How to set a goal you'll actually keep

If you want a goal to stick, it helps to be clear about exactly what you want, to know how you'll tell when you've got there, to give it a date, and to write down why it matters to you. Then keep an eye on how you're getting on. Those four things sound simple, and they are, but they're backed by more than fifty years of research by two psychologists, Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, who found that people who set specific, stretching goals do far better than people who simply promise themselves they'll do their best.

Why do so many good intentions run out of steam?

You'll know the feeling. Maybe it's the start of the year, or a Sunday evening when the week ahead looks like a fresh page, and you decide that this time things will be different. You're going to get fit, or finally sort out your finances, or write the book you've been talking about for years. For a week or two it feels within reach, and you can almost picture yourself on the other side of it.

Then life gets in the way, as it always does. A busy fortnight at work, a stinking cold and a family birthday later, and the goal that felt so close has started to drift. It hasn't gone anywhere exactly; it has just become a bit vague, and a vague goal is a slippery thing. You can't tell whether you're on track, so you can't tell when you've slipped, and it's very hard to get back on course when you were never quite sure where the course was.

If that sounds familiar, you're in very good company, and the fix usually lies in how the goal was set up in the first place.

What does the research say about setting goals?

Edwin Locke began studying goals in the 1960s, and together with Gary Latham he spent the next thirty-five years or so testing what makes them work, with all sorts of people in all sorts of settings. When they pulled it all together in 2002, their conclusion was refreshingly simple: goals that are specific and a little bit difficult lead to better results than easy goals, vague goals, or the well-meant promise to just do your best.

There were two conditions attached, and they matter. The first is that you have to genuinely care about the goal, which is why it's so useful to write down why it matters to you. The second is that you need some way of seeing how you're getting on, since without that feedback even the best-worded goal gradually loses its pull.

You may have come across SMART goals at work, which is where most of us first meet them. The idea comes from a short article George Doran wrote for managers in 1981, and in his version the A stood for "assignable", meaning who will do the work, as he was writing for people handing out objectives to their teams. Today most of us read it as "achievable". Either way it's a handy checklist, and Locke and Latham's research explains why it helps.

How do you set a goal in PiViva?

Goal Setting is where a goal begins in PiViva. You give it a name and say how important it is to you on a scale of one to ten, and then you work through five questions: what exactly do you want, how will you know you've done it, why is it realistic for you now, why does it matter to you, and by when would you like to have done it.

If those look familiar, they're the SMART questions, with a little more room given to the "why". That's the part that keeps you going on the days when motivation is thin on the ground.

It's worth taking your time over the first two. "Run more" is a lovely idea, but you'll never really know whether you've done it, whereas "run 5k in under 30 minutes by the end of May" is something you can work towards, check on, and celebrate when you get there.

Once you save it, your goal sits on your Goals page alongside anything else you're working on, and that's where you add the actions that will get you there. As things move along you can nudge the progress score up, and if it stalls for a while, that's useful to know as well. It usually means something is in the way, and there are other tools in PiViva designed to help you work out what that is.

What if your goal starts to stall?

At some point it probably will, and that's perfectly normal. Very few worthwhile goals travel in a straight line.

If you suspect the thing holding you back is something inside you, a doubt or an old habit or a fear you'd rather not look at, WOOP is a gentle five-minute exercise for spotting that obstacle and planning around it. If you simply can't put your finger on why you're stuck, the GROW Model will walk you through it, one question at a time. And if you keep putting off the first step, the Procrastination Killer will help you break it down until it's small enough to start today.

You don't have to do any of this on your own, either. Viv is there whenever you'd like to talk something through, and if you'd like a person in your corner, you can share your goal with a coach from the PiViva Coach Directory, so that your very first conversation starts with what you actually want.

Set one goal properly, give it a little time and attention, and see what happens. Then, when you're ready, set the next one, and the one after that, until your life starts to look more like the one you had in mind.