SMART Goals for 2009 | The Student Finance Blog

Set yourself SMART Goals for 2009

Tue, Dec 30, 2008

In the last post I highlighted what I had planned for The Student Finance Blog for the coming year, some are short-term and some are medium to long term plans. I believe that all of these goals are highly achievable and some have already been put into motion before the end of 2008. This is a very important thing to note about setting goals, there’s no point saying ‘I want more money’ or ‘I want to loose weight’. A SMARTer goal would be ‘by the end of March I want to earn a higher salary by applying for a promotion’ or ‘I want to loose a stone by the end of February through eating healthily and excersicing’.

This is why we apply the SMART rule whilst setting goals, SMART stands for:

Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Realistic
Timely

Most people set goals as a New Years Resolution, but I would say around 75% either give-up in early January, this is why it’s important for student to keep focused in the new year and setting goals in order to achieve the highest grades possible in the coming exams and assessments. Setting out a detailed plan for a SMART goal can help you stick to your aspirations, you can even have it printed out and stuck on your wall if it helps, lets quickly specify each step of setting yourself a SMART plan

Specific - As I mentioned earlier, a general goal is much more likely to fail, so make your goals specific to you, detailing aspects such as who, where, when, why etc

Measurable - Make sure you can measure the progress of your goal and identify a time-period, it doesn’t matter if it’s days, month a even a whole year, this makes it much easier to keep track of how well (or badly) you are doing.

Attainable - This is an important aspect and in some way ties with measurable, as time goes on in your time-scale plan, you start to believe and develop the mental positiveness that you goal will be attained.

Realistic - When setting a goal, it should be something which you can realistically complete, there is no point setting a challenge that is not possible in terms of your willingness and ability.

Timely - Goals with a set time-frame are important for the psychological aspect of the challenge, for example, ‘by the end of March I want to loose two stone’, if you don’t set yourself a time-frame for your goal, it’s more likely you will keep putting it off.

I hope this post will help you all set SMART goals and new years resolutions and hopefully give you a helping hand in achieving your aspirations for 2009. Please leave any comments if you have anything to add to this post.

Share and Enjoy: