Do SMART Goals Work? What George Doran Actually Wrote in 1981

In November 1981, a two-page piece appeared in a trade journal for managers, and it gave the world a mnemonic that is still printed on HR forms, school planners and January posters. George T. Doran’s “There’s a S.M.A.R.T. way to write management’s goals and objectives” ran in Management Review, volume 70, issue 11, pages 35 to 36. So do SMART goals work? The article itself never claimed they do. It was a writing guide for objectives inside organizations, and the evidence that exists about goals comes from a different body of research, which supports parts of SMART and says little about the rest.

That gap between what was written and what was repeated is the subject of this piece.

What did Doran actually write?

Library and citation records place the article in the November 1981 Management Review, the AMA Forum section, with Doran described as a consultant and former director of corporate planning at Washington Water Power Company (see the Scientific Research Publishing citation record and the ProjectSMART history). His subject was corporate planning. The people he addressed were executives who had to write objectives that a department could act on, and his complaint, as summarized, was that objectives were routinely written so loosely that nobody could tell whether they had been met.

His five letters, as commonly summarized, were these:

• Specific: target a particular area for improvement.
• Measurable: quantify, or at least propose, an indicator of progress.
• Assignable: say who will do it.
• Realistic: state what results can realistically be achieved given the available resources.
• Time-related: state when the result can be achieved.

Two features of that list matter later. First, the A is about a person. Second, Doran reportedly did not present the letters as a test every objective must pass. A summary quoted on the ProjectSMART history page has him saying that the acronym does not mean every objective written will have all five criteria, and other summaries add that quantifying is not always feasible at every management level. That comes secondhand, so check the original page before quoting it.

How did the letters change between 1981 and now?

Most popular explainers list the letters differently from Doran, and they rarely say so. The comparison below uses Doran’s five terms as reported in the sources above and the two most common later variants.

Letter	Doran, 1981 (as summarized)	Common popular version	What changed
S	Specific	Specific	Nothing
M	Measurable	Measurable	Nothing
A	Assignable: who will do it	Achievable or Attainable: can you do it	A person became a judgment about difficulty
R	Realistic: results attainable with available resources	Relevant (or Realistic)	Sometimes a synonym, sometimes a different test
T	Time-related: when the result can be achieved	Time-bound	Nearly the same

The A is the interesting row. In an organization, “assignable” answers a question every manager knows: whose name goes next to this? The popular replacement, “achievable,” asks whether the goal is within reach, which is already covered by the R. The result is a list in which two letters (A and R) repeat each other and the question of who answers for the goal is gone. Nobody need have done this on purpose. Mnemonics drift, and a checklist for a company objective loses its owner column when it is pasted onto a personal resolution.

Do SMART goals work, according to goal-setting research?

The research most people mean when they say “goal setting works” is the program of Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, whose 2002 review, “Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: a 35-year odyssey,” appeared in American Psychologist (volume 57, issue 9, pages 705 to 717; PubMed record). What follows sticks to the theory’s standard findings.

• Specific, difficult goals beat vague ones. In this literature, hard and specific goals lead to higher performance than easy goals, no goals, or an exhortation to “do your best.”
• Commitment is a condition. The effect of difficulty is strongest when people are committed to the goal, and that matters most for difficult goals, because they demand more effort and carry a lower chance of success.
• Feedback matters. A goal without information on progress does less.
• Complex tasks are different. For complicated work, the summaries stress shorter-term (proximal) goals.

Set that beside SMART. “Specific” and “time-related” line up with the specificity finding. “Measurable” makes feedback possible. But look at “realistic” and “achievable.” The theory’s headline result is about difficult goals, and a rule of thumb that pushes people to pick what feels attainable can point in the opposite direction from the research. That does not mean “set a huge goal and hope.” The same body of work says high goals help when the person is committed and has the ability, and it recommends sub-goals for complex tasks. It means that “do SMART goals work” has a split answer: the specificity and feedback parts have research behind them, and the “make it achievable” part is a folk addition that the research does not clearly back. Effect sizes vary by task, so none are given here.

