Stop Setting SMART Goals: Mindset Shifts

With love from an ambitious ADHDer, this is part 1 on how to set goals that work with your brain, not against it.

Every January, you think the problem is you. But what if the real issue is that SMART goals were never designed for humans with fluctuating energy, messy motivation, and a creative, curious brain?

I have always been highly ambitious, driven, and curious, so chasing after goals has basically become a personality trait… but I also have ADHD. This is how I’ve made goal-setting work for me.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction To This 5 Part Series

2. SMART Goals & Why They Are Popular

3. Why SMART Goals Don’t Work

4. Six Foundational Mindsets For Goal Setting

5. Three Alternatives To SMART Goals (teaser)

Introduction

If you’re anything like me, setting goals for the new year almost always ends up feeling like a cruel trick from the universe. Your brain gets magnetised to the shiny, novel feeling of a brand new year. The thought of reinventing yourself and overhauling your life is deliciously irresistible. As long as you follow a plan, what could go wrong?

You hear about SMART Goals and think, “Well, this seems reasonable — and it must be popular for a reason.” And yes, they do sound logical. Of course, your goals “should” be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. But that’s the issue with this framework— it’s too clean, too polished. It doesn’t account for the messy reality of our lives, energy patterns, fluctuating capacity, or uncooperative brains.

Thankfully, SMART is far from the only option. Before you give up on goal setting entirely — because let’s be real, you are ambitious and want to grow — I want to introduce you to three alternatives. They are structured enough to be helpful, but flexible, playful, reflective, and (in my opinion) far more ADHD-friendly.

Trying to cram everything into one post would have been chaotic, so this is 5-part Goal Setting Series is my New Year’s gift to you.

Part 1 (today): Why SMART goals fail us + the six foundational mindsets you need
Parts 2–4: Three better alternatives to SMART (Moon & Stars, NICE, PACT)
Part 5: How to weave everything together into a resilient, flexible system for the year ahead

Let’s start by dismantling the assumptions you’ve been taught — not to shame them, but to make space for something better.

SMART Goals & Why They Are Popular

The SMART acronym popped up in 1981¹. George T. Doran coined it in an issue of Management Review. It became popular as a tidy, structured way to define goals and measure success. Its credibility grew even further after claims that a 2007 psychology study showed that people who used SMART goals were more likely to achieve their career goals than those who didn’t. Except… that’s not what the study found.

Dr Gail Matthews — who designed and carried out the famous experiment— assigned people to 5 different groups². One group did not write down their goals, another group wrote goals down using the SMART framework, and some groups included reporting their progress to a friend. It was this combination of writing down (SMART) goals and updating someone on the progress that produced the best results, but how much of an impact the SMART framework had is unclear. The study didn’t compare SMART goals to any other goal-setting framework. So we can’t actually conclude that SMART is superior.

Even within research on goal setting, SMART has become a default, not because it’s the best, but because it’s convenient. Interestingly, sports science researchers — like Christian Swann— have recently called out SMART goals for lacking a scientific foundation, and surprisingly found that more open-ended or vague goals often produced better results.

So, while SMART Goals are popular, they’re not necessarily optimal. Has this framework ever worked for you? Let us know in the comments!

Why SMART Goals Don’t Work For Many Of Us

There are a few reasons SMART Goals have let me down as an ambitious ADHDer, and it’s mainly because the structure is too rigid, and it emphasises outcomes over the process. But let’s break down the issues further.

Specific

A specific outcome as a goal narrows our mental field of vision. It sounds helpful —locking us in on what we want to achieve — but in practice, it makes you fixate on a single path and miss opportunities along the way. And when you haven’t yet built the systems you need to reach that outcome, it’s easy to crumble.

Measurable

As someone with a science background, I love data — but measurement can become a trap. Metrics shift your focus toward numbers instead of meaning. What is the point in tracking numerical indicators of success if you never stop to reflect on whether you’re enjoying the process or whether you still want to pursue the goal at all? When you decide on metrics before you’ve even started, you sterilise the process and remove creativity, curiosity, and joy.

Achievable

This one bothers me the most. Deciding whether a goal is “achievable” at the very beginning shuts down ambition and imagination. Now, you might say, “But Anna, if I don’t set goals that I know are achievable, then I will just be setting myself up for disappointment”. We will cover this in part 2, but all you need to know for now is that there is a difference between a goal and an expectation. Your goals can be ambitious — and in fact, I encourage you to aim wildly high— but your expectations can be a bit more grounded.

