I recently did a series of articles on SMART goals and how to write a smart goal. It is important to realize that all of the goals in the world will not help you to be successful without tasks. Tasks are the day-to-day actions that you must perform, to complete the task. Just like creating SMART goals, your task should be somewhat SMART to ensure that it is driving the goal results that you are looking for.
Be SMART with your Tasks
A Task is defined as: A piece of work to be done or undertaken.
Using the same acronym I will show you how to create SMART tasks to be successful.
S – Specific
M – Measurable
A – Attainable
R – Relevant
T – Time-bound
The task that is created should be specific to the goal you are trying to achieve. For this article, we will use the following SMART Goal to create SMART tasks:
Reduce overtime in the department from 150 hours per month to 50 hours per month by the end of the fiscal year with no increase in incident reports.
Task Creating Process
There are several tasks which could be combined to reducing overtime within the department. One example would be: Track the employees' weekly hours to identify employees who frequently have overtime.
Let’s break that down to see the SMART pieces of the task. Specific-- Track the employees' Time-bound-- weekly Measurable-- total overtime hours worked Relevant-- identify employees who frequently have overtime. Although the letters in the Acronym were not in order, it is easy to determine the specific task you are going to achieve is tracking employee overtime hours. The measurable is the result of those hours. This task is attainable since it is completed weekly and is relevant to the goal of reducing overtime and this task is completed weekly adding the time-bound piece of the SMART acronym.
Dig Deep for Great Contributing Tasks
When thinking about tasks, think about how you are going to get the goal accomplished and what needs to be done to get you to the finish line. Tracking who is getting overtime is just one task you would look at to help with the goal. Another task, could be to work with these employees to determine why they are getting overtime and what are the barriers that keep these employees from going home on time. The task could be to interview the employees to gain a better understanding of why they are working so much. To balance that task out, you would also want to interview the managers to get their take on why employees are working so much. The answer will be in that data and from there you can set tasks to attack those issues, all with the goal of decreasing overtime.
These are just some examples of tasks that are designed to drive the goal. There are many others that one could look at such as creating a sub-goal of recruiting and hiring more employees to reduce turnover. This goal would have tasks such as placing a job ad online and interviewing candidates, all of which could be set up as a SMART tasks.
Retooling Tasks is Smart
It is easy to see that tasks truly make the world go round and without tasks, goals will never be achieved. By correctly writing a SMART goal, it will be easy to determine what the tasks are that will drive that goal. Sometimes, the task doesn’t exactly get you the results you are looking for and those tasks should be redone or tweaked. The key is to not give up and to keep trying different SMART tasks to help you achieve your goal. It may also be important to create a root cause analysis to help you achieve your goal, this analysis will identify other tasks to help achieve your goal.
SMART tasks can be used at work or home and can help you focus on accomplishing goals. Hopefully, this article on writing SMART tasks will help you better understand how the energy and fuel of tasks will deliver good on your goals.