Use the “Prompt 52” Pocket Notebook to Create SMART goals

The “Prompt 52” Prompt Journal 2020 (green botanicals) notebook contains the new set of journal prompts for 2020. The Prompt Journal can play an important part in your career development strategy and in particular, can be a great way to set and track your Career Development Goals.

Setting Goals

Setting your own personal goals (which should be hopefully be aligned with your Company’s goals) can be a great way to focus your career development strategy or plan. The Prompt 52 Pocket Notebook through the range of prompts can help you explore what is important to you, what you might like to do in the future. It contains both short term wins and long term aspirations.

These journal entries can then be turned into goals (and you can use the Goals 2020 notebook which is available as part of the same set to plan these out).

Setting goals is important as it helps you to motivate yourself and monitor your progress and achievements which you can then use to demonstrate that you are ready for that promotion or payrise etc.

Set SMART goals

Whether writing long or short term goals, the most widely used framework is S-M-A-R-T. Your boss and colleagues will probably already be talking about making sure you set SMART goals and you are probably already familar with the process – so here is a quick reminder.

• Specific: Well-defined with specific goals, so that both you and your boss can easily measure progress toward goal completion.
• Measurable: Provide milestones to track progress and motivate yourself.
• Attainable: Success needs to be achievable with the effort not too high or too low.
• Relevant: It should be relevant to the companies objectives (not just your own).
• Time-bound: Establish enough time to achieve the goal, but not too much time to undermine performance.

The SMART acronym is designed to be a framework that will enable you to write goals that have an impact. When writing your goals keep each of these aspects in mind. This will mean that you will have a clear goal and be able to quantify how far you have come and how far you have left to go.

When you reach the milestone set out in your SMART goal you will then be able to celebrate and benefit from a great feeling of satisfaction.

Tracking Goals

Once you’ve established your goals, the next step is tracking progress on those goals. If you are serious about taking control of your career you may already be using a career journal (in addition to the Prompt 52 Pocket Notebook). If you haven’t already got one why not get started with PROMPT: 52 prompts for setting up and writing your career journal. It’s important to track your progress on goals because you will need to have the information available during the all-important review process.

Other alternatives to tracking your goals are the Career Progression Goals and Meetings Notebook which has a focus on setting goals, developing an action plan and tracking your progress as well as one handy place to prepare for and keep a record of career-related meetings, your achievements, training and of course that all-important appraisal / review meeting.

Finally, as mentioned above you can also use the Goals 2020 notebook to track your Goals and as a perfect companion to the Prompt 52 Notebook.