There is also the matter of what SMART was tested on. Doran’s article was a practitioner’s proposal and not a study. Nothing in it is a trial in which SMART-formatted goals beat non-SMART ones for people setting personal goals. Locke and Latham’s findings concern goal properties, mostly in work and laboratory tasks, not the five-letter template. So the defensible statement is narrower than the poster: goals with specific targets and feedback tend to outperform vague ones, and SMART is one memorable way to force the specifics.

Where does a personal SMART goal actually break?

Here is where it breaks. Take a goal like “wake at 6:30 on weekdays for the next four weeks.” It is specific, measurable, dated, and within reach. It passes the popular test. Then the alarm goes off, and nobody but you knows whether you got up. The person who set the goal, the person who does the work, and the person who decides whether it counted are the same person, at their least reasonable hour.

Compare that with Doran’s setting. There, “assignable” put a second person in the loop by construction: a named owner, a manager who reviews, a colleague who is waiting on the output. The commitment that Locke and Latham describe as the condition for hard goals had a social scaffold built into the workplace. Strip that away, print the letters on a personal planner, and you keep the parts that are easy to copy and lose the part that carried the commitment.

This is an argument, not an established finding. The commitment literature supports the idea that commitment moderates the effect of difficult goals. The link from there to “a witness raises commitment for personal goals” is an inference, and no study I know of tests it in this exact form. There is also evidence that the wrong kind of audience can hurt: research associated with Peter Gollwitzer suggests that announcing an identity-level intention can deliver a premature feeling of progress, which is discussed in a piece on why announcing a goal can backfire. The difference, on that account, is between telling people who you are becoming and letting them see whether a specific thing happened.

What would a witness add to a SMART goal?

Three things, each a testable claim rather than a proven one.

1. A verdict that is not yours. “Got up at 6:30” becomes a fact someone else could check, which is what the M was for in the first place.
2. A cost for a miss that arrives on time. Difficult goals are hard because the pull toward quitting is strongest exactly when the goal is being tested. An observer changes what a miss means at that moment.
3. Feedback on a shorter cycle. The research on complex tasks favors proximal goals, and a daily check-in is about as proximal as a goal gets.

Mornings make a clean test case because the check is binary and it happens at a known minute. A bedtime goal is smeared across an evening; a wake-up goal is a single moment. The sleep research on why the wake end of the schedule is the one worth anchoring is covered in this comparison of bedtime and wake-time consistency, and the machinery that makes a wake time enforceable at all has its own long backstory in the history of the alarm clock.

An alarm app built on this idea is the plainest way to try the argument on yourself. DontSnooze gives you 30 seconds after the alarm to record a video showing you are up; if you do not, a random photo from your camera roll goes to your friends, and a streak counts consecutive on-time mornings. In Doran’s terms, the friends are the assignable part: they are the people who will know. Whether that raises follow-through for you is an empirical question about you, so a fair way to run it is two weeks with the goal written SMART and no witness, then two weeks with the same goal and the friends, and compare the number of on-time mornings.

What should you take from the 1981 article?

Three practical points hold up.

Write the goal so it can be checked. This is the durable part of SMART and the part with research behind it: a specific target, a date, and some way of knowing where you stand.

Do not treat the five letters as a pass mark. Doran, by the secondary accounts, did not either. A goal that lacks one criterion is not automatically a bad goal, and a goal that meets all five is not automatically a good one.

Put the missing A back. Ask who will know, and when, whether you did it. If the answer is “only me,” you have a wish with a schedule. The claim that a witness turns it into a commitment is my argument, drawn from the commitment research, and it deserves to be tested against your own record rather than accepted from an article.

The primary source is short enough to read in ten minutes. If you can get the November 1981 issue or a scan of pages 35 and 36, read what Doran wrote, and check my summary of it against the page.

The “time-bound” letter has a known weak spot too. Students in a classic study underestimated their own deadlines by about a third, which is covered in the planning fallacy write-up.