SMART Goals Have Zero Evidence Behind Them. Zero.
Fun fact: everyone's favourite goal-setting tool was invented by a guy at a water company.
The world’s most popular goal framework has zero evidence behind it.
I know. That’s a big claim. But stay with me.
SMART goals are everywhere.
Every corporate training deck you’ve ever sat through. Every January reset article. Every wellness carousel with cute fonts and a sunset background.
They feel so official, so universally agreed upon, that I assumed there must be decades of research behind them. Right?
There are not.
The whole thing traces back to a 1-page article published in 1981 by a corporate planning director at a water company in Washington state, USA.
George Doran wrote it for Management Review. It had no references. No data. No evidence of any kind.
It was designed to help managers write clearer objectives for their teams.
Not for your health. Not for your habits. Not for the complicated, messy, deeply personal business of changing how you live.
Even Doran said the acronym “doesn’t mean that every objective written will have all five criteria.”
So in 2022, a team of researchers finally did what nobody had bothered to do: they checked the evidence.
A systematic review in Health Psychology Review looked at 147 studies on goal-setting in health contexts.
Their conclusion: not a single study has demonstrated that SMART goals outperform other approaches.
A hundred and forty-seven studies. Zero proof.
A 2024 study went further and tested SMART goals against simple "do your best" goals for complex, creative tasks.
SMART didn’t win. The specificity it demands actually constrained people’s thinking and reduced their motivation.
So the most popular goal-setting tool in the world is a 1-page management memo that was never tested, never validated, and may actively get in your way for anything more complex than “Dave, ship the report by Friday”.
Isn’t that absolutely mental?
Every January I used to sit down with a fresh notebook and write goals that ticked all 5 boxes.
Specific? Check. Measurable? Check. Attainable, relevant, time-bound? Check, check, check. Gold star. Yay!
And by mid-February I’d have quietly abandoned every single one while the pretty notebook gathered dust on my desk, judging me.
If that sounds familiar: it’s not a you problem. It was always the tool.
Back in January, I wrote about the kinds of goals we set and why they fail.
This is the part I hadn’t seen yet: the playbook itself.
This is Part 2 of The Spring Clear-Out.
First we cleared the thinking errors. Now we’re clearing the way you set goals.
Why the goals that work look nothing like a worksheet
While SMART was becoming gospel, actual goal scientists were studying what makes people follow through. And what they found is more interesting than any acronym.
It comes down to one thing: the goal has to actually be yours.
Not “yours” because you wrote it down. Yours because it connects to something you genuinely care about.
When there’s a real match between what you’re pursuing and what you value, you don’t just try harder. You sustain effort over months. And when you get there, it actually feels good.
But when a goal looks right on paper and doesn’t connect to anything real inside you? Even achieving it doesn’t make you feel better. You tick the box and wonder why you still feel empty.
And here’s the part that got me: many people are actively pursuing goals they neither want nor like. And they can’t see it.
Because the goals look correct. They tick the boxes. They’re specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
They’re also someone else’s idea of a good life. I call these borrowed goals. And they’re everywhere.
It goes even deeper than values, though. When a goal feels like “something a person like me does,” difficulty gets reframed as importance. This is hard because it matters.
But when a goal feels disconnected from who you are, difficulty becomes evidence that you should quit. This is hard because it’s not for me.
Same goal on paper. Completely different experience in your body.
This is why “exercise three times a week” completely changes one person’s life and makes another person miserable. It’s not about the goal. It’s about whether the goal belongs to you.
Achieving the wrong goal can literally make your life worse. And SMART has no way of telling you which kind you’re holding.
OK. So here’s what does work.
If you take one thing from this, make it this: there are only 2 shifts that actually matter.
First: focus on what you do, not where you end up.
When researchers compared process goals (”walk for 20 minutes after lunch”) with outcome goals (”lose 5kg”), process goals won by a landslide. Like, not even close. Like comparing a proper meal to finding a crisp under a sofa cushion.
“Write for 30 minutes before breakfast” is a process goal. “Finish my book” is an outcome goal.
“Eat vegetables with dinner” is a process goal. “Fix my diet” is an outcome goal.
Process goals work because they point your attention at something you can actually do today. They build confidence with every tick.
And if you remember last week’s cognitive distortions, you’ll spot why: outcome goals are an all-or-nothing trap. Process goals aren’t.
Second: root the new behaviour to something you already do.
This is the bit that changed how I coach.
The idea is almost embarrassingly simple: “After [something I already do], I will [tiny new thing].”
By pre-deciding what you’ll do in a specific moment, you create a mental link between the situation and the response. When the moment shows up, the behaviour fires without you having to negotiate with yourself about it.
I call these Rooted Routines. New behaviours anchored to things you already do.
Not floating around in your calendar waiting for motivation to show up (spoiler: motivation is not coming, she has other plans), but wired into the structure of your existing day.
“After I pour my morning coffee, I’ll write for ten minutes.”
“After I eat lunch, I’ll walk around the block.”
“After I close my laptop for the day, I’ll do five minutes of stretching.”
Notice the shape:
After I [thing I already do], I will [tiny new thing].
The “after” is doing the heavy lifting.
It turns an existing moment into a launchpad instead of asking your brain to generate momentum from scratch at 3pm on a Wednesday when you can barely remember your own name.
The one thing to try this week
Pick the one area where you keep starting and stopping. You know the one. It’s been on every list you’ve written since January, and possibly since last January.
Now forget measuring it. Forget deadlines. Forget making it achievable and relevant and all the other boxes.
Instead, ask yourself two things. Does this actually matter to me (not to the version of me that looks impressive on paper, but to the one who’s actually living this life)?
And: what’s the smallest version of this I can root to something I already do every day?
Write one Rooted Routine. After I [existing habit], I will [tiny action]. Put it somewhere you’ll see it. Do it for two weeks.
That’s the whole experiment. Nothing more.
Spring is here. The fresh start is real. But this time, skip the worksheet.
Start with something that’s actually yours.
With love,
Noemie x
P.S. Be honest: have you ever set a SMART goal that actually worked long-term? Or did it quietly fall apart while you assumed it was your fault?
P.P.S. If you want to stress-test your goals first, I broke that down in more detail back in January. Three simple questions that catch most of the problems early.
