You can find a hundred guides on how to set goals, which ones to avoid, and which ones matter most. What most of them skip is a simpler question: how many types of goals are there, actually? You can't really choose one until you know what you're choosing from.
So here are the six types we've landed on, plus how to make sure you're setting the right version of each. Some goals will fit into more than one category, that's normal, these aren't rigid boxes.
Don't set the wrong goal
Before getting into types, one thing matters more than any of them: setting the right goal in the first place. Get that part wrong and it doesn't matter how well you execute or which category the goal falls into, you'll just arrive somewhere you didn't actually want to be.
So remember this: the most important type of goal is the right one.
How do you know if it's right? Start with whether it lines up with your values, personal or otherwise. If a goal conflicts with what you actually care about, skip it, no matter how many books or well-meaning people say you should chase it.
Take "make a million dollars a year." Nothing wrong with that goal on its own, but what if hitting it meant missing your kid's childhood or treating your team badly along the way? That's when a perfectly good-sounding goal turns into the wrong one.
Sometimes it's not the goal that's wrong, it's the approach. That's where a real framework helps, one that gets you to the right goal and actually gets you to follow through on it. SMART goals are our favorite. Here's the short version.
How to set SMART goals
We've gone deeper on this in a full article on SMART goals, but the short version: a SMART goal checks five boxes.
- Specific. Say exactly what you're aiming for. "I want to travel" becomes "I'm visiting Greece next summer."
- Measurable. You can quantify it, so you know for certain whether you hit it. It's part of why weight-loss goals are so popular: the scale doesn't lie.
- Achievable. Realistic given your actual resources. Matching Elon Musk's net worth isn't happening for most of us, mostly because luck plays a bigger role there than people like to admit. Starting a business or retiring early is a different story.
- Relevant. It lines up with your values and gets you somewhere you actually want to be, not just somewhere impressive-sounding.
- Time-bound. A deadline creates urgency. Without one, goals tend to drift on forever without ever getting evaluated.
The six types of goals
With the framework out of the way, here are the six categories most goals fall into. We'll start broad, then get specific.
1. Long-term goals
These are your bucket-list goals, the big ones everything else orbits around. They usually run a year or longer.
A few examples:
- Become fluent in a language
- Publish a book
- Become a serial entrepreneur
No amount of money or effort compresses these into a shorter timeline. Some things just take time, and figuring out which of your goals actually belong here versus in the short-term bucket gets a lot easier once you're running them through the SMART framework anyway.
2. Short-term goals
Short-term goals run on a much smaller clock, sometimes a week, sometimes a quarter. Finishing a blog post by Friday is short-term. So is finishing your book's first draft by the end of the quarter, just at a bigger scale.
The "achievable" part of SMART matters most here. Can you actually pull this off with the time and resources you have right now? If not, it's probably a long-term goal that needs to be broken into smaller, more realistic short-term pieces.
3. Personal development goals
This category covers a lot: health, personal growth, even life milestones like getting married or having kids. What sets it apart is that it has nothing to do with your job.
These are the goals about who you're becoming, usually pursued in your own time without anyone telling you to. If you don't have any right now, it's worth setting one. It's easy to let your career eat all your attention and forget you're a whole person outside of it, and having something to work toward outside your job tends to matter most on the days work itself isn't going well.
4. Financial goals
Financial goals cover everything from tightening up your daily spending to saving for retirement to buying your first place. Whatever your income or your other goals look like, getting better with money makes everything else easier to pull off. It's worth having both a long-term and a short-term version.
These often overlap with personal development. Cut back on drinking to improve your health, and you'll probably spend less money too, which knocks out a financial goal at the same time without you really trying.
5. Career goals
We've written a whole piece on this one, but the short version: have career goals at all. Too many people take whatever job shows up and just hope sticking around long enough leads somewhere.
You're probably more deliberate than that, maybe even eyeing your own business down the line. Either way, treat it like a marathon. You're not doubling your salary tomorrow, but you can ask for a raise. You can spend evenings building a skill that gets you to the next role, or find someone a few years ahead of you willing to show you the way.
On a smaller scale, track your sales numbers, your weekly output, the number of new people you meet in your field. Just setting and watching those numbers puts you ahead of most people around you.
6. Business goals
If you don't own a business, this one might feel irrelevant. But if starting your own company is even a background idea in your head, understanding how to set business goals before you jump in saves you from floundering once you actually do.
Most people default to financial goals here, revenue targets, keeping costs down. Fair enough, money matters (nonprofits included, someone still has to keep the lights on). But it's worth thinking past the balance sheet too: how many people you help, how many jobs you create, what running it does for your own life.
If you went out on your own, it's probably because you believed you could do something for yourself that a regular job wouldn't let you. Whatever that something is for you, working in line with your values, building something genuinely new, having more time with your family, that's part of your business goals too, even if it never shows up on a spreadsheet.
Write it down
That's the overview. Pick the goal, run it through SMART, know which type it is, and you're most of the way to actually finishing it.
If you need somewhere to put it, the Self Journal covers the full range, setting, planning, and reviewing goals of every type on this list.
And if you want something you can glance at every day without opening a notebook, the Weekly Action Pad breaks any goal down into the kind of weekly chunks you can actually knock out one at a time.
Put your goals into action: Use the Self Journal to plan, track, and review your goals over 13 weeks.
