If you already know SMART goals, the two extra letters are probably what brought you here.
In the version of SMARTER goal setting I use, SMARTER means Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound, Evaluate, and Readjust. The first five letters help you clarify the goal. The last two remind you that setting a goal is not the end of the work.
You still have to act. Once you do, reality starts giving you information that was not available when you made the plan.
That is why I do not present SMARTER as a better version of SMART. I find it useful because it offers a different way to work with goals: set the goal, make your moves, follow the proof, and adjust the plan when you learn something important.
A Plan Is Written Before the Work Teaches You Anything
In 2025, I wrote a strategic game plan for my business. It was not a collection of vague ambitions. I had numbers attached to it: public seminars throughout the year, weekly webinars, attendance targets, conversion targets, and specific activities designed to create demand for our consulting work.
I meant it when I wrote it. I had considered where I wanted the business to go and what we could do to get there.
Then I started doing the work.
Over time, I began seeing things that were not visible when the original plan was written. I developed new products. I changed how I designed learning experiences. Workshops became connected to cohorts, scenarios, plays, tools, proof, and larger product systems. Some opportunities became more interesting. Other ideas became less important.
The work was teaching me.
That did not make the original plan foolish. It made the original plan what every plan really is: a set of choices made with what you know at the time.
This is the part of goal setting we sometimes forget. We spend so much energy creating the plan that changing it later can feel like admitting we were wrong. But the plan was written before customers responded, before the first experiment ran, before problems appeared, and before new possibilities became visible.
A useful plan should be strong enough to guide your next move—and open enough to learn.
Before You Make the Goal SMARTER, Choose What Matters
A goal-setting framework cannot tell you which goal deserves your life.
You can make almost anything specific and measurable. You can put a deadline on something that does not matter. You can create a beautiful dashboard for a target that should never have become a priority.
So before working through the letters, start with a more important question:
What are you actually trying to make happen, and why does it matter now?
This is why SMARTER goal setting belongs naturally inside the larger work of Choose What Matters. Goal setting begins after a choice has been made. The framework can help you clarify that choice, but it cannot make the choice for you.
And this matters because we often have more goals than we can seriously pursue. Health, income, family, business growth, writing, learning, travel, promotion, savings, a new project—each can be worthwhile. But worthwhile does not mean equally important today.
That is why I keep returning to another principle: not every goal is equal.
Choose first.
Then make the goal useful.
S — Specific: Narrow the Field
“Grow the business” sounds like a goal, but it leaves almost every important decision unanswered. Do you want more customers? Higher prices? More repeat business? A new market? More profitable products?
Making the goal specific removes some of those possibilities so you can see where to move.
Suppose you change it to:
Increase inquiries from manufacturing companies in Laguna.
We still need more information, but the field has narrowed. You have identified a customer group and a kind of movement you want to create. That immediately changes the questions you can ask and the moves you might make.
Specific does not mean writing more words.
Specific means removing enough ambiguity that a useful decision becomes possible.
M — Measurable: Look for Movement, Not Merely Activity
This is where goal setting can become deceptive.
Almost everything can be counted. You can count calls, meetings, posts, proposals, workshops, pages written, kilometers walked, hours worked, or tasks completed. Those numbers may be useful, but they usually tell you what you did—not necessarily what changed.
I know this trap well.
For years, I could fill my days with teaching, preparing, coaching, answering questions, checking work, travelling, and solving one problem after another. I could go home exhausted and have plenty of evidence that I had worked.
The harder question was whether the work had moved what mattered.
That is the distinction behind Stop Measuring Effort. Look for Movement. A measurable goal should help you see whether the desired result is becoming more real, not merely prove that you stayed busy.
If you published twenty articles, that is activity. Did the right readers find them? Did anyone use them? Did they create conversations or opportunities?
If your team made one hundred sales calls, you have a count. Did those calls create qualified conversations?
Ask:
What would become visibly different if this goal were moving?
Measure as close to that change as you reasonably can.
A — Achievable: Make a Credible Bet
Achievable is sometimes mistaken for comfortable.
I don’t think that is useful.
A goal can demand something you have never done before and still be achievable. You may need to learn, collaborate, build a capability, find resources, or make a move that makes you uncomfortable. The question is not whether success is guaranteed. You rarely have that kind of certainty.
