SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely. They’re easy to set and easy to track, but many people still fail to meet their goals because they fail to track them.
When you’ve set your SMART Goals, immediately start tracking your progress. It’s been said that what gets measured gets done. A goal on its own is not sufficient; it has to be backed by some form of evaluation.
Evaluation is a clear reminder to assess whether your current actions are contributing towards your overall goal. Tracking your goals plays an important role in optimizing your performance. It not only measures progress, but also monitors habits, provides the platform to adjust behaviors and identifies achievements and failures.
Why you must track performance of your SMART Goals
- Measuring your performance allows you to identify areas of weaknesses and gives you room to rectify and implement changes to strengthen your goals.
- Tracking your progress helps you to concentrate on the important things you need to achieve in order to move toward your goals.
- Evaluation makes goal setting easier by allowing you to break big tasks into small and manageable steps.
- Tracking will identify activities which will give the best results or areas to focus on.
- It improves your ability to estimate the completion of tasks and projects thereby improving your forecasting techniques.
- Quick gratification and self-satisfaction, feeling good about your progress, is a side-effect of seeing yourself achieve it. This motivates you to work harder to reach your targets.
- Evaluating your performance helps you overcome procrastination
The priority here is to focus on quantifiable factors that are clearly linked to the drivers of success in your business and your sector.
To help you get started we have created SMART Goal tracking templates.
