As an English Literature graduate I love a good acronym, and as a Millennial I spend a lot of my time ‘lol’ing (laughing out loud) and ‘smh’ing (shaking my head). The myriad of terms shortened so they don’t take so long to type (because let’s be honest here, that’s why we do it) is endless.

Lots of acronyms become interchangeable with the actual phrase they represent (most of us have heard our friends say ‘lol’ out loud…) and SMART is one of these words. I’d never heard of a SMART objective before I entered the business world – I thought it just meant you were writing objectives… smartly. In essence, that’s exactly what you’re doing. The letters just mean a bit more.

Research suggests that having goals makes a person more successful (sign me up) but Millennials are usually stereotyped as being bad at long term aims (I hate stereotypes) for several reasons, which I’m going to break down for you right now:

• We’re impatient and want instant gratification
• We’re lazy, and not prepared to do what needs to be done to in order to achieve a goal
• We’re job hoppers, and never stay in one place long enough to achieve goals before we’re onto the next one

According to this 2012 article by Forbes, 91% of Millennials expect to stay in a job for no longer than 3 years. A need for instant gratification has been created by our exposure to the internet, and this probably also links to the perception of us being lazy. 

I think these stereotypes are rubbish, but let’s humour them for a second and consider how we can create good objectives despite all of these things. I’m not going to attempt to change the behaviour of the Millennial – I’m going to give them a solution that can be used even if they are lazy, impatient job hoppers.

This is where SMART objectives come in. SMART stands for Specific (and Stretching), Measurable, Achievable (and Agreed), Relevant, and Timebound. You can use SMART objectives for any kind of goal, whether it’s just a short one like “I really need to finish my list of tasks before the bank holiday weekend” to help keep you focused when you’re daydreaming about being in a beer garden for 3 days straight, or a long term goal, like “I want to move out of my parents’ house before I turn thirty and give up the will to live.” So how do you do it?

Firstly you need to make them specific. If you know that your overall goal is to leave work on Friday afternoon knowing you’ve completed your actions list, there’s little point concentrating on tasks that aren’t due for weeks. Rather than deciding you will “do all the things on your list,” (which means you can do that fun thing you’d really like to spend an afternoon on but will actually slow you down from getting the important stuff done) say you will “decide what tasks are important to finish this week and what can wait.” After you’ve done this you can remove distractions – i.e anything that didn’t make the Do By Friday list – and just focus on what you need to do. Bam. Look at you, you organised thing!

It’s simple to make your objective measurable in this case; you’ve already done the hard work and decided what needs to be on your list and what doesn’t. In doing this you’ve also been specific and decided what’s relevant to completing this particular goal. Your list is also your measure of how well you’ve achieved – as long as you’ve crossed everything off by 5pm Friday, you’ve completed your goal! You deserve an extra drink for that.

However you have to make sure that list is something you can achieve, otherwise you just won’t be able to finish it. S stands for both specific and stretching, because your goals should stretch you, but not so much you’re destined for failure! This also links to the final letter in SMART, time; how much time do you have? How much time will each task take?

Not completing a short term objective can be demoralising, and leave you playing catch up come Tuesday morning when you feel like you’ve blinked and the weekend is just a fond memory. But if you can plan your objectives wisely – SMARTly – you’ll be ready to take on the week