Short-Term Goals: Definition, Examples, & List

By Nathalie Boutros, Ph.D.
​Reviewed by Tchiki Davis, M.A., Ph.D.
What are short-term goals? Learn how to set attainable and productive short-term goals and discover how setting short-term goals can help you achieve your long-term ambitions.
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Short-term goals are the goals that you want to accomplish soon, usually within a year. A short-term goal may be something you want to do for its own sake. For example, you may want to clean out your closet, read that book that’s been collecting dust on your nightstand, save the money you need to go on a long-overdue vacation, or finally run a 10K.
Short-term goals can also be things that you want to do in the process of accomplishing longer-term ambitions and goals. You may want to earn a professional certification so that you can broaden your career prospects, get a good grade on the next test so that you go to your first-choice college, or save money for a down payment on your first home so that you can build intergenerational wealth. In this article, we’ll talk about how to define your short-term goals, outline ways that you can frame and understand your short-term goals, and see how setting short-term goals may help you achieve your longer-term ambitions.

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What Are Short-Term Goals? (A Definition)

Short-term goals are tasks, objectives, and outcomes that can be completed within a relatively short time frame, usually less than a year. A good short-term goal may be SMART – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound (Macleod, 2012):
  • Specific – You may have more success with goals that are precisely defined. The goal to “do well in biology” is not specific. A specific version of this goal might be “score at least 90% on the next three biology quizzes”.
  • Measurable – How will you know whether you have successfully achieved the goal? Goals with clear criteria for success may be more effective than goals with ambiguous outcomes. “Learn cellular metabolism” may be a commendable goal, but is difficult to measure. In contrast “Be able to diagram the Krebs Cycle” is much more measurable.
  • Achievable – Is this goal realistically within your reach? If you currently have a B-average in biology it may not be realistic to strive for a perfect grade. However, you may be able to work towards an A.
  • Relevant – Why is this goal relevant to your long-term goals, plans, or desires? Why are you trying to achieve this goal? You may find yourself much more motivated to work towards your short-term goal if you can connect that goal to a longer-term goal. For example, you may want to connect your short-term goal of doing well in biology to your longer-term goal of attending medical school and becoming a physician.
  • Time-bound – When should this goal be completed? You may be more motivated to act if you have a specific date by which you plan to have accomplished your goal.

How to Set Short-Term Goals

You may be able to set achievable short-term goals by using the SMART framework. To start, ask yourself the following questions to clarify your goal (Robins, 2014):
  • Specific – What is it that you want to accomplish?
  • Measurable – How will you know that you have been successful?
  • Achievable – Is achieving this goal realistic? Can you strive higher? What are the steps involved in accomplishing this goal? Are there any constraints and requirements that you need to consider?
  • Relevant – Does this short-term goal serve your long-term goals? Is achieving this goal worth the time and effort?
  • Time-bound – How long will it take to accomplish this goal? When would you like to have completed this goal? Are there any external time constraints?

Short-Term Goals vs Long Term Goals

Long-term goals are the goals and ambitions that express your beliefs, core values, and worldviews. Short-term goals are the day-to-day actions that reflect these long-term beliefs (Doran, 1981). For example, your long-term goals may include providing yourself and your family with financial security and material privilege. Short-term goals that serve this long-term goal may include getting a higher-paying job or securing a secondary source of income.

Short-term goals may be more satisfying and fulfilling if they serve long-term goals. For example, if your long-term goal is to feel a stronger sense of community and connection within the world, you may want to choose specific short-term goals to reflect these values. Setting yourself a short-term goal of spending at least 10 hours a month in acts of service may help you work towards your long-term goal of increased connection and community.

Examples of Short-Term Goals for Your Career

You may want to choose short-term career goals that serve your long-term career ambitions. John Doerr is an investor and tech entrepreneur that has been involved in the growth of some of the world’s most successful companies, including Intel and Google. He is a champion of the Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) approach to goal setting. This process involves defining an objective that you want to achieve and then naming 3-4 key results that you can work towards in pursuit of that longer-term objective.

