SMART Goals for Writing: Examples That Actually Work

Most people are terrible at setting goals.

Writers are especially bad about it.

“I want to write more this year.”

“I should probably start a newsletter at some point.”

“I really need to finish my book.”

Those aren’t goals.

They’re all respectable ambitions, but none of them tell you what to do tomorrow morning. So they’re really just nice thoughts you jotted down in a notebook once.

The challenge is turning those ambitions into something you can actually execute.

That’s exactly what the SMART framework was designed to solve.

It was first described in a 1981 management article by George T. Doran as a way to turn vague corporate objectives into concrete ones, introducing what later became known as SMART goals.

The acronym stuck because it solved a real problem. People were setting goals that sounded impressive but didn’t translate into anything actionable.

But SMART forced those goals to become specific enough that someone could actually do something with them.

What each letter in SMART actually means

The acronym itself is straightforward:

• Specific — the goal describes a clear action.
• Measurable — you can tell whether you’ve completed it.
• Achievable — the scope is realistic for the timeframe.
• Relevant — the goal actually matters to what you’re trying to accomplish.
• Time-bound — there’s a clear deadline or schedule.

But notice what all five pieces have in common.

They force a goal to describe work, not just intentions.

And that’s the real reason it works. Take that common “I really need to finish my book” goal from earlier that writers set all the time…

It sounds like a reasonable goal, but the moment you look closer, the questions start piling up.

How many words? How often are you writing? When exactly does “this year” stop being enough time?

And most importantly…

What are you actually supposed to do tomorrow?

A SMART goal answers those questions.

So instead of “finish that book this year,” the goal might become something like “write 800 words every weekday until the manuscript reaches 70,000 words.”

Now you know what success looks like, you know the pace required to get there, and you know exactly what the work looks like when you sit down tomorrow.

SMART goals don’t create motivation, but they do create clarity about the work ahead of you.

The outcome trap

There’s one problem with SMART goals that most people don’t talk about, though.

Even when they’re written correctly, they often focus on the wrong thing.

Get 10,000 email subscribers…

Finish a book this year…

Grow my blog traffic…

Those outcomes are mostly (if not completely) outside your control.

You can’t force people to subscribe. You can’t guarantee that traffic will grow. You can’t promise that life won’t derail your writing routine halfway through the year.

What you can control is the work itself — how often you sit down to write, how consistently you publish, and how many ideas you actually turn into finished pieces.

Outcomes are what you hope happens. Process is what you actually do.

That’s why the SMART goals that do well usually focus on process, not outcomes.

So instead of setting a goal like “grow my email list to 10k subscribers,” a process-focused goal might look like:

Publish one article every Friday for the next six months.

That goal doesn’t guarantee a specific result, but it tells you exactly what work needs to happen (and most of the time that’s the part people were missing).

Once you start looking at goals this way, the SMART framework becomes much easier to use.

How to write a SMART goal in one sentence

If you strip away the acronym and the productivity jargon, most SMART goals follow a surprisingly simple pattern.

You define the work, define the amount, and then define the timeframe. In practice, they end up looking something like this:

I will [specific action] for [measurable amount] every [defined interval] for the next [timeframe].

And the ones that fall apart usually do so for the same reason: one of those pieces never gets defined. The action stays vague, the amount isn’t measurable, or maybe the timeframe quietly disappears.

Once all three are clear, the goal stops being an idea scribbled down on a sticky note and starts becoming an honest-to-goodness plan.

A few SMART goal examples for writing, blogging, email marketing, and freelancing

I will write 800 words every weekday for the next 30 days.

That’s a writing habit.

I will publish one new article every Tuesday for the next three months.

That’s a blogging cadence.

I will send one email every Friday for the rest of the year.

That’s a newsletter goal.

I will spend 30 minutes pitching article ideas each weekday for the next four weeks.

That’s a goal aimed at landing paid writing work.

None of those goals guarantee a particular outcome, of course. They don’t promise bestseller status, viral traffic, or a flood of new subscribers.

But when the work happens consistently, the outcomes tend to take care of themselves.

Want a printable version?

If you want a quick reference, I’ve put together a simple printable SMART goal template you can download here.

But you probably don’t need it.

If you remember the one-sentence formula, you already have everything required. It’s the same structure I’ve used for years when planning writing projects:

I will [specific action] for [measurable amount] every [defined interval] for the next [timeframe].

That’s it.

Write that sentence on a scrap piece of paper.

Fill in the blanks.

Now you have a goal that actually tells you what to do tomorrow.