Guide to SMART Goal Setting + Free Goals Worksheets

With the New Year approaching, I’ve been thinking a lot about my goals from last year and my goals for the upcoming year. I’m guessing you have too! Each year I find myself reflecting on what enabled me to achieve my personal goals and what I can do differently next year to achieve both my short-term goals and long-term goals. This past year I’ve had some of my biggest successes in goal setting and goal achievement. I credit much of that progress to new tools I’ve started using to improve my goal setting process.

In this post, I’ll go over the goals I set for myself over the previous year, the progress I made, recommendations and tools that I’ve found extremely helpful, and my yearly goals for 2024. At the end of the article, you’ll find free goal setting worksheets to help you set daily goals, weekly goals, and monthly goals. Using these goal setting worksheets is a great way to make incremental progress towards your long term goals. 

A Note on Goals vs. Resolutions

Before I dive in, you may have noticed that I’m using the term “goals” instead of “resolutions.” It may seem like semantics, but I prefer to set goals over resolutions. The word “resolution” suggests to me that I cannot deviate from what I resolved to do at the beginning of the year. It feels far more black and white than goal setting. In contrast, setting a specific goal sounds more like something I’m working towards.

For example, if I set a goal to write in my journal every day, I feel like that’s something I am working towards. I might not write every day as I begin my pursuit of that goal. However, over time, I hope to progress to that point. In contrast, a resolution to journal every day makes me feel like I have to actually journal every day from the get-go or else I failed.

Consequently, I prefer to set goals rather than resolutions. Goals give me more freedom to mess up, take breaks, and slowly grow. As a result, I believe goals are more conducive to lasting change than resolutions. If this resonates with you, I encourage you to also reframe your resolutions as goals.

Last Year’s Goals

So what were my goals for the past year? I developed goals in a few different areas.

Mental and Physical Health-Related Goals

• Run 1 marathon (accomplished)
• Run 5x per week on average (accomplished)
• Climb 3x per week on average (didn’t accomplish)
• Meditate most days (didn’t accomplish)
• Journal most days (didn’t accomplish)

Social Goals

• Walk with my parents 1x per week on average (accomplished)
• See my sisters 1x per month on average (accomplished)
• See my brother every other month on average (accomplished)
• Walk with my friend 2x per month on average (didn’t accomplish)
• Go on a monthly date night with Andrew (kind of accomplished, we missed a bunch of months but also did lots of fun things together)
• Run, walk, or hang out with one of my other friends 2x per month (accomplished)

Career and Financial Goals

• Blog once every 2 weeks (super accomplished, as I’ve been posting 2x per week since April!)
• Develop a paying side hustle that uses my skills/creativity (sort of accomplished, I will be teaching next quarter and I have made $3 from my Etsy store if you exclude orders from my family haha!)
• Get a children’s story published (I abandoned this goal earlier in the year after I decided it didn’t fit what I wanted to focus on)
• Max out Roth IRA (accomplished)
• Save $25,000 (accomplished)

Not daunting at all, right? No one ever accused me of being low key when it comes to goal setting. Funnily enough though, before I looked back on these goals, I assumed I didn’t accomplish most of my goals. I could only really remember the goals I hadn’t achieved. For example, I didn’t journal or meditate every day, injuries kept me from climbing regularly, and my side hustle goal isn’t quite where I want it to be.

But once I started reflecting on all my other goals, I realized I did accomplish a lot! Not only that, but I learned a ton from the process!

Lessons Learned from Goal Setting

Indeed, while I have set goals for many years, I’ve probably learned more about goal setting this past year than I have in any other year. This is partly because my goals for this year were many and lofty. There was virtually no way I could achieve all of them. And that process was informative. Plus, I started using a variety of tools that helped with my goal setting.

Additionally, this is the first full year I’ve gone to therapy. I can’t recommend therapy highly enough. It’s helped me engage in much more self-reflection, particularly when it comes to the pretty impossible standards I hold for myself. Therapy helped me better reflect on what it means to fail and achieve.

As a result, these are the key lessons I have learned from a year of major goal setting.

Not Achieving a Goal Isn’t a Failure

As noted above, two of my primary goals were to journal and meditate almost every day. And I actually did meditate daily until April and journaled daily until September. But then I stopped both cold turkey. You could argue that doing so was a failure.

However, the problem with viewing these goals as failures is that they were supplanted by new goals. I stopped journaling and meditating because my morning routine was replaced by work on my blog before I started my work day. I still love journaling and meditating, but I love the blog more.

You could also say that I failed at my climbing goal. However, setting that goal aside was pivotal for my health after I injured my knee, then my hip, then my finger, the latter two thanks to climbing. I haven’t gone back to climbing yet because I’m prioritizing my goals around running. Specifically, I’m training to run the Boston Marathon in April and I don’t want to get injured yet again.