A more useful question is:
Do we have a credible way to influence this result?
Perhaps you want to double the number of qualified inquiries in six months. You may not know whether you can do it, but you know your audience, have an offer people already buy, have ways to reach more potential customers, and can run experiments along the way.
That is a bet you can work with.
If the target feels too large to test, make the first move smaller. You do not always need more confidence before you begin. Sometimes the move itself creates the information you need.
That is one reason Move First matters even when you have a plan.
R — Relevant: Does This Goal Still Deserve Your Attention?
Relevant may be the most important letter in the first five.
You only have so much attention, money, energy, and time. Every serious commitment takes resources away from something else. Yet we often keep goals because we wrote them down months ago, announced them in a planning meeting, or invested enough effort that abandoning them feels wasteful.
Relevance asks you to return to what matters.
Why does this goal deserve attention now? What will achieving it make possible? Who benefits? What promise does it support? What larger result does it help create?
There is another question worth asking:
What are you choosing not to pursue because you chose this?
That question exposes whether the goal is really a priority.
One of the most useful decisions I have made in my own life was learning that choosing a win also means accepting a trade-off. I explore that more deeply in Choose Your Win. Sometimes a goal becomes clearer not when you add more reasons to pursue it, but when you become willing to release competing goals.
Relevance is not a box you tick once.
Life changes. Business changes. Responsibilities change.
A goal that mattered in January may deserve another look in August.
T — Time-Bound: Give the Goal a Moment of Truth
A goal without a date can remain important forever without ever becoming urgent.
Putting a result in time forces you to bring the future closer. If something needs to happen by December, what must be true by September? What has to happen this month? What move belongs to this week?
Eventually the question becomes:
What needs to happen today?
This is where a distant goal begins entering ordinary life. Make What Matters Urgent does not mean treating everything as an emergency. It means giving important work enough presence in today’s choices that urgency does not always belong to somebody else’s requests.
A deadline helps.
But a deadline is based on what you know when you set it. The project may prove harder than expected. Conditions may change. A new constraint can appear. You may even discover that you can finish earlier.
So respect the date.
Do not worship it.
That brings us to the two letters that make SMARTER especially useful to me.
E — Evaluate While You Can Still Do Something About It
Many goals are evaluated when it is already too late to influence them.
The deadline arrives. Someone opens the spreadsheet. The target was hit or missed. Then everyone explains what happened.
That is useful for learning, but it is not very useful for this goal anymore.
Evaluation becomes much more powerful when it happens while there is still time to change the game.
Suppose your goal is to increase sales of a service by 15 percent before December 31. Do not make December 31 your first serious review. Put an evaluation point somewhere along the journey—perhaps September 30—and decide beforehand what evidence you will examine.
Then look.
Which customers responded? Where did the inquiries come from? Which conversations became proposals? Which proposals became agreements? Which activities consumed time without creating movement?
And resist the temptation to defend the plan.
Ask instead:
What is actually happening?
This is where following the first proof of movement becomes important. A move gives you information. Something happens, or it does not. The result may be encouraging, disappointing, or ambiguous, but it is still evidence you did not have before you acted.
Good evaluation lets reality interrupt your assumptions.
R — Readjust: Protect What Matters, Not the Original Plan
Imagine that you hold the September review.
The numbers are presented. Everybody agrees that one activity is producing little. People discuss possible reasons. Someone takes notes.
Then Monday comes, and everybody continues doing exactly what they were doing.
That was not really evaluation.
It was reporting.
Readjustment asks the question that gives evaluation consequences:
What will we do differently because of what we learned?
You may continue the goal and change the move. You might narrow the audience, rewrite the offer, change the channel, involve another person, shorten the cycle, remove a step, or test something completely different.
This is where SMARTER goal setting connects naturally with Change Your Game. When the familiar move keeps producing the familiar result, working harder at the same move is only one option. Sometimes the evidence is inviting you to play differently.
But readjustment does not require dramatic reinvention every time something disappoints you. Often the wiser response is to run a small experiment before you reinvent everything.
Change one move.
Watch what happens.
Then decide again.
