I have kids about to enter college. One knows what he wants to do with his life, at least professionally, and one does not. When you don’t know what you want to major in, it is significantly more difficult to choose the right college, which can be disconcerting for the applicant. Everybody’s asking you, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Choosing is difficult when you’re interested in everything. Our world today is unkind to the renaissance man.

In our information and task flooded world, we’ve all become a little scatterbrained. Most job postings today say something about being capable of multitasking, and this can make it hard to choose goals and objectives. But if you want that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, you have to know which way to walk to go find it.

So if you are one of the lucky ones that does have an understanding of the end goal, how do you translate that into a set of objectives that will get you there?

Goals are different from objectives. An example of a goal is “I want to be the best programmer I can be” or “I want my company to enable customers to understand costs in a way that improves their profitability.” Objectives are more specific, such as “We will increase revenue by 20% in 2008.”

Objectives are SMART – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-based.

1. Specific – “We will increase revenue” is an objective preferable to “We will increase sales.” Sales might mean revenue to the CEO, bookings to the sales team, billings to the accounting department and cash to the treasurer. Pick one. Be specific.

2. Measurable – “A whole bunch” is not measurable, but “20%” is.

3. Achievable – Setting the bar too high is also a common problem. If everyone knows they’ll fail, why bother? The autocrat who hands down crazy objectives is just kidding himself. The Soviet Union’s five year productivity improvement plans were top-down in this manner and they never hit their targets.

4. Relevant – The accounting department cannot increase brand awareness; that’s a goal for the marketing department. Make sure the objective is something the people can accomplish from where they sit.

5. Time-based – An objective has to have an end-date. Increasing revenue in a time period makes sense, while increasing it
“someday” is not very helpful.

- Curt Finch, Journyx CEO