And yes, I haven’t gotten my side hustles to the place I want yet. However, I have grown the blog, built an Etsy store, and will start teaching an undergraduate class in January for 10 weeks as yet another side hustle that I really enjoy.

So while I didn’t achieve these goals, I didn’t fail either. I learned a lot from the pursuit of those goals and they led me to new goals. Which brings me to my next lesson.

Take a Growth Mindset

Astronaut Mike Massimino recently appeared on my favorite podcast Stacking Benjamins. He said that it doesn’t matter whether you achieve your goals, the process of working towards your goals will get you in a good place.

And I have certainly found that as well. It doesn’t matter that I didn’t achieve all my goals over the past year. The process of working towards them has led me to find new hobbies and passions. It has also forced me to get better at clarifying what I truly love and the different goals I want to prioritize.

So I encourage you to focus on the process of pursuing goals (or resolutions!), rather than focusing on the endpoints of those goals/resolutions.

Consider Goals in Multiple Categories

Part of the reason I set so many goals is that I bought a new planner last year (I link to it below!). That planner included space for goals in personal, health, career, and social categories. Normally I would never have considered creating goals in all these categories. But this planner led me to reflect more on what I might like to pursue in each area.

In particular, I wouldn’t have thought about setting social goals. However, the planner led me to set social goals including walking with my parents weekly, seeing my sisters monthly, seeing my brother every other month, and seeing some of my friends regularly.

While I wouldn’t have initially considered these goals, they ended up becoming the goals I most enjoyed pursuing and had the most success at. They also helped me ensure my life was more well-rounded and fulfilling than if I focused on career- or health-oriented goals. You too might find it valuable to consider goals across multiple areas of your life.

SMART Goal Setting

The best goals are SMART. If you are unfamiliar with S.M.A.R.T. goals, SMART refers to creating specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals. Goals that do not meet these criteria are much more difficult to pursue and achieve. As part of achieving SMART goals, it’s important to break big goals down into steps that are also SMART.

For example, you might set a main goal to max out your Roth IRA by the end of the year. If you’re under age 50, that means saving about $542 per month or $6,500 for the whole year. That’s a goal you can set into your calendar each month or create an automatic deposit for a specified amount of time. It’s therefore specific, measurable, and time-bound. It’s also likely to be relevant to your long-term goals if you want to retire one day! And the degree to which it’s achievable depends on your financial situation. 

In contrast, you could set a goal to save more. However, that’s not specific or measurable. You have no idea what success looks like. Yes, you could save $5 more than last year and technically achieve that goal, but is that relevant to you? Maybe it is, but maybe that doesn’t get you to where you truly want to go. Vague goals are not very motivating because we have no clear sense of how to achieve them or even why we’re pursuing them. 

Consequently, the most effective way to make motivating, clear goals is to make sure they’re SMART. 

Create an Action Plan for Goal Setting

Once we create SMART goals, we can develop an action plan. Indeed, an action plan is the best way we can make goals achievable. Take a big goal and break it down into short term goals that you can turn into monthly, weekly, or daily tasks. The key is to schedule those next action steps into your calendar to help with time management.

To use the Roth IRA example again, we could create an action plan to set up monthly automatic deposits into our retirement accounts. We could create a budget and then evaluate our spending every two weeks for areas where we overspend and need to cut back in order to contribute to our retirement account.

Additionally, we might commit to doing an audit of our home every two months for things to sell. Or plan to apply to one job a day to find a job with a higher salary or better benefits to help us achieve that goal. There are a million smaller goals we could develop and implement on a daily basis (or whatever frequency) to help us reach our goals.

One of the important questions you should ask yourself as part of this process is: what potential problems might I encounter as I progress towards my final goal? Then anticipate those problems in your action plan. Do you anticipate you won’t be able to contribute to your Roth IRA during the holidays with all that added spending? Try contributing $591 from January to November so you don’t have to worry about contributing anything in December. Worried your budget can’t take the monthly $542 hit? Try automatically depositing a smaller amount and progressively increasing it each month. Use your action plan to empower you and give your goals the best chance of success.

Reward Your Progress

This is probably the one I’m worst at. I’m a perfectionist. Plus, with big goals, it’s often hard to recognize that any accomplishments you make on the way to reaching your goal are accomplishments too. It’s also easy to push your end goal farther and farther out as you progressively achieve success.

As an example, when I was pursuing my PhD, I didn’t get that excited about receiving my Master’s, finishing my comprehensive exams with distinction (an intense, 48-hour long exam where you write 30 pages in response to a few writing prompts), or defending my dissertation proposal. I didn’t even get that excited about the 20 papers I published.

In only a couple of those instances did I have any kind of celebratory dinner or other acknowledgement of those achievements. After all, these things were required for me to receive my PhD. But they didn’t actually represent getting my PhD.

