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Regular readers will know I am sceptical of the uncritical application of goal setting as a panacea for everything from career development and education to work performance. Goal-setting as captured by the dreaded SMART acronym Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-based is particularly troublesome. The basis for my objections generally boil down to the oversimplifying nature of goals.

Specific and measurable goals tend to narrow down, fix and oversimplify situations that are generally complex and changeable. Consequently, SMART goals have a tendency to work in the short term. But over time there is a greater opportunity for the inevitable complexities of life to insinuate themselves and derail the best laid plans of rodents and people.

There is now a growing body of evidence from life examples and from carefully conducted studies pointing to the fact (surprise surprise) we have probably grossly oversimplified goal setting and need to carefully consider the nature of the goals. Also, critically, we need to more carefully consider the nature of the task we're trying to complete.

Goal-setting has often been held up as a useful tool by elite athletes who talk remorselessly of setting and achieving goals. But very typically the nature of the task confronted by athletes is far more simple than most tasks faced by the rest of us at work. Throw it further, jump higher, run faster, throw it there and not there etc. Furthermore, the elite athletes receive tremendous support from a coterie of coaches, managers and minders who shield them to a great extent from the outrageous slings and arrows of life. Studies show goal-setting works best in closed environments, like in psychology laboratories for elite athletes, and becomes less effective in more complex environments.

Now Gillian Yeo and her team writing in the Journal Of Applied Psychology have directly addressed the relationship between having a performance goal orientation of "I want to perform better than others" and the complexity of the task they were asked to perform. Guess what? If the task was simple or well-learned, the performance goals boosted performance so good news for goals. However, if the task was not well-learned, complex performance orientation was actually associated with a decrease in performance.

In other words, we are seeing good evidence that performance goals are not great under all circumstances and sometimes the mental effort of setting and monitoring such goals could be better directed at simply trying to master complex tasks.
The fuzzier mastery orientation goal of wanting to be the best I can, or learning as much as possible, may be a better strategy than the so-called SMART goal!

So if you need to motivate yourself to do a simple task that is unlikely to change much in the short term, then by all means set SMART goals and they may actually help you. If, however, you are looking to confront that far greater category of problems in life and career that are ambiguous, incomplete, complex and changeable, you might do better not wasting precious time monitoring how you are going compared to others or compared to some arbitrary time-frame you've imposed but rather simply resolving to do your best!