Time-bound

Time-bounding the goal also sounds good in theory, because timelines do help with structure. But time-bounding creates the paralysing feeling of putting your goal in a pressure cooker. You know that feeling where you’re like:

• “Ah, this recipe only takes 30 minutes”, so you delay starting because you know it won’t take you very long.

• But you lose track, and suddenly, it’s only 25 minutes until you need to be done with cooking.

• You haven’t started yet, but you still decide to attempt a 30-minute task in a 25-minute time frame.

• After 10 minutes of cutting onions and crying, you realise you didn’t preheat the oven, and there’s no way you can get this even halfway done on time.

• You give up.³

That is what a time-bound SMART goal feels like to me.

Relevant

The only part of the SMART framework that resonates is keeping the goal relevant. And by relevant, I mean personally relevant, not trend relevant, but we’ll chat more about that later. The rest of the system is missing crucial flexibility. Despite what you might expect, chasing goals does not mean a perfect plan that is followed to a T.

When you set goals, always ask yourself where you will create room to reflect and reassess. Always remember that you will accommodate the fluctuating capacities — energy, curiosity, emotion, attention — that come with living a full life. And you won’t always be able to predict precisely when obstacles arise.

Six Foundational Mindsets For Goal Setting

Even the best goal-setting frameworks won’t work if the mindset underneath them collapses. There are six foundations our brains benefit from building first:

Identity-Based Goals

Usually, when we set personal goals, it’s with the underlying hope that if we can achieve that goal, it says something about the person we are — it gives us an identity. It makes sense at first — someone who wins a gold medal at the Olympics, of course, identifies as an athlete — but this is a little bit of a backwards way to think about it. James Clear tackles this in chapter 2 of Atomic Habits, where he distinguishes between outcome-based habits and identity-based habits. In the above example, the outcome would be the gold medal, but the identity would be the athlete.

I have always found more value in identity-based goals, focusing first on who I want to be. They keep me checking whether my goals and habits are actually something I want and not something aspirational that I want to want because it looks good.⁴

The trick is that the identity-based goal needs to be based on some truth of your actual identity. If you’re not an athlete but you still want to craft an identity-based goal that helps you work out regularly, lean into the identity of someone who values their health. Someone who values their health is likely to work out.

Permission To Be A Beginner

The trouble with crafting identities that are a little too far from who you are right now is that it can lead to imposter syndrome. This is where you need to give yourself permission to be a beginner. In a recent LinkedIn post⁵, Ali Abdaal shared that the only way to entirely eliminate imposter syndrome is to stay in our comfort zones. But that’s no way to live. Allow yourself to be a beginner by identifying as:

• Someone learning to do X

• Someone trying Y part-time

• A junior Z

Setting yourself up to be a beginner also lets you focus on what beginners do best: start. Beginners don’t need to impress. They only need to begin. Which leads to the next mindset you need to have…

Persistence > Perfection

Perfectionism sounds like high standards, but it’s really avoidance disguised as ambition. It can be truly paralysing, too. Kelly Banks put this really well in a recent post:

I used to think I wasn’t a perfectionist because “I never do things perfectly,” then a therapist said to me: Perfectionism isn’t about doing things perfectly, it’s about finding flaws easily…and I’ve not been the same since.

Instead of focusing on being perfect, including being perfectly consistent, focus on whether you can be persistent and how to help yourself do that. How can you keep coming back? Why would you want to come back?

I will explain more about that in an upcoming post about habits and routines, but here’s an Instagram post explaining why I love habit trackers and built-in leniency.

Community & Support

Accountability helps. Not shame-accountability, but connected-accountability. Reporting your progress to a peer or community helps you actively reflect and shows you that people are rooting for you. There are caveats to sharing your goals, though. We’ll dive into this more when we break down Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s 3 Public Pillars.

Figure It Out Mentality

YouTuber MuchelleB explains the value of a Figure-It-Out Mentality really well. Basically, the idea is that our brains are problem-solving machines that love questions. With any goal or necessary action, always ask your brain, “How can I figure X out?” or “How can I make X enjoyable/ easier/ an everyday thing?” I love questions as a way to approach problems with non-judgmental curiosity.

Three Alternatives To SMART Goals

Now that we have the identity-first-anti-perfectionism-persistent-curious mindset set up, these are the 3 alternatives to SMART Goals that we’ll be diving into in the following special-edition posts:

1. Moon & Stars Goals (Inspired by Jessica McCabe)

Jessica McCabe — creator of How To ADHD — talks about how structured goals never worked for her, and how she prefers goals that feel more like “battling a dragon.” I call these Moon & Stars Goals, inspired by the idea that when you aim high, you expand your possibilities of achievement even if you don’t hit the exact target. In Part 2, we’ll dig into how this mindset frees your ADHD brain to stay ambitious without the perfectionism trap.

