Turning wishes into goals you measure and adjust, from personal resolutions to organization-wide systems.
Goal setting turns a vague wish into a result someone else can judge, then checks progress and revises the plan as you go. It starts with writing goals down. You add measurement criteria and deadlines. Planning, execution, and reflection close into a single cycle, and your own data resets difficulty and timing. Higher up, the work moves past your own goals. You design goal systems for teams and organizations, and you coach other people through writing goals of their own.
You've started moving goals out of your head and onto paper. Each thing you want to achieve becomes one sentence with a due date. Where you stand right now goes on record as a fact or a number, so there's a starting line. The goal statements still read like resolutions. Someone else reading them couldn't tell whether you hit the mark or missed it.
What Comes Next
If you've checked off most of this list, you're ready to enter the Specific Goal stage, where you write goals a third party can judge. Locke and Latham (2002) found that specific goals produce higher performance than vague resolutions, study after study.
Compares six models of self-regulation, including Zimmerman's three-phase cycle (forethought, performance, self-reflection). How completely you close the loop from goal setting through monitoring and attribution is the axis for the level boundaries here.
A synthesis of 35 years of empirical work. Specific, hard goals produce higher performance than "do your best," and difficulty tracks performance in a linear relationship. Grounds the checklist items on goal specificity and difficulty.
Sets out the working standard for OKRs: split the Objective from its Key Results, then reduce each one to measurable actions with deadlines. The authority behind the goal alignment and transparency described at the upper levels.
Frames goal setting as a prescription drug needing careful dosing and offers a warning label, Table 1, to accompany the practice. Its finding that employees pursuing multiple goals at once narrow onto one of them grounds the Lv.4 cap on concurrent goals and the Lv.5 retrospective design.
