Personal Objectives
Personal objectives are things you'd like to achieve, experience or change about yourself. These differ from end-goals as objectives are things that you can action now.Learn a language | Read more |
Make friends | Start a business |
Get a job | Exercise |
Practice an instrument | Study for an exam |
Save money | Travel somewhere |
Get into a college | Pursue a hobby |
Live in the moment | Develop self-discipline |
Overcome a fear | Discontinue a bad habit |
Celebrate each day | Be more productive |
Build stronger and deeper relationships | Forgive myself and others |
Look at life with humor and positivity | Join a sports team |
Improve your performance in a sport | Improve your performance at work |
Learn a skill | Change your lifestyle |
Become more confident and independent | Stop worrying about little things |
Stop worrying what others think | Make better use of time |
Career Objectives
Actionable goals for your career. This can begin long before your career starts whereby school achievements are a path to a career.Get a promotion. | Improve work quality. |
Improve visibility at work. | Gain more important work assignments. |
Start a side business. | Start a family business. |
Found a startup. | Develop a new skill. |
Change careers to a new profession. | Change to a new department in your company. |
Learn to sideline stress and be more happy with work. | Get into the office more to improve perceptions. |
Avoid upcoming layoffs by delivering important work. | Make more friends at work. |
Build a network of professional connections. | Develop your talents as a public speaker. |
Deliver results to secure a large bonus. | Become a team leader on the path to management. |
Get rid of a terrible duty or task. | Push into conversations to influence team direction more. |
Business Objectives
Business objectives include short term end-goals such as revenue in a year. They can also include steps towards long term goals such as improving a process to increase operational efficiency. The following are the common type of business objective without specific numerical targets or dates.Increase revenue | Reduce costs |
Reduce risks | Improve efficiency |
Expand market share | Improve quality |
Increase margins | Increase profits |
Improve customer service | Improve customer experience |
Improve customer satisfaction | Improve product and service ratings, reviews and word of mouth |
Increase sales volumes | Diversify revenue |
Streamline processes | Increase production volumes |
Increase brand recognition and awareness | Build and sustain a positive reputation |
Increase customer loyalty | Reduce customer attrition |
Build competitive advantages | Overcome competitive disadvantages |
Solve business problems | Retain talented and productive employees |
Increase productivity | Increase employee performance |
SMART Objectives
Smart objectives are designed to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timebound. This is all intuitive with the difficult part being making the objective measurable. Technically, anything that can be marked as true/false is measurable. However, people tend to want to see a number, any number, in a smart objective. The following are examples.Study math for 2 hours a day without distraction until the exam. | Improve math grade to above 80%. |
Improve customer satisfaction to 82%. | Deliver 19 modules of code for the ____ project. |
Improve code quality to less than 1 defect per thousand lines of code. | Deliver high priority work on time to improve my bonus to 20k. |
Improve order turnaround time to less than 45 minutes. | Close sales of $8.7 million in the quarter. |
Increase sales win rate to 51% of proposals in January. | Increase gross margins to 60% in Q2. |
Secure $1.2 in research funding next year. | Launch a new product by June with 10% market share within 6 months. |
Summary
Objectives are goals that are actionable steps towards your end-goals. These are more relevant to planning and performance evaluations than end-goals which are often not directly actionable. Objectives are also commonly known as SMART goals.
