Goals, Part Two: DUMB

Today I’m going to write about DUMB goals, a system I just made up myself to articulate some things that I have seen and experienced.  Some of us feel (OK, I feel) pressured by SMART goals and constrained by systems that keep demanding more and more.  I offer DUMB goals for those of us who want something different.

 

DUMB goals are Doable, Understandable, Measurable, and Basic.  Yes, two of those things are the same as SMART goals, but with different letters.  I kept those two because they were the most useful.

 

Let’s get the repeats out of the way first:  Doable and Measurable, which map to Attainable and Measurable in the SMART system.  We want goals that we can meet, so choosing a doable goal is important, even if we need some help figuring out what exactly is doable.

 

I’ll come clean:  I really hate measuring stuff.  I resent it every single morning when I step on the scale.  I dread my monthly dates with the tape measure.  I often swear at my Wristy Overlord (aka Apple Watch) when it reminds me that I have not hit a particular measured milestone on a given day.  Problem is, measuring stuff works.  I like stuff that works even more than I hate measuring things.  The key is finding the measurements that combine effectiveness in gauging our progress with something we can tolerate doing.  Using myself as an example, again, my fitness level does not have a high correlation with my daily step count, at least partly because my favorite exercises are biking and swimming, which do not add steps.  Cardio minutes, however, really do impact my fitness level, so I pay attention to getting my 30 minutes every day.

 

Now on to the letters I added:  Understandable and Basic.  Understandable, in terms of goals, means that we choose something that means something to us.  Waist-to-hip ratio, BMI, body fat percentage may all be useful metrics, but if they don’t mean anything to us, they are not useful as goal-markers.  We may do better with something like a clothing size or a scale weight or a round-the-block time.

 

My favorite letter in the DUMB goal is the B for Basic.  I believe that we learn to meet goals by meeting goals, so starting with very basic goals is the way to success.  I think that our first goals should be stupidly easy—do five minutes of cardio once a day, do one squat, one pushup, drink one glass of water.  We learn efficacy this way.  Then, once we know we CAN do things, we make it just a little harder, say, six minutes of cardio.  One step at a time is how we get to our goals.

 

Try it and tell me what you think!