a purpose and creating the full goal than most people are used to. And, to be fair, this method is largely hypothetical, based on what I perceive to be the strengths and weaknesses of the various goal-setting approaches. Really, I’m putting it out there as a challenge and opportunity for people to critique, try, modify, and hopefully develop into something truly helpful for individuals and organizations.
This is also a way for me to put forward my USE PACT related to blogging, especially the stated part:
I’m committing here to writing one new blog post every week in order to have a place to collect my thoughts that otherwise would have gone onto social media in a more thoughtful and nuanced way. I’ll reevaluate whether a post a week is really sustainable every three months.
Final note: I am not in the running for any job that requires me to know Bulgarian. I am in fact quite extremely very happy at Trinity Episcopal Church. I am not considering a move to Bulgaria.
