Height’s SMART goals template provides a structured approach to setting and tracking your SMART goals, so your entire team can work towards key objectives and stay on-track.

Here’s how:

• Create more focused and achievable goals by using a Height task form with SMART goal characteristics built-in.
• Link your goals to more granular day-to-day tasks within your workspace so everyone knows how their work connects to the big picture.
• Collaboratively discuss goals right within the context of tasks with in-task chat and use status attributes to visually update progress

What are SMART goals?

Let’s say you have a lofty goal in your mind: something big you want to accomplish, like writing a novel or improving your product. These goals, while impressive, are very general — and setting a goal that feels overwhelmingly large makes it much harder to achieve. What if, instead, you broke those big goals down into manageable, actionable chunks? Our examples would become more specific, like “Write 1000 words a day for 3 months” or “Fix at least one bug every day and launch one new feature per week.” The process of grounding your goals in reality like this is really the core of SMART goals.

SMART goals help increase your chances of successfully accomplishing your goals. The SMART acronym stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. This framework facilitates better goal-setting — you can clarify your vision, establish clear milestones and expectations, and more easily track progress toward your goals. Big ideas become less daunting when you make sure they’re broken down into actionable SMART goals.

Who is this template for?

This SMART goals template is designed to work for all teams: engineering, marketing, product, design, and more. A marketing goal like “Grow organic traffic” is much more effective and trackable when it’s broken down into something like “Post one SEO blog post every week and distribute across social channels to grow organic traffic by 50% after three months.” But the template also works well for personal productivity goals: instead of a goal like “organize the house,” you’d break things down into tasks like cleaning the kitchen counter every night, tackling one room per week, and more.

The template will also work for teams of all sizes, and is especially helpful for fast-growing companies as you scale. It’s essential to start creating and tracking your goals even as a team of one or a few, so you start building the habit and can accelerate progress. Whether you have just a handful of collaborators or hundreds of employees, you need a clear way to set goals and break down action items. Height’s unique ability to link tasks together helps you connect even the smallest action items to your big-picture SMART goals.

How do I start creating SMART goals in Height?

Creating SMART goals helps you set your entire team up for success, but how do you actually go about creating them? Housing your team’s goals inside a project management tool shines a spotlight on them and ensures they don’t get lost in the shuffle of daily to-dos.

Height’s SMART goals template specifically lets you create, set, and implement actionable goals that connect to daily work so your whole team is in the loop. Here’s how:

1. Take each new goal you brainstorm through the SMART framework.

   When you have a new goal in mind, you’ll use the New SMART Goal task form built right into the template to submit it and create a new SMART goal task. Within the task form, you’ll answer questions aligned with the SMART goal methodology, including: the specific aim of the goal, how it will be measured, what actions you can take immediately to achieve this goal, what makes it relevant or necessary to do now, and when you need to finish it by. This task form makes it practically seamless to think through the SMART components of your goal, and gives you a written record of that information so your whole team can see the context surrounding it.

2. Tie individual work tasks and projects to your SMART goals.

   Once you start creating your SMART goals, you’ll also create individual tasks with one or multiple assignees to work towards the goals. These smaller tasks are the day-to-day work that goes into achieving a larger goal. Height has a number of custom attributes to make your task and project management experience more efficient, including linked tasks: link the individual tasks your team is working on to the actual SMART goals so it’s clear from start to finish why you’re working on each task and what’s a priority.

3. Organize your lists and start collaborating.

   With Height’s SMART goals template, you’ll have access to multiple lists. First, your SMART goal planning list is where you’ll submit your new goals with the task form, have them approved by the team, and kick off the projects. Then, you’ll also have a Height Smart List, which aggregates your SMART goals and their corresponding linked tasks into one consolidated list for an overview of how tasks fit into bigger projects. This is a great place to visualize progress with status updates, communicate about key details with chat right within tasks, and see what’s going on at a glance.

How do I get started with the SMART goals template?

Getting started is easy — all you have to do is click “Try in Height”.

If you already have a Height account, you’ll be all set and ready to start customizing your new workflow. If not, welcome! Creating a Height account is free, quick, and easy. You’ll be good to go in just a minute.