In November 1981, an Idaho-based management consultant named George Doran published a two-page article in Management Review arguing that most managers still did not know how to write an objective. His fix was a five-letter acronym, offered without a single reference to research.¹ SMART goals then spread far beyond management, into health services and exercise programs that recommend or even require them.²

A SMART goal is written so that anyone can tell what it asks for, who does it and by when. Doran’s five letters, turned into steps you can use today:

1. Specific: name the one area you want to improve
2. Measurable: choose the number or sign that shows progress
3. Assignable: say who will do it
4. Realistic: aim high within the resources you have
5. Time-related: set the date and the checkpoints

Run “improve the monthly report” through those five and it comes out as “cut the monthly report from 12 pages to 4 by the June edition; Priya drafts, I sign off.”

SMART deals only with how a goal is worded. For the wider evidence on which goal habits help, read the research-based guide to setting goals.

Where SMART goals came from, and what the letters first meant

SMART goals began as a checklist for managers, not a finding from psychology. Doran, a consultant who had once run corporate planning at Washington Water Power Company, offered the acronym as a guide to writing objectives: specific, measurable, assignable, realistic and time-related.¹

His own example, which opens the examples table below, gives a new inventory system a year-end deadline, a cost saving to hit and a cap on staff hours and spending.¹ Nothing in it says whether the saving is ambitious for that company, because none of the five letters asks.

Doran did not treat the five letters as compulsory either. He warned that quantifying every objective could cost a manager the benefit of a more abstract one, and that some staff roles did not suit numbers at all.¹

It should also be understood that the suggested acronym doesn’t mean that every objective written will have all five criteria.

Over four decades the letters drifted. A 2023 review by Christian Swann, a researcher at Southern Cross University, and his co-authors found 34 different words standing in for SMART’s five letters across 147 physical activity studies and programs, and only three studies that tested SMART goals against another kind of goal. The A, which Doran used for “assignable”, most often became “achievable” or “attainable”.²

Myth

SMART goals were distilled from decades of goal-setting research.

Fact

Doran's 1981 article cited no theory or evidence, and SMART asks for achievable or realistic goals where goal-setting theory asks for challenging ones, the 2023 Swann review points out.

The drift means two people can both write “SMART goals” and mean different things. So when a manager or a template asks for one, ask which five words they mean first.

How to write a SMART goal, letter by letter

Writing a SMART goal means running a rough intention through five questions: what exactly, how you will know, who, how high and by when. Below, each letter gets Doran’s meaning, what later research adds and a way to use it.

• S1981, Specific: target a specific area for improvement. Today: specific.
• M1981, Measurable: quantify, or at least suggest an indicator of progress. Today: measurable.
• A1981, Assignable: specify who will do it. Today: usually achievable or attainable.
• R1981, Realistic: what can realistically be achieved, given available resources. Today: most often realistic, sometimes relevant.
• T1981, Time-related: specify when the result can be achieved. Today: time-bound, timely and many other time words.

1. Specific: name the one area you want to improve

Doran asked only that an objective target a specific area for improvement.¹ In a 2002 review, goal-setting theory’s founders, the psychologists Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, point out that specific goals vary in difficulty, so a specific goal does not by itself lead to high performance; where results are fully in your control, specificity does make them less variable.³

“Speed up invoicing” gives you nothing to aim at; “send every invoice within two days of delivery” does. But “within 29 days instead of 30” is just as specific and asks almost nothing. The lesson: make the goal specific so you can see it, then check separately that it is hard enough to matter.

2. Measurable: choose the number or sign that shows progress

Doran’s wording was to quantify, or at least suggest, an indicator of progress; a sign you can observe counts as well as a number.¹ The point of measuring is feedback. Locke and Latham report that goals combined with feedback on progress work better than goals alone, because people cannot tell whether to push harder or change tactics without it.³

A goal to “get noticed more at work” becomes measurable once you pick a sign, such as speaking at one team meeting a month. Choose a measure you can check weekly without much effort; a measure you only see at the deadline tells you too late.

3. Assignable: say who will do it

Doran’s A meant “specify who will do it”, and it is the meaning most often lost. Only a handful of the studies in the 2023 Swann review used “assignable”.²

Doran was writing for company, department and section objectives, where a goal with no named owner easily belongs to nobody.¹ For a shared goal, put a name next to each part: “Sam runs screening, I run final interviews.” For a personal goal, the owner is you, and the letter matters less.

4. Realistic: aim high within the resources you have

Doran defined realistic as stating what results can realistically be achieved, given available resources.¹ Goal-setting research pushes harder than that word suggests. Locke and Latham’s 2002 review reports that the most difficult goals produced the highest effort and performance, and that results levelled off or fell only when people reached the limits of their ability or stopped committing to a very hard goal.³

In one field study they describe, unionized truck drivers who were assigned a specific, hard goal went from loading 60 percent to 90 percent of the legal weight limit for logs.³ Read the R as “possible with the time, money and skill you have”, then set the goal near the top of that range rather than in the comfortable middle.

