How can you reach a destination if you don’t first know what it is? Goal-setting not only involves deciding what you want but also planning how you should get there. It’s a common theme, even if many people disagree about which aspects are most important.
Goal-setting has also been studied by psychological research and generally found to be helpful. However, it also seems clear that just having the idea of what you want to achieve usually isn’t enough (although it may be a necessary start). Thus, goal-setting on its own needs to be paired with plans, systems or habits if it is going to be successful.
A good heuristic for goal-setting is that they should be SMART (specific, measureable, attainable, relevant and time-bound). Implementation intentions formulated as IF… THEN… plans tend to work better than just focusing on an outcome on its own. Planning fallacies also need to be watched for as many goal-setting efforts can be overly optimistic.
Some view the disadvantages of explicit goal-setting to outweigh the benefits. These people either argue for being entirely process-oriented and ignoring outcomes or simply negate the value of achievement itself in favor of different values.
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