It is common at the beginning of a new year to make a list of goals and desires for the next 365 days and graduate students are not immune to this behaviour. However, most people struggle with how to check all those goals off the list on December 31st. The most effective answer is to use a managing strategy called SMART, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. Each letter in the framework corresponds to a feature a goal must have to be trackable and ultimately accomplishable. I have reached an 80%+ success rate for the past 5 years on my resolutions list (which never happened before) and can attest to the technique's power. In today's post, I want to tell you about it so you, too, can make your dreams come true in 2025!
Step 1: Specify the Hell Out of It
Unfortunately, just saying "I want to graduate" is not a good enough goal. What's left for you to achieve that? Are you the only person responsible for making that happen? If you need help, from whom and how? What is your plan? Initially, it may seem silly or obvious but organizing your thoughts and writing about it makes a massive difference to your mindset.
Step 2: Set Metrics
Goals must be quantifiable to know you are on the right track and can achieve them. Setting metrics and strategies at the beginning to get there is essential. You may be looking for a specific number of conference and journal papers by the end of your degree, but you will probably not be writing all of them in your final year. Can you break those numbers down to the years your degree takes? How many experiments do you usually need for each of those papers? At the end of each year, you can evaluate how ahead or behind you are and recalculate for the next.
Step 3: Be Realistic
Ambition is always good, but so is reality. When writing down a goal, ask yourself if that is acceptable to your context, health, and resources. How do you know if a goal is achievable or reasonable? Evaluate your own history and talk to people. Ask your supervisor and colleagues and investigate Reddit posts. You are on track to be a scientist, so act like it and make decisions based on facts. Being realistic in your goal-setting will keep you grounded and practical, ensuring you set achievable targets.
Step 4: Think ³ÉÈË´óƬ the Big Picture
It is way easier to have the motivation and discipline to work toward something when you know why you are doing it. Why is that goal relevant to you? What are you trying to achieve next?
Step 5: Don't Forget the Calendar Check
From Step 2, you may have realized that your goal needs to be set within a timeframe so that you and others involved can check on the progress of each metric and recognize when you finally reached a goal. In the case of New Year's resolutions, the time frame will be that year, but you can add calendar checks to evaluate how everything is evolving.
Step 6: Organize the Resolutions Table
Try to write at least one or two sentences about your goals for each step. After that, you will compile everything in a 4-column table: What, Why, Metrics, and Status. For tracking, I like to use colours (red, orange, yellow, and green) to indicate the status of my goals, but you could use a numerical scale, a series of check marks or any other system that works well for you.
Final Tips
Use your scientific training to refine the specificity and set good metrics, asking as many questions as possible. Be diligent with the tracking of your goals. After you go through all the trouble to define them, you are more likely to remember them, but scheduling a monthly reminder on your calendar doesn't hurt. Try to have the tables in the same file or notebook to easily see and compare the results from different years. Use this strategy to any scenarios in which you need to set goals, not only academic/ yearly resolutions – it is widely versatile.