Using the OKR approach to identify short-term goals that serve long-term career ambitions begins with first “finding your why” (Head, 2020). What are your long-term professional ambitions? Where would you like your career to be in 5-10 years? Working back from this point, what skills, experiences, and certifications do you need to get there? These are the key results that can serve as your short-term career goals.

To illustrate how the OKR process can identify short-term goals that serve long-term career ambitions, John Doerr’s What Matters website lists specific examples of career objectives along with the key results that serve those objectives. For example, the career objective to “Gain the hard technical skills to become a top 1% product manager in Silicon Valley” is supported by two key results: “Spend 2 days a week practicing Python and SQL” and “Deploy a sample project by the end of the month”.

Examples of Short-Term Goals for Work

Many workplaces are diverse and dynamic, with multiple people working together on frequently-changing projects. In these environments, short-term work goals may be most successful when they adhere to the acronym FAST (Sull & Sull, 2018):
  • F – Frequently discussed and revised as needed. Regular feedback on how things are progressing may lead to improved outcomes. Moreover, in dynamic workplaces, goals may need to be changed, reprioritized, or even eliminated.
  • A – Ambitious. The most successful companies don’t limit their workforce to setting goals where success is guaranteed.
  • S – Specific metrics and milestones. Goals should not be vague and should be paired with quantifiable metrics of success whenever possible.
  • T – Transparent for everyone in the organization to see. Goal transparency has many benefits including eliminating redundant or unaligned work across teams, increasing accountability, and helping all employees see how their contributions fit into the organization’s broader goals. Google lists the past and present goals of each employee in its internal employee directory.

The FAST metrics may be applied to a variety of specific work goals. For example, a marketing manager of a startup may be tasked with increasing awareness of the brand. An ambitious, specific, and transparent short-term goal that serves this longer-term objective may be to gain 100,000 followers on the organization’s Facebook page. As new social media platforms come to prominence, this goal may need to be revised.

Examples of Short-Term Goals for Business

The specific short-term organizational goals that you choose will likely reflect the long-term ambitions that you have for your business (Cothran & Wysocki, 2005). For example, if one of your long-term business goals is to have the best website in your industry, you may want to choose short-term goals that reflect this. Potential short-term goals may include redesigning the website’s layout, increasing loading speed by 20%, reaching 1 million monthly visitors, or increasing average visit times by 20%. These short-term goals are all specific to the long-term goal of improving the company’s website. The short-term goals that will best serve your business or organization depend on your particular long-term ambitions. 

What are short-term stretch goals?
​When setting goals, high-performing organizations such as Google and Twitter encourage their teams to set ambitious goals that lie just beyond the threshold of what seems possible (Google rework, n.d.). These lofty goals are sometimes called stretch goals. In these highly successful organizations, goals are expected to have success rates between 60-70 percent. Success rates approaching 100 percent may suggest that the team isn’t taking enough risks or aiming high enough. Importantly, performance reviews, advancement within the organization, and bonuses are completely decoupled from goal achievement. Google claims that these practices encourage teams to be innovative and to take risks on projects with the potential for a big payout.

In the video below, John Doerr discusses the goal-setting procedures used by Google and other high-performing organizations. A particularly compelling example discussed in the video is the creation of the Google Chrome browser. When the browser was first launched, the engineering team set themselves the very ambitious goal of having 20 million users in the first year. This goal was not met. In the second year, the goal was increased to 50 million users. Once again, the goal was not met. In the browser’s third year, the goal was set to 100 million users. In this third year, the goal was not only met but exceeded. Being encouraged to set ambitious goals without fear of negative performance reviews in case of failure allowed the team working on Chrome to aim high.

Video: Why the Secret to Success Is Setting the Right Goals

Examples of Short-Term Goals for Teens

Setting goals and then following through on achieving those goals requires cognitive and executive functioning skills that teenagers are still developing. These skills include self-regulation, forethought, and planning, and are controlled by parts of the brain that continue to change and grow up to age 25 (Spear, 2000). Teens may need to be particularly intentional in framing their long-term ambitions in terms of achievable, short-term goals.

The SMART goals technique may help break down potentially overwhelming long-term ambitions into more manageable and approachable short-term goals. For example, if your long-term goal is to excel athletically, you may find it helpful to break this long-term ambition down. See the following as an example:
  • Specific – Define a specific athletic goal. For example, being selected for your school’s varsity swim team.
  • Measurable – Identify the speed or time that you need to swim to be selected for the varsity team.
  • Achievable – What will you do to improve your swim speed? For example, you may decide that you will practice each stroke for 20 minutes a day as well as attend a swim clinic twice a week.
  • Relevant – Remind yourself why this is an important goal. Do you hope to swim competitively beyond high school? Is it important to your high school experience that you participate in varsity sports?
  • Time-bound – Define a time by which you want to have accomplished this goal. Being selected for a specific sports team is externally time-bound by the date of try-outs. For other goals, you may need to set a date of expected completion.

The SMART goals technique can similarly be used to break down goals you may have for your academic performance, your participation in music and the arts, personal finances, and health and fitness (Proctor, 2019).

Examples of Short-Term Goals for Students

The short video below explains how SMART goals may help you set and achieve academic goals, using the example goal of “Doing well on the next exam”.

Video: How to Set SMART Goals | Goal Setting for Students

Other Short-Term Goals Ideas

The Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) technique may help you identify short-term goals that serve your longer-term plans and ambitions. The short-term goals that you choose will probably be specific to your long-term ambitions. For example, if your long-term goal is to increase your financial security, your short-term goals may include eliminating all of your high-interest debt, having six months of expenses in your savings account, and increasing your credit score. This technique can be used to identify short-term goals for professional, academic, athletic, romantic, financial, social, recreational, and other parts of your life.

Short-Term Goals List

The most popular new year’s resolutions, which are usually short-term goals, include (Statista, 2021):
  • Exercising more
  • Losing weight
  • Saving money
  • Eating a better diet
  • Pursuing career ambitions
  • Spending more time with family
  • Taking up a new hobby
  • Spending less time on social media
  • Giving up smoking
  • Completing home renovations
  • Doing more volunteer or charity work.

All of these vague and abstract goals may be made more concrete and therefore more achievable if reframed and clarified within the SMART framework. For example, if your goal is to exercise more, you may have more success if you define a specific and measurable goal that is achievable, such as doing at least 30 minutes of intentional exercise 3 times a week. Reminding yourself of the reasons why you want to exercise and setting a date by which you want to be regularly and consistently exercising may also help you achieve your goal.

You can also use the OKRs technique to identify and clarify your short-term goals. For example, if your goal is to save money, you may find it helpful to set a specific savings goal, and then define the ways that you will achieve that goal. You may choose to limit how often you eat out, commit to buying second-hand items, or save on transportation expenses by walking or cycling whenever possible. The specific goals that you set for yourself will vary according to your particular ambitions and constraints. The important thing is to identify specific actions that you can take on the way to achieving your goal.

Articles Related to Short-Term Goals

Want to learn more? Here are some related articles that might be helpful.​​

Books Related to Short-Term Goals

Here are some books that may help you learn even more.

Final Thoughts on Short-Term Goals

Your specific short-term goals may be important to you for their own sake. For example, you may want to clean out your refrigerator for no deeper reason than wanting a cleaner refrigerator. However, setting specific short-term goals can also help you achieve longer-term ambitions (Latham & Locke, 2002). Cleaning out your refrigerator may be part of the larger project of creating the cleaner, less cluttered space that you’ve always wanted to live in, or it might be the first step in starting your own home-based baking business. Setting attainable short-term goals may help you reframe your long-term ambitions and put those loftier goals and dreams within reach.

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