5. Time-related: set the date and the checkpoints

Doran asked objectives to specify when the result can be achieved.¹ A deadline alone leaves out how often you check in. The Swann review reports that in a 2016 meta-analysismeta-analysis: A study that combines the results of earlier studies on the same question into one overall estimate. Pooling makes the estimate more precise, but it cannot repair the studies it pools: a meta-analysis of surveys is still survey evidence.Full entry in the glossary of physical activity goals, studies that set daily goals were linked to more activity, while goals set only by the week showed no clear effect.²

The finding comes from exercise studies, so read it as a prompt rather than a rule. For a goal three months away, add a weekly checkpoint: “two timed practice papers a week from March” alongside “pass by 15 May”.

WiserHours

Before you call a goal SMART

• One area named, in words someone else would understand
• A number or visible sign you can check each week
• A named owner for each part of a shared goal
• A level near the top of what your time, money and skill allow
• A deadline, plus a checkpoint between now and then
• A check that the task is familiar enough for a performance target

Find this checklist online:
https://wiserhours.com/goals/smart-goals/#checklist-smart-goals-check

20 SMART goal examples, from vague to specific

The first example is Doran’s own from 1981; the other 19 are illustrations written for this article, not tested goals, and their numbers are placeholders to swap for your own.

The SMART versions add a place to look, a count, a name where others are involved and a date. What they cannot tell you is how hard the goal is. Whether “5 applications a week” is ambitious or timid depends on you. So compare each number with what you managed last time, and raise it if it only matches what you would do anyway.

Do SMART goals work? The direct tests are few and mixed

SMART goals have rarely been tested as a package, and the few experiments that have tried point in different directions.² The most positive result among the tests reviewed here comes from a small, one-week experiment with students at an Australian university.⁴

The study

Limited evidence

SMART worksheet or a plain written goal? One week with Australian undergraduates (2022)

Every student chose one personal goal for the coming week. Groups assigned to the SMART condition worked through a worksheet to make that goal specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely; control groups wrote the goal down with no further instructions. A week later the SMART groups rated about 73% of their goal as attained, against about 64% in the control groups, and reported more need satisfaction and positive affect, though not higher overall well-being.⁴

The study shows that a structured worksheet beat writing a goal down with no guidance, for one week, on the students’ own ratings. It cannot show that SMART beats a hard goal set some other way, because the comparison group got no goal-setting help at all.⁴

Other tests are less flattering. A pre-registeredpreregistration: Filing a study's hypotheses and analysis plan publicly before the data are collected or examined. It stops a planned test from being rewritten once the results are in, so a reader can tell a real confirmation from a hunt through the data.Full entry in the glossary 2024 experiment with 247 participants found no meaningful difference in creative performance between SMART goals, do-your-best goals and open goals.⁵ In walking studies summarized by the 2026 ESSA expert statement, written by researchers who ran several of those studies, people who were not very active walked further with an open goal than with a SMART target, while people who were already active walked further with the SMART one.⁶

One reading of these results is that SMART helps most when the alternative is a loose intention with no structure. Against other deliberate ways of setting goals, the evidence so far shows no clear edge. In practice, if your goals tend to stay vague, SMART is a cheap fix; if they are already specific and dated, put the extra effort into how hard the goal is and how often you check progress.

1. 1981Doran proposes SMART for writing managers’ objectives
2. 2002Locke and Latham sum up 35 years of research favoring specific, difficult goals
3. 2022A one-week experiment tests a SMART worksheet with students
4. 2023The Swann review finds SMART rests on no theory and is applied inconsistently
5. 2024A creative-task experiment finds no edge for SMART goals
6. 2026An Australian expert statement gives exercise practitioners goal-setting advice beyond SMART

When a SMART goal is the wrong tool

A SMART performance target fits best when you already know how to do the task and have the time and resources for it. The 2026 expert statement from Exercise and Sports Science Australia advises checking that a person has the knowledge and skill for a specific performance goal first, and suggests another type of goal, such as a learning goal, otherwise.⁶

The reason, in Locke and Latham’s account, is pressure. On a new, complex task, a hard numeric target can leave people so keen to hit the number that they try methods at random and never learn which one works. They give an air traffic control simulation as an example: there, a performance goal got in the way of learning the task.³

Take someone moving into their first management role. “Cut my team’s overdue tickets to zero by March” assumes they already know how to run the queue. “Try three ways of triaging tickets by March and keep the one that clears the most” is still specific and dated, but it rewards finding the method first. The short version: switch to a numeric target once the method is familiar.

SMART goals can also add pressure. The Swann review reports that in one of the group’s own walking experiments, individualized SMART goals came with more reported pressure and tension than open goals, and warns that inappropriately set goals carry risks such as stress and perceptions of failure.² The ESSA statement treats open goals such as “see how many steps you can reach today” as a reasonable option, depending on a person’s situation and preferences.⁶ If a target starts to feel like a verdict on you rather than a guide, loosen it for a while.

The bottom line

SMART is a useful editing checklist for a goal, not a theory of what makes goals work. Use its letters to make a goal clear, owned and dated, then ask the question it leaves out: is this hard enough to matter, and do I know how to do it yet? If the answer to the second part is no, set a goal to learn first.