2. NICE Goals (Ali Abdaal)

Ali Abdaal’s NICE framework, from Feel Good Productivity, flips SMART goals on their head by grounding everything in what you can control right now. It shifts the focus from outcomes to actions — and adds one crucial ADHD-friendly ingredient many systems forget: making the process feel good. In Part 3, I’ll show you how NICE goals help you build momentum without burnout.

3. PACT & The 3 Public Pillars (Anne-Laure Le Cunff)

Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s PACT framework from her book, Tiny Experiments, centres purpose, repeatable actions, and meaningful progress-tracking — without the pressure of perfect metrics. It pairs beautifully with her Three Public Pillars that help you reflect, reassess, and stay connected. Part 4 will break down how PACT makes space for curiosity, creativity, and tiny experiments that add up.

Conclusion & Next Up

So SMART goals aren’t inherently bad; they’re just not designed for humans whose capacity fluctuates, whose ambition is high, whose curiosity is alive, and whose brains need flexibility, identity, and experimentation.

In Part 2, we’ll start with Moon & Stars Goals — the framework that gives you permission to dream boldly, aim high, and expand your possibilities without running headfirst into perfectionism, pressure, or shame.

Over the next few weeks, you’ll build a full goal-setting ecosystem that:

• honours your fluctuating capacity,

• leaves room for experimentation,

• leverages your natural strengths,

• keeps you connected to your identity,

• and helps you return to your goals again and again, anchoring your drive in persistence over perfection.

If you enjoyed this Part 1, leave a comment with your biggest takeaway, share it with the ambitious humans in your life, and tell me which framework you’re most excited for.

And as always: stay curious, stay connected, and turn your potential into action.

Sources

Abdaal, A. (2023). Feel-Good Productivity: How to Do More of What Matters to You. Random House.

Bjerke, M. B., & Renger, R. (2017). Being smart about writing SMART objectives. Evaluation and Program Planning, 61, 125–127. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evalprogplan.2016.12.009

Clear, J. (2018). Atomic Habits: The life-changing million-copy #1 bestseller. Random House.

Cunff, A.-L. L. (2025). Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World. Penguin.

Extension, M. S. U. (2014, August 26). Achieving your goals: An evidence-based approach. MSU Extension. https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/achieving_your_goals_an_evidence_based_approach

Matthews, G. (2007). The Impact of Commitment, Accountability, and Written Goals on Goal Achievement. Psychology | Faculty Presentations. https://scholar.dominican.edu/psychology-faculty-conference-presentations/3

McCabe, J. (2024). How to ADHD: An Insider’s Guide to Working with Your Brain (Not Against It). Souvenir Press.

Swann, C., Hooper, A., Schweickle, M. J., Peoples, G., Mullan, J., Hutto, D., Allen, M. S., & Vella, S. A. (2020a). Comparing the effects of goal types in a walking session with healthy adults: Preliminary evidence for open goals in physical activity. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 47, 101475. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2019.01.003

Swann, C., Hooper, A., Schweickle, M. J., Peoples, G., Mullan, J., Hutto, D., Allen, M. S., & Vella, S. A. (2020b). Comparing the effects of goal types in a walking session with healthy adults: Preliminary evidence for open goals in physical activity. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 47, 101475. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2019.01.003

There’s A S.M.A.R.T. Way To Write Management’s Goals and Objectives—George T. Doran—Management Review (1981) PDF | PDF | Goal | Psychological Concepts. (n.d.). Scribd. Retrieved 4 December 2025, from https://www.scribd.com/document/458234239/There-s-a-S-M-A-R-T-way-to-write-management-s-goals-and-objectives-George-T-Doran-Management-Review-1981-pdf

1. Some say that the SMART framework is based on Locke & Latham’s A Theory of Goal Setting and Task Performance (1990). Their theory posits that clear, specific, and challenging goals, combined with commitment, feedback, and manageable complexity— (C-S-C-C-F-C)— significantly boost motivation and performance in work and life. C-S-C-C-F-C is not as catchy an acronym as SMART, though.

2. Group 1- Unwritten Goal, Group 2- Written Goal, Group 3- Written Goal & Action Commitments, Group 4- Written Goal & Action Commitments to a Friend, Group 5- Written Goal, Action Commitments & Progress Reports to a Friend.

3. This analogy may or may not be based on a recent experience

4. Youtuber Muchelle B explains this really well

5. My one critique of Ali’s post is the broetry style it is crafted in.