SMART goals are not so smart: make a PACT instead

PACT stands for Purposeful, Actionable, Continuous, and Trackable—the four factors that make for great goals:

• Purposeful. Your goal should be meaningful to your long-term purpose in life, not just relevant to you right now.
• Actionable. A good goal is based on outputs you can control.
• Continuous. It’s important that the actions you take towards your goal are simple and repeatable.
• Trackable. Not measurable. Stats can be overrated and don’t apply to lots of different types of goals.

Your goal should be meaningful to your long-term purpose in life, not just relevant to you right now. It will be much harder to stick to your goal if you don’t actually care. When a goal is aligned with your passions and your objectives in life, you are feeling much more motivated. (many tasks don’t feel purposeful but need to be done in order to achieve a meaningful long-term goal, and that’s fine—they are tasks, not goals)

A good goal is based on outputs you can control. Your goal should be actionable and controllable. It’s all about shifting your mindset from distant outcomes in the future to present outputs you can control and that are within your reach, taking action today rather than overplanning for tomorrow.

It’s important that the actions you take towards your goal are simple and repeatable. So many goals are not achieved because of what’s called choice paralysis. That’s when there are so many options that you end up spending more time doing research than actually doing stuff that will make you progress towards your goal. The good thing about continuous goals is their flexibility. What you need to do is get started, and as you learn more, you can adapt your approach.

Not measurable. Stats can be overrated and don’t apply to lots of different types of goals. I’m a big fan of the “yes” or “no” approach to goal tracking, similar to the GitHub tracker. Have you done the thing or not? Have you coded today? Have you called three potential customers? Have you published your weekly blog post? Yes or no? This makes your progress very easy to track.