As a resident assistant, I learned about SMART goals to help teach my residents how to set themselves up for success during their college careers. In order to help achieve your goals, you can make them SMART, or specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.

I’ll briefly explain what each of the following are and how they relate to setting and achieving your goals, and provide an example goal to show how it can be implemented.

Specific | SMART Goals

Your goals should be specific and clearly define what you want to achieve. Being specific about your goals will help keep them within reach, and provide a better opportunity to attain them.

Instead of saying I want to be healthy, which is a broad statement, think of specific ways to achieve your goal of being healthier.

You could start by creating more specific goals such as eating healthier food and exercising. However, eating healthy and exercising are also broad goals, so you would want to make those goals more specific. Some good ways to get thinking of specific goals is to ask yourself:

• What are you trying to achieve?
• How are you going to do it?
• Why are you doing it?

For example, a specific goal for being healthier by eating better and exercising could be: Lose five pounds in one month by limiting fast food to one meal per week and jogging for 30-minutes three days a week.

What are you trying to achieve? Lose five pounds in a month.

How are you going to do it? Only eat fast food one meal per week and jog for 30-minutes three days a week.

Why are you doing it? To be healthier.

Measurable | SMART Goals

Your goals should be measurable so that you can determine exactly what the result will be when you reach your goal. While the specific goal should be measurable, there will often be smaller measurements built into that goal.

A good way to think about this is by asking yourself: How will you know when your goal is accomplished?

For example, being healthier—as well as eating healthier and exercising—is not a measurable goal. However losing five pounds in a month is. By making your goals measurable, you can effectively see whether you have achieved your goals through a quantifiable result.

In practice, instead of making undeterminable goals, such as eating less junk food or exercising, you would say that you’ll limit your fast food consumption to one meal per week and jog for 30-minutes three days a week. These are measurable goals with a measurable result: lose five pounds in a month.

Attainable | SMART Goals

Are your goals realistic and achievable? One of the ways to think about this by asking: How can you accomplish this goal? This is an important assessment to make when setting attainable goals.

For example, if you are setting specific goals such as limiting fast food to one meal per week, you may want to ask questions such as: Do I have time to prepare other meals each week in order to limit my fast food consumption? Does my budget allow me to purchase other options to replace the fast food meals?

If you are evaluating your options for exercising, you’ll want to see if your goal is realistic. For example, if you haven’t exercised in a long while, then can you realistically set a goal of exercising five days a week? Do you have access to a gym? If not, you probably won’t want to make an exercise goal that requires using a gym facility.

Relevant | SMART Goals

Make sure that your goals are relevant to you, and something that you truly want to achieve. Questions to consider: Why do you want to reach this goal? Do you really want to pursue this goal right now?

Relevant goals are ones that you are personally inspired to achieve, and that you are willing to put in the time and effort to see them through.

For example, do you really want to be healthier by changing your diet and exercising? If so, do you really want to limit your fast food to one meal per week, and are you really committed to jogging for 30-minutes three days a week? If not, you will want to look at ways to come up with other specific goals that you are personally willing to see through.

Timely | SMART Goals

Your goals should be time-bound so that you can stay focused and have deadlines in place to achieve them. Without having a timeline in place, it will be difficult to measure results and evaluate success.

For example, question how long the goal will be relevant. Is it for a season, or a few day or weeks or even months? If the goal is something that you would like to become part of your daily routine, then you should aspire to do it for three months in order to turn your goal into a habit.

Additional Examples of SMART Goals

This year I want to be healthier by eating 2-3 servings of fruits and vegetables five days a week, and by going to the gym for at least an hour two days a week.

For my winter break, which is six weeks long, I want to finish five books by reading 50 pages a day.

By the end of summer, I want to go on a week-long vacation in Florida with four of my friends. I will find out travel and lodging costs by March 1^st, I will invite people by March 15^th, and I will have the vacation scheduled by May 1^st.

SMART goals are a great approach for setting and accomplishing individual goals, whatever they may be. By using this method, and creating goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely, you will increase your overall chance for success.