Back when I had a regular job, one time we had to write goal documents and they made us come up with ‘S.M.A.R.T.’ goals. Which turns out not to be just some silly thing the company had made up to annoy us and waste our time. Well, it did annoy us and waste our time, but it has some usefulness too. So, I thought I would try the ‘S.M.A.R.T.’ goals approach to what I’m doing here.

Each of the letters in ‘S.M.A.R.T.’ stands for something but it seems to vary a bit. According to Wikipedia:

“A SMART objective is one that is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.”

Where I worked I believe we used ‘trackable’ for ‘T’, I don’t remember what else was different.

Anyway, I’ll give it a try. The goal I’ll use it for is creating a small blog network. In the bigger picture though - what I want is a successful web site, one that could be sold for a decent amount of money and to get there I see building a community around the site as a good first step. And an blog network is a good way to start the community building. That’s kind of goals within goals within goals I believe. Nevertheless for this exercise I will stick with the creating a small blog network as the goal.

Specific - “Is there a description of a precise or specific behavior / outcome which is linked to a rate, number, percentage or frequency?”

Yes.

Oh. I guess I’m supposed to actually say what the specific objective is. Ok - I’d like to add 8-10 blogs to this site. I already have a good idea of what the topics will be about, although I realize that could change. I could go into more detail, but I think it best to wait until I’ve gone through the blog posts I mentioned a few posts ago in more detail (A Strategy for Building Niche Focused Blog Networks, How to Launch a Blog Network and 46 Things To Do Before Launching a Blog Network).

Measurable - “Is there a reliable system in place to measure progress towards the achievement of the objective?”

Not really much to measure here - I count the number of blogs added.

Achievable - “With a reasonable amount of effort and application can the objective be achieved?”

Yes, but can it be achieved by me is another matter. Am I capable of it? I don’t know that anyone can answer that. I think all I can do is try my best and see. I don’t know how they define ‘reasonable’ either. But I’ll stick with ‘yes’.

Relevant - “Can the people with whom the objective is set make an impact on the situation? Do they have the necessary knowledge, authority and skill?”

Yes, it is relevant to me and I can make an impact on the situation. But do I have the knowledge and skill? I don’t have all the knowledge and skills, I expect to have to learn a lot along the way. But hopefully it is something I am capable of doing.

Trackable - “Is there a finish and/or a start date clearly stated or defined?”

Well, its starting now, that’s easy. A clearly defined finish date? How do I come up with that? Maybe asking other people how long it took them. But everyone’s situation and skills are different so I don’t know if that would be very helpful anyway. How about I say 1 year?

Ok, so this ‘S.M.A.R.T.’ goals thing may not have been very useful. I don’t know that I got any more out of it than what I already knew. Maybe I’ll come back to it later once I’ve fleshed out some more details from the blog network posts I mentioned above.