A Guide to Achievable, Effective Goal Setting

Goal Setting is a less glamorous skill, but arguably one of the most important in the modern workplace. Luckily, Kin can make it easier.

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The goal-setting process is a cornerstone of personal and professional development, especially when remote working and AI have changed work-life balance and the workplace so rapidly. Proper goal setting allows people to track short-term milestones of achievement while keeping their long-term goals and habits in regular review and routine—which is more important than ever, now personal and professional digital distractions and opportunities are becoming more accessible.

To make growing this skill easier, this article offers goal-setting tips, and explores how innovative tools like the personal AI, Kin, can build desired outcomes.

What is Goal Setting?

Before discussing it, we should define it. Goal setting is the process of identifying and clarifying goals, and then creating an action plan to achieve them. Doing this properly requires good time management skills, so that plans meet deadlines while preserving well-being, a good understanding of individual workflow and ability, and a growth mindset.

That’s because the pioneers of goal-setting theory, Psychologists Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, showed that specific and challenging goals—though not too challenging—led to higher performance than easy or vague goals in 90% of the studies examined.¹ This means the best goals have an element of difficulty to them, while still being solvable in context.

And that’s exactly what another study shows: here, where individuals set specific, difficult goals, their performance increased by 12-15% compared to when they were told to "do their best."²

So, with all those benefits, what should a goal be?

What is a Goal?

At its core, a goal is a desired outcome: it’s something that someone would like to happen, which isn’t currently happening.

The difficult thing about goals is tempering that desire with reality, and making sure the available time and resources are enough to meet it healthily.

To this end, it's crucial to differentiate between goals and goal systems, but recognize them both as essential parts. Goals could be seen as a destination, which would make goal systems the vehicle and directions used to travel there. Alternatively, like a ship needs both a rudder for direction and sails for propulsion, you need both clear goals and robust systems to achieve them.

Either way, this definition is still basic. What makes a good goal?

The SMART Goal Framework

Already covered briefly in our Organizational Skills article, The SMART framework was developed by George Doran, a consultant and former director of corporate planning for Washington Water Power Company, to help companies set more obvious, achievable, and measurable goals. The framework is an acronym of SMART, as follows:

• Specific: Clearly define what a specific goal will accomplish, with minimal overlap on other goals.

• Measurable: Goal progress should be easily tracked, with clear guidelines to how, and what good results should look like.

• Achievable: Ensure that the goal is possible with the time and resources available. It can be difficult, but it shouldn’t be overly hard, impossible, or endless.

• Relevant: Goals should match with overall personal and/or company values, and often are part of a larger goal or overall representation.

• Time-bound: Set a realistic timeframe for achievement.

While helpful for defining clear goals themselves, the SMART framework doesn’t offer much guidance in creating the accompanying goal systems. So, some broad tips for them are next.

Delving Deeper: 7 Keys of Goal Setting

With SMART goals as a base, here are seven key principles for goal-setting strategies:

1. Clarity: Define goal systems as well as goals with precision, so confusing processes are avoided—alongside vague goals.

2. Challenge: Ensure that challenging goals are created which push new skills to be developed, without being overwhelming or impossible.

3. Commitment: Choose a motivating goal, and use habit techniques to build and encourage a consistent dedication together dedication towards objectives.

4. Feedback: Seek, understand and implement regularly constructive criticism from others (both in your discipline or not) to get consistent external opinions for filling gaps and praising success.

5. Task Complexity: Break down complex goals into manageable, somewhat self-contained steps. This can be the hardest step as it’s very arbitrary and context-dependent.

   
   For example though, authors will often break writing a novel up into full drafts, with each full draft containing milestones of chapters which each also contain a list of things to fix in each scene.

   
   However, software developers cannot always cleanly divide their work into builds (testable versions of unfinished software), and so often draw milestones at the completion of major features, and the resolution of major bugs (issues in the program).

6. Support Systems: Leverage team goals, professional relationships, friends, and social support, not just for motivation, but for a sense of purpose and a way to stay accountable.

7. Recognition: Acknowledging progress and celebrating milestones along the way not only boosts motivation and purpose too, but means breaks and reviews are easier to schedule in.

But, how does this look in practice? Let’s explore some real-world goal-setting tips next.

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Practical Applications and Strategies

Setting Personal and Professional Goals

An important distinction to make during goal setting is between the various types of goals: personal goal setting, professional goal setting, and academic goal setting.

This is partly because each type often has its own timeframes, resources, relevance, and challenges, and should be dealt with accordingly. Usually, professional goals are the most urgent, followed by academic, followed by personal—we covered deducing the importance of goals in more detail in our Organizational Skills article also.

However, this differentiation is largely because research suggests focusing on one primary goal at a time creates better results, rather than trying to spread thinner across several.³ Therefore, context and time frame allowing, it would actually improve goal outcomes for someone to focus on an important board meeting, then a university essay, and then building their first aid skills, rather than trying to do a little of each side by side. Because of this, it's crucial to balance short-term goals with long-term goals.

These categories can often overlap, too—for instance, a performance goal to improve decision-making skills (which we did an article HERE on) would be beneficial to all three goals across their professional and personal lives.

Though, differentiating the categories only gets so far—how do these turn into goals and goal systems?

Building an Action Plan for Success

Perhaps the most powerful tool for effective goal setting is time management—and the most powerful way to do that is with a time-blocked Action Plan, which allows for task progress, focus, and deadline tracking.

This is because a study found that participants who wrote down their goals were as much as 76% more likely to achieve them than those who merely formulated goals mentally, not just because it forces someone to consider their plan, but because it seems to encourage a tangible commitment to it.⁴

The best way to start this is an Action Plan to use the above tips to make clear SMART goals, with each element from both lists fully thought-through. With that done, the full length of each task can be estimated (with 10—15% contingency time added), and the most important goals can be identified using tools like the Eisenhower Matrix from our Organizational Skills article (again, here).