By the time I got my PhD, that didn’t even feel like a big accomplishment because my goals were then centered around getting a job. I’d pursued the PhD for so long (6 years), that it felt like old news by the time it happened. This highlights that it’s sometimes difficult for us to celebrate our accomplishments on the way to a goal, even if those accomplishments are super cool and meaningful! We may find that we don’t even have a super positive attitude about achieving our goals once we finally do reach them!

This is why it’s so helpful to celebrate your benchmark accomplishments that make your end goals possible. Plus these celebrations can give you the motivation to keep pursuing your goals when things get tough.

Be Willing to Be Lofty in Your Goal Setting

As adults, it’s tempting to reign ourselves in when it comes to our dreams. Failure feels much more real and tangible as an adult than it does as a kid. If, for example, we are 8-years-old and dream of becoming an actress, we don’t have to worry about achieving that goal any time soon. We can enjoy the dream without feeling the pressure. Adults generally have to confront the limitations and realities of achieving their goals. Consequently, we might feel scared about setting big goals.

I certainly felt that way when making goals related to my blog. Initially I told my therapist that I would be satisfied if just one person read one article and got something out of it. But, in retrospect, that wasn’t even close to the truth. I made that goal because it felt safe, almost guaranteed.

So I started to create much bigger goals, goals so big that they scare me to even articulate here. Goals like *gulp* getting 100,000 views on the blog or earning a steady income from the blog (or at least more than the $5 I’ve currently earned from ads). These goals are scary. But they’re also much more honest, exciting, and satisfying than the safe goals I’ve set in the past. And even if I don’t achieve them, the pursuit of those goals has helped me learn and grow a lot.

Goal Setting for Next Year

So in the coming year I’m going to continue setting goals. However, I’m going to make room for growth and change. I’m also going to set big, scary (but still SMART) goals. And I’ll work on rewarding and acknowledging my progress. Yes, I’m also going to continue making a lot of goals and in different categories. So without further ado, my goals include:

Health-Related Goals

• PR at the Boston Marathon
• Run 5x per week until April 15^th
• Strength train 5-6x per week until April 15^th

Financial and Business Goals

• Reach 100,000 views on my blog by the end of the year
• Post 2 blog posts per week on average
• Participate in the blogging Facebook groups daily, on average
• Pin 5-6x per day on average
• Join an affiliate program by the end of the year
• Guest post 1x per month on average
• Make over 100 Etsy sales by the end of the year
• Create at least 20 new Etsy products
• Advertise the Etsy store
• Max out my Roth IRA
• Save $30,000

Social Goals

• Walk (almost) every week with my parents
• Do trivia (almost) weekly
• Have a monthly date night with Andrew
• Go on at least one trip with *just* Andrew (even if it’s short)

Notice that these goals are largely very specific and measurable. I also have an end date for the goal or I aim to regularly pursue that goal and strive for an average amount of times I pursue it throughout the year. Setting an average acknowledges that I won’t always, say, walk with my parents each week, but I will aim to do that most week.

Goal-Setting Template

As I work towards my goals, I’m going to use the goal planner I created. I’ve created a daily goals template/weekly goals template and a monthly goals template. Each one includes a goal sheet to set small steps you can pursue on a daily, weekly, and/or monthly basis. This free template is a valuable tool to build new habits. It’s also one of the easiest ways of figuring out your top priorities and managing your time around them effectively.

You can download the free printable goal worksheet in PDF format and print at home or at your local library or print shop.

Other Resources for Goal Setting

As I mentioned above, I believe that my goal progress this year is due, in large part, to some of the great goal setting resources I’ve used. In particular, I love my daily planner by Rachel Pohl. She redesigned the planner for 2024, so I don’t have feedback yet on the new design. But if it’s a fraction as great as the original, I know it’ll be amazing. The planner has space for monthly, weekly, and daily goal setting. Plus, it has a full page for each day to schedule out tasks hourly. The planner was an immensely useful tool for developing actions plans for my goals. 

Final Thoughts on Goal Setting

The New Year is a great time to assess our progress towards our important goals and set new goals for 2024. By making your goals SMART, developing an action plan, having a growth mindset, rewarding your progress, and setting goals in multiple categories, you can make your goals more achievable than ever. I also hope the free printable goals templates above help you get there even faster. Indeed, my wish for you is that 2024 is your best year yet and that you achieve all of your biggest, loftiest goals!

What are your goals for 2024? Let me know in the comments!

If you enjoyed this post, please consider liking, subscribing, or sharing with others! It’s always a huge help and immensely appreciated. Interested in related content? Check out my posts on saving for any goal, how to get a promotion or raise, how to rediscover your workout motivation, savings challenge printables, and how to prioritize multiple savings goals.