The important distinction is this:
The goal may survive. The plan does not have to.
Be committed to what matters.
Be willing to negotiate with the plan.
A SMARTER Goal in Practice
Suppose your starting goal is:
Increase sales.
It gives you a direction, but not enough clarity to guide much action. So you work through the first five letters and arrive at something like this:
Increase Product A sales by 10 percent before November 30.
Now you check whether the target is credible given your current customers and capacity. You make sure Product A actually deserves the extra attention because it serves the right customers or advances an important business priority.
Most SMART goal-setting exercises would stop somewhere around here.
SMARTER asks you to keep going.
Before executing the plan, put an evaluation date on the calendar. For example, on September 30 you will review Product A sales, qualified inquiries, conversion, customer response, and the activities being used to generate those results.
Then make the moves.
When September arrives, you have a different kind of conversation. Instead of asking only whether everyone completed the activities, you ask what those activities produced. One channel may be working. Another may be generating many inquiries but few qualified buyers. A third may have created an unexpected opportunity.
Now you know something you did not know when you wrote the goal.
Use it.
SMARTER Objectives: Do Not Mistake the Move for the Result
Consider this objective:
Make five sales calls every day.
It is specific. It is measurable. It can have a deadline.
But it describes an activity.
Why are the calls being made?
Perhaps the desired result is:
Generate thirty qualified sales conversations by September 30.
Now five calls per day becomes one possible move. If the calls are creating the conversations you want, you have evidence worth following. If twenty calls create nothing, blindly increasing the target to forty calls may not be the smartest response.
The distinction matters:
The objective tells you what you want to move. The activity is one attempt to move it.
This is also why planning should come after choice. In Strategy First, Plan Second, I make a similar distinction in business: strategy decides the game; the plan organizes the work. A plan becomes dangerous when we become more committed to completing the listed activities than to the result those activities were meant to create.
SMARTER gives you a way to notice when that is happening.
SMARTER Planning Begins Where Goal Setting Ends
Once the goal is clear, you still have another problem.
What will you actually do?
That is the territory of SMARTER planning.
I think of the difference this way. The goal tells you what you are trying to make happen. The plan tells you what you intend to try. The work tells you what actually happened.
Then planning must become intelligent enough to respond.
A familiar planning sequence looks like:
Goal → Plan → Execute → Deadline
SMARTER planning creates another rhythm:
Goal → Move → Proof → Evaluate → Readjust → Next Move
The second rhythm does not reject planning. It asks the plan to learn.
That deserves a deeper treatment of its own, which is why I am developing SMARTER Planning as the next step from this page. The question there is no longer simply how to write a useful goal. It is how to turn the goal into moves you can make today, proof you can follow, and adjustments you can make without losing sight of what matters.
Because plans live in the future.
Execution happens today.
Use the SMARTER Review
You do not need another complicated template to begin.
At the review date, bring the goal back into view and ask four questions: What were we trying to make happen? What actually happened? What did we learn? What will we do next?
Spend time on the second question. Look at evidence rather than explanations. Then make the third question useful by identifying which assumptions held and which did not.
The fourth question is where the review earns its place on the calendar.
Continue something.
Change something.
Stop something.
Try something.
Then make the next move.
The meeting is not the win. A completed dashboard is not the win. Even learning is not yet the win if nothing changes because of what you learned.
The proof of a good review appears in what happens next.
Bring the Goal Back to Today
Your goal may be due six months from now. Your business plan may stretch across several years. Your personal ambition may take a decade.
None of them can act today.
You can.
So after all the thinking, measuring, evaluating, and planning, bring the goal back to one practical question:
What can I make happen today that will give me useful proof?
Talk with the customer.
Test the offer.
Open the file.
Send the draft.
Make the call.
Finish one useful version.
Ask the question you have been avoiding.
That move does not have to achieve the entire goal. It has to move something that matters and teach you enough to choose intelligently again.
That is the larger practice behind Make What Matters Happen Every Day. Important things rarely happen because we wrote better intentions. They happen when meaning enters ordinary decisions, actions create evidence, and evidence shapes the next move.
Set the goal.
Follow the proof.
Adjust the plan.
Then make what matters happen today.
If you’re building a business and you are playing to win…
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