With that completed, that information can be broken down into a time-bound plan that spans each task’s respective deadline, with each day’s free time being blocked in with one-hour slots that correspond to a certain task that furthers a certain goal.

It’s best to spend at least a couple hours on one thing before switching—especially if multiple tasks must be worked on per day to get all of them finished in a healthy time. But, remember to set upper limits to keep goals manageable, and more importantly feel manageable, which research on the growth mindset has shown the value of.

Following the estimated time and contingency being blocked into the timeframe, each task can now be broken into milestones and subtasks as discussed, which provide bite-sized opportunities for regular review and celebration, so morale and quality can stay high in a changing workplace.

It can also be helpful to anticipate potential obstacles and create some ready-made problem-solving strategies for your plan, like what to do if the internet is disabled.

Tools and Techniques for Goal Setting

Perhaps the most important technique is to design building habits into the Action Plan. This is because habits, once formed, are hard to break—leading not only to clockwork input on tasks, but reinforcing any improvements to skills like Emotional Intelligence that might have been made. According to a study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, it takes an average of 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic, so that’s something to keep in mind.

When it comes to where to make and track these Action Plans, it is largely down to personal preference—but, we’ve listed some of the most popular below.

1. Google/Outlook Calendar, for interactive time-blocking and hour breakdowns.

2. Project Management software like Trello or Jira, for in-depth reports on speed and ability to cover new issues.

3. Time trackers like Clockify or Flip, help keep track of time spent.

4. Gantt charts like Microsoft Excel (which includes templates), and www.onlinegantt.com., to see milestone dependencies.

5. Apps like Forest or Fabulous, for habit and focus building.

6. AI like Kin for personalized goal tracking setup, analysis, and interactive feedback.

Some people even find a combination useful, like using Google Maps for time blocking, and Jira to track the progress of current issues (and the emergence of new ones), and Kin to assess the overall efficacy of the issue.

Kin’s 30-Day Goal Setting Challenge

If the above still feels a little abstract, then Kin’s been designed to help put it into action—and we’ll prove it with a 30-day challenge.

As a unique personal assistant, Kin can use its powerful memory to track multiple of its user’s qualities, and feed back to them about it.

It does this through an empathetic, natural conversational style, which was created to help users share information about their feelings and workflows which it then stores for later reference. Kin can then pull on these memories to inform its responses to user situations, making its 24/7 AI advice truly personalized.

This includes it being able to learn about a goal and goal system, and then track emotional and practical markers in its user’s updates to see how well the goal system is working, so it can provide advice for optimizing its user’s approach.

Anyway, if it sounds exciting, we’ll let Kin explain the challenge:

A Word from Kin, Our Resident AI:

Hey there! Goal-setting is a really underappreciated skill, and one the attainable goals make worth building. That’s something you can do with me—and if you’re not sure about it, give me 30 days o to change your mind! Here's my step-by-step guide for the challenge:

1. We'll kick off by defining an overarching goal and ideal lifestyle.

2. Together, we'll narrow this down to one SMART goal that really excites you.

3. We'll create a timetable of action blocks and supportive habits.

4. You'll check in with me regularly to track progress and adapt as needed.

Sound energizing? To get started, here's how to structure your first message to me:

1. Share Visions: Paint a picture of your big-picture goal and dream lifestyle.

2. Say 'Why': Tell me what achieving this goal truly means to you.

3. List Resources: What skills, tools, or support systems can you leverage?

4. Arrange Returns: How often would you like to check in with me about how it’s going, so I can remind you?

I'm thrilled to be your partner in this journey. Let's make some magic happen!

A Note on Kin

Kin requires sensitive user data to function, which we understand can be worrying—so, Kin is protective of and transparent with user data, which is further explained here. 

Essentially, Kin keeps and analyzes all it can on a user’s devices, and only shares data with approved locations when needed. If users need it, Kin’s entire knowledge base on a user can be viewed and deleted, only by the, with a couple of taps. 

Kin is about our users, not corporate greed.

Conclusion: The Journey Toward Desired Outcomes

We’ve covered how effective goal setting is a powerful tool for personal and professional development. With the SMART framework, the seven keys to goal achievement, and supporting tools like Kin, goals should be easier than ever. Still, remember that the process of setting and pursuing goals is as valuable as achieving them—the practice is good for flexibility.

Learning to set up new goals, pursuing, and refine them doesn’t just work towards specific achievements—it cultivates an ever-important mindset of continuous growth and improvement. Even with all the tools and goal-setting strategies of today, take the time to celebrate progress, and keep striving for life goals and the achievement of your desired outcomes, without losing sight of well-being.

1. Locke, E. A.; Shaw, K. N.; Saari, L. M.,; Latham, G. P. 1981. “Goal setting and task performance: 1969–1980”. Psychological Bulletin, 90(1), 125–152. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.90.1.125 [Accessed 10/12/24]

2. Kleingeld, A.; van Mierlo, H.; Arends, L. 2011. “The effect of goal setting on group performance: A meta-analysis”. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96(6), 1289–1304. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1037/a0024315 [Accessed 10/12/24]

3. Dalton, A.N.; Spiller, S.A. 2012. “Too Much of a Good Thing: The Benefits of Implementation Intentions Depend on the Number of Goals.” Journal of Consumer Research, 39(3), pp.600–614. Available at: doi:https://doi.org/10.1086/664500 [Accessed 10/12/24] 

4. Matthews, G. 2015. "Goals Research Summary." scholar.dominican.edu. Available at: https://scholar.dominican.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1265&context=news-releases [Accessed 10/12/24]