The start of a new year is always an exciting time as you now have a whole year ahead of you to accomplish something new. It’s also right after the holidays where hopefully you had time to slow things down a little and recharge which always helps a little before jumping into something new.  

For many people they set new goals for themselves such as working out more or to travel to another country. I’ve also taken time at the start of the year to think about what goals I wanted to accomplish and it got me thinking about goal setting.

Setting goals are great but I wanted to know how I can start to build a plan around those goals so that I have a better chance of accomplishing them. After doing some research I came across the principles of SMART goal setting. It seemed like a useful format to follow to help me get started on putting my goals together and maybe some of you will find this helpful as well. 

SMART Goals

SMART stands for:

• S = specific

• M = measurable

• A = attainable

• R = relevant

• T = time-bound

Essentially when you set up your goal you should touch on each of these sections in relation to your goals. Specific (S) essentially asks what do you want to accomplish? You should be very detailed here so it’s clear without a doubt what your goal is. For example, if my goal was to lose weight I would say something such as, I want to lose 5 pounds by working out 3 times a week and eating better food. 

Measurement (M) asks you to come up with a way of tracking your goals so you can tell when you’ve reached it. Going with the weight loss example, I could measure myself by taking my weight at the end of each week. If it goes down I know I’m making progress towards losing those 5 pounds. 

The next one, attainable (A), asks you if this goal is something you feel you can actually accomplish. If my goal was weight loss, I’m confident I could workout 3 times a week. If I had said 5 times, I don’t think I would be able to do it consistently.

Relevant (R) asks if your goal is something that can be realistically achieved addition to asking yourself if it’s the right time and/or does this fit in with what you really want to do. Again going with the weight loss concept, if I set my goal to lose 5 pounds but only gave myself 1 week I don’t that that would be possible for me. Alternatively, if I had just booked a one month vacation this might not be the right time for me to try and lose 5 pounds as I know I’ll be enjoying all the different foods on my trip. But, I feel that if set the right amount of time I could realistically accomplish the goal. 

Finally, time-bound (T) is simply setting a deadline for your goal. If you setup a goal without a timeline it’s very easy to quickly push it out to the point where you will never accomplish it. This is why setting a specific date is important and it adds a little healthy pressure so you stay on track. 

My Photographic Goals

By going through this exercise I learned about goal setting and now wanted to apply it to my photography. I’ve never actually written down photography goals before but I’m excited to try it this year. 

So what is my goal this year? My personal photo goal is to sell a few photo prints.  I chose this as a goal because if I can improve my photography where someone would want to put it up on their wall it would be a major accomplishment. I would be able to know I’ve reached my goal through the actual exchange. I figured the best way to measure my progress towards this goal was by increasing and monitoring my social exposure on a weekly basis. I therefore committed to doing the following:

• One blog post a week

• Setting up and posting to Pinterest weekly

• Reaching out to 5 galleries in SF 

• Reaching out to popular blogs online to be featured or possible guest post

• Post to Instagram a couple times a week

I think these tasks are challenging but attainable and realistic as well. Lastly I set a deadline of June, which gives me six months to make it happen. 

In addition to writing this goal out I also wrote down what I think are possible blockers to me performing these tasks. I found this helpful as I could start thinking about better ways to handle these eventualities, such as getting swamped at work. I’m excited to see how things go and I’ll report back on this goal in six months!

In Conclusion

I hope this little overview caused you to think more about your goals and a format to help you accomplish them. There are also a lot of great resources on SMART goal setting which can provide templates and further tools to help you with your goal setting. 

Let me know your thoughts in the comments and if you set your own photography goals I would love to hear them. Until next week happy shooting!