A Unified Definition of SMART Goals

Yesterday, I spoke at ISPI in San Francisco about one of my pet peeves: the fact that there are more than one million possible variations of the SMART acronym.

You read that right... 1 million.

Is it any wonder that most goals don't meet the SMART criteria, when we cannot decide what the SMART criteria are?

I've researched over 400 books that reference SMART goals, in an attempt to settle on a unified definition of the SMART acronym.

Three of the letters are easy:

• S = Specific was chosen by 92% of the books researched. Strategic comes in second, with 2%.
• M = Measurable was chosen by 94% of the books researched. Motivational comes in second, with 2.6%.
• T = Time-bound. Time-something was chosen by 90.5% of the books researched. Time-something includes Time-bound, Time-based, Timed, Time-framed, Time-limited, Timely, Time-oriented, Time-specific, and more. Time-bound was the leader of the Time-somethings, with 36%. Trackable comes in second, with 6%.

That leaves us with A and R.

A = Attainable. A is a horse race. Attainable noses out Achievable, but they're synonyms. Together, they total 66% of the vote. Action-oriented is third, with 12%. 'Agreed' is fourth with 8%. I've added Aggressively, for reasons I'll explain over the next few weeks.

R is tough. The winner is Realistic with 56%. Relevant is second with 28%. The problem, which I'll demonstrate over the next few weeks, is that Realistic is the same as Attainable, while none of the other letters contain the important aspects of Relevant.

Therefore, I'm pushing R = Relevant, for our unified definition of SMART.