It’s that time of year. A fresh, new start. New Year’s resolutions have been made (and some have already been broken), a crisp new calendar is on our desks, waiting for jotted notes and creative meetings.

It’s the time of year for setting goals. Businesses set their goals for the year, what their bottom line should look like, how to inch out ahead (or sprint, perhaps) of their competition. Things feel new, even as it is the dead of winter here in the US, where I sit to write this.

Many of us are asked to think, and think deeply, about what we hope to do with the next twelve months, even as we reminisce about the months we’ve just left behind.

2021 was not an easy year for many of us, finding our way through many changes – in our work environments, our work styles, our social gatherings and tolerances – much is indeed different. But rather than waxing too poetic, it’s time to get down to brass tacks.

We as technical writers have to set goals for ourselves that outpace those of our developers, our scientists, our teams. There’s more to us than just batting cleanup for the tech teams. We know that. So how do we set goals when so much of what we do depends, wholly, on the work of others?

We do it by relying on the business-tested model of SMART goal setting. Many of us are familiar, but for those who are not, I will briefly elaborate.

SMART goals are thus:

Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.

I daresay that the two most important words in that acronym, at least as far as I am concerned, are Achievable and Time-Bound. As a writer, I know how to be specific, and relevancy is the home base of technical writers. I truly want to focus in on Achievable first.

I talk, from time to time, about law school. Indeed, even at my age (not terrifically young), I’d like to go to law school. I cannot, though, set “Get a law degree” as a SMART goal for 2022. It simply takes too long, and it isn’t achievable. It is something I can achieve in a few years, if I ever get started, sure, but not before I turn the calendar to 2023. So instead, if I want to be serious about it, my goal should be: “Study for and enroll in the LSAT by July, 2022.” That is a specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goal.

How so?

I stated very clearly what it is – study and enroll. (Okay, I suppose that is two goals rolled into one, but they do go hand-in-hand.) I know how to measure it – my enrollment will be provable with a receipt that I’ve paid for and scheduled the test. It is achievable – there’s no reason I can’t prepