Creating SMART Goals to Grow Your Freelance Writing Career
If you read that title and groaned inwardly, you’re not alone. I also ‘urgh’ out loud while writing it. The idea of ‘goals’ and ‘goal setting’ has pretty much been rammed down our throats - especially after the year we’ve just had and the roll-in of a new year (#goalsetting central). It’s a topic that’s been visited and revisited countless times, and I’m with you in thinking it’s been done and dusted.
Goals also feel a little .. boring? Restrictive? Hard work?
A lot of my friends comment on how organised I am, but the truth is I don’t feel particularly disciplined, and I’m terrible at keeping myself accountable. When I decided freelancing full-time was something I wanted to commit to fully, I knew that wasn’t going to fly, because, clients! I’ve written about goals and goal-setting a dozen times and even created resources for my students to use to help them get clear on their academic and career goals. I’ve tried to be goal-oriented in previous years for my professional development but usually lose interest quickly.
As a creative freelancer, I’ve started to realise how important setting goals is. I no longer have supervisors and coworkers checking in on me. I need to create a more disciplined structure to make sure I’m delivering on my responsibilities and progressing in the different domains of my professional life.
So, goal setting is back on the table and I decided to go back to the basics. I’m not sure how long I’ll be freelancing full-time for, but it will be the rest of this year, and I want to make sure I achieve the things that are important to me during that time. But there are two questions I needed to answer to do that:
What are those things?
How do I break them down into achievable milestones?
I hate to be cheesy, but it meant I needed to get SMART.
What is SMART for Goal Setting?
You might have come across this acronym for preparing answers in interviews (I know I’ve delivered more workshops on it than I can count!).
If you’re anything like me and have a habit of setting goals that then fall to the wayside, get forgotten about and ultimately are never achieved - SMART is something that can help. I used to write goals out like this:
Find new clients.
Write more.
(Pretty obvious why they never really went anywhere.)
What people, myself included, often don’t realise is how you write your goals can significantly impact whether you successfully achieve them. Using the SMART acronym to write out and plan your goals works super well because it aligns with our psychology, helping us to understand, remember, and ‘chip-away’ at goals effectively and proactively.
Here’s what SMART stands for:
SPECIFIC
This a bit of a no-brainer, but to achieve a goal, it helps to be specific about what it is you want to achieve. Let’s use my example of ‘Find new clients’.
Vague: Find new clients.
Specific: Find new careers-related content writing clients.
Now, I have a market to aim for. I’ve based this goal on the topic I’m specialised in and the type of work I want to do - careers and content writing.
MEASURABLE
Now, you need to think of something to measure your goal against, so you have something to work towards to signal you’ve ‘achieved’ your goals.
Unmeasured: Find new careers-related content writing clients.
Measured: Find six new careers-related content writing clients.
ACHIEVABLE
This one is super important. One of the main reasons we fail with our goals is because we set lofty targets or outputs that simply aren’t achievable. We fall short and as a result, feel pretty rubbish. Making goals achievable helps you stay motivated.
Unachievable: Find six new careers-related content writing clients.
Achievable: Find two new careers-related content writing clients.
Six new clients is a lot. Two is far more achievable and realistic for me to work towards.
RELEVANT
Here’s where you can get into some nitty-gritty. It’s all well and good setting a goal that’s Specific, Measurable and Achievable, but if it isn’t connected to the longer-term vision or even the current vision you have for what you’re building, then it’s not going to help you.
Let’s say, as a freelancer, I’ve decided I no longer want to write content in the careers space any more and want to focus on building my presence as a psychology and health writer:
Irrelevant: Find two new careers-related content writing clients.
Relevant: Find two new psychology or health-related content writing clients.
OR let’s say I want to keep writing careers content, but I’m over one-off short term gigs. I need clients I can build relationships with and who offer stability as I do this full-time and rely on my freelance income:
Irrelevant: Find two new careers-related content writing clients.
Relevant: Find two new careers-related content writing clients, offering a minimum of 6 months work.
The more relevant you are to your longer-term goals as a freelancer (in this case) the more you’ll be able to work towards achieving them proactively.
TIMELY
Lastly, you need to set a timeframe for your goal. This has been super pertinent for me, a chronic procrastinator who works best with a short deadline as it moves my butt into gear!
Untimely: Find two new careers-related content writing clients, offering a minimum of 6months work.
Timely: Find two new careers-related content writing clients, offering a minimum of 6 months work, by the end of March.
A small thing that makes a big difference in accountability.
Using SMART to write out your goals is a process of clarifying your goals to stay accountable and achieve them. Every goal you develop should align with this process - it might feel awkward or long-winded at first, but you might be surprised at how effective it is.
Create A Vision and Start From There
Of course, to start drilling down your goals and getting SMART with them, you need to be clear on your vision as a freelancer. What do you want to do? Who do you want to do it with? What type of work energises you and which doesn’t?
For some people, generating ideas and talking about the bigger vision comes naturally. For others, it’s easy to get lost in the details and forget to take a step back.
As freelancers, we can get lost hustling for new clients (or taking care of the ones we have) and lose sight of why we started working for ourselves, to begin with. Envisioning your ideal freelance life as a professional career and personally is vital for clarifying the goals you need to start putting in place and working towards. Otherwise, you could waste time moving in the wrong direction, working towards something that feels inauthentic or simply just stalemating in your career.
Once you’ve got a handle on that, getting SMART about things is definitely the next step forward.
