Setting goals for 2021 – A brief guide about personal goal setting

I don't think that's the intent. The intent is to look back and see if you accomplished your goal or not. If you don't have a measurement, then you don't know if you've meet your goal. Something such as 'I want to be a good parent to my kid' Isn't specific, nor is it attainable. Setting a goal of 'I want to spend an hour of time a day with my child' is both specific and measurable.

>" Sometimes, they are so far off in the future that you don't think about them until it is too late because you thought you could do them."

Seems like the contradicts the 'Relevant' part of SMART.

I see this as a framework to help you focus in on your goal instead of making wishes at the start of ever new year. 'I'm going to lose weight this year' Okay, how are you going to do that? Are you going to exercise and eat less? Okay, how much or both and how will you know if you met those micro goals? Given what we know about weight loss at the moment, what's a reasonable goal weight for March, June, August?

1) Write out your goals in the form of a personal letter to yourself. Focus on the things you think are making you unhappy, not what you think will make you happy. Read it out loud in private. After that, hide it away for a while where only you will find it.

2) Keep your goals private. Especially keep progress private. Trying to stop smoking/drinking? Folks will notice, but politely decline to answer that infamous "how long since...?" question. Don't externalize the rewards.

3) Focus on very small results. Find a way to make them stick. Build on that and in time you'll find that amounts to a LOT more progress and personal satisfaction.

IMO build from the ground up and the fancy big goals will come more easily and naturally. You won't have to game it.

There are so many factors that play into being a good father that "I want to spend an hour of time a day with my child" is essentially useless.

About this goal specifically, I found it beneficial to stop thinking about a target weight. Instead think about: What level of fitness do I want? What kind of health do I want? (the two are related, but not the same)

Main reason: If you take up exercise and are not obese or at the higher end of "overweight", you may not lose weight for the first couple of months (or ever!) depending on the style of exercise you've selected and your body's tendency to build muscle. If you take up weightlifting, and are overweight but not obese, you could see your body composition basically trade, nearly pound for pound, fat for muscle. You will look better and feel better but not achieve the weight goal, which can be disheartening to people who have an explicit weight goal even though what they've done has measurably improved their fitness and health. And if you take up running or something similarly cardio intensive, you may gain weight (building up leg and core muscles with running, for instance) in the first few weeks before any weight loss begins. This is similarly disheartening and demotivating.

Instead, think about what fitness or health level you want and why, then work towards them.

My fitness goal was predicated on being able to play back-to-back soccer games (rec league, 70 minute games). So I needed to be able to sustain nearly 2 hours of continuous movement including sprints and extended periods of running/jogging. So I took up running and got my 5k time below 25 minutes, then upped it to 10k runs. A single game left me feeling like I'd just finished a warmup, the second game would leave me feeling like I'd actually exercised but not fatigued.

My health goal was predicated on getting off a statin and reducing my blood pressure (largely work stress induced, but my weight and fitness at the time pushed it into the pre-hypertensive range). So I ate better in order to achieve that, and reduced (not eliminated, still drink coffee black) caffeine in order to improve sleep (both improved sleep and reduced caffeine also helped reduce my anxiety levels and my periodic panic attacks at the time left me, happy side effect).

Both of those left me at a lower weight than I started at, but I had no explicit weight target. If I had, I could've been demotivated by early weight gains (when I started running I went from 215 to 220lbs) or later weight gains (when I added BJJ to my exercise regimen I went from 175 to 190). Both of those were the result of increased muscle mass, but they both took me in the "wrong" direction if weight loss and a weight target were specific goals.

It's off topic, but you seem to have some insight into this. What steps would you take to achieve a goal like that?