Personal development goals can give you long-term vision and short-term motivation. When you have a personal goal for work, you can see where you’ll end up years down the road and that vision can give you the motivation to work harder towards that goal. We’ll review here how to set personal goals for work in a way that will help you to be motivated to achieve those goals.
Make your goal SMART
The most important aspect in how to set personal goals for work is to set SMART goals. SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
- Specific: A goal that is specific is much easier to achieve than one that is broad. The more specifically you can define your goal, the clearer the path to achieving your goal will be.
- Measurable: You goal should also be measurable. Without a system of measurement, you can’t know when it’s been achieved. For example, the goal “I will become rich” isn’t measurable. In contrast, if your goal was “I will make $1 million,” you’ll know exactly when you’ve achieved it because it’s measurable.
- Attainable: This aspect of goal setting has to do with how easy or hard it will be to achieve your goal. An attainable goal is one that presents a challenge, so it’s not too easy but isn’t so hard that you’ll be likely to give up on it. When goals aren’t attainable, meaning they’re too difficult, you’re more likely to be discouraged and not achieve your goals.
- Relevant: When setting personal goals for work, this element is especially important. A personal goal for work is relevant to you personally but also relevant to your work or to your employer.
- Time-bound: The time-bound element of your goal is what gives you motivation. A goal without a deadline is less likely to be achieved because you’ll have a tendency to say, “I’ll do it tomorrow.” It’s so easy to get a year down the road and realize that you haven’t achieved your goal. Knowing when you must achieve your goal by helps to provide you with motivation.
Goal levels
When creating your personal goals for work, consider creating multiple goals with different levels. The level of your goal may be expressed in the time-bound element of the goal. You might have a few goals: one that must be met next week, one for next month, and one for a year from now.
Having different levels of goals allows you to plan goals out to work towards a larger goal that wouldn’t be attainable at this time. The short-term goals all work towards the achievement of the long-term goal.
Another way to express this tip is to break down long-term goals into bite-size goals. Creating smaller, stepping-stone goals to get to your larger goal follows the recommendation of making your goals attainable. A large, long-term goal might not be attainable right now, but breaking it down into smaller goals does make it attainable.
When creating these smaller, bite-size goals, be sure to use the time-bound element for each goal. Each goal should have its own timeline for achievement, not just the final goal.
Set goals positively
How personal goals for work are expressed or stated is a very important part of motivation and self-care. If your goals are stated in a positive way, you’re more likely to achieve them and feel good about working towards that goal.
For example, instead of setting a personal work goal of “Don’t be stupid or incapable of using Photoshop,” create a positive statement. A much stronger goal is, “Take classes in Photoshop to improve skills and knowledge by the end of the year.”
Which goal do you want to work towards?
Be precise
A good goal is precise. The more detail and precision you can include when designing your goal, the better. Details you might want to include when setting your goal could be dates, time, and amounts. These details add a level of measurability to your goal. When a goal is measurable, you can know when you’ve achieved it.
Prioritize
If you’re creating multiple goals for yourself, make sure to decide the priority of those goals. Know which goals need to be achieved first.
Prioritization of your personal goals for work can help you decide which goal is the most important. Prioritization may happen because some goals need to happen before others can be achieved, but others might just be more important than others.
Handwrite goals
Writing things down by hand is a type of memory creation. By writing down your goals, you’re committing them to memory as important in your mind.
Once your goals are written down, display them in a prominent place in either your home or office. You may want to have your goals written down and displayed both at home and in the office. These handwritten notices of your goals serve as a daily reminder to you on what you’re trying to achieve.
Measure performance, not outcome
When setting personal goals for work, you should set your measurement to be about performance, not outcome. When you set a goal, you want to make sure that you have as much control as possible over your ability to achieve that goal. If your goal is dependent on other people, you will have a harder time achieving the goal while you wait for other people to do their part.
This is especially important to remember when setting personal goals for work. In a work environment, there are factors that employees may not have control over and that will make it harder to achieve goals. Outside forces may force you to step down from your position or not take time off to learn new skills.
Basing your personal goals on performance and not outcome will give you more control over achieving your goals.
Be realistic
Similar to setting attainable goals, you must be realistic when setting your goals. Iff your goal isn’t realistic than it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to achieve it. Unachievable or unrealistic goals are more like to be discouraging than motivating.
It’s easy to fall into the unrealistic goals that are set for employees by bosses and by society. Watch out for these goals and try not to fall into expecting yourself to always meet those unrealistic goals.
When setting personal goals for work, try to think through the possible obstacles you will face and the steps that you will need to achieve to meet that goal. Thinking through the process of achieving your personal goal will help you to set realistic goals.
Accountability partner
One way to make achieving your personal goals for work a little bit easier is to have an accountability partner. An accountability partner is someone who periodically checks in with you to make sure that you’re working towards your goal.
An accountability partner makes it easier to achieve your goal because they remind you what you’re working towards and how to get there. They’re the person who helps to motivate you towards your goals when you feel discouraged.
Ask for feedback
Along with your accountability partner, you can also ask for feedback from other people at your workplace to see if you’re achieving your goals.
After you set your personal goal for work, consider sharing that goal with your manager. As you work towards the goal, you can ask your manager for feedback to see if you’re progressing as you should.
Sometimes an outsider has a clearer perspective of the work that you’re doing towards your goal. As we work towards a goal, the changes are incremental and harder to see on our own. That’s where a manager can come in to help give you feedback.
No matter what personal goals you set for yourself at work, we hope that these tips will help you to be able to more easily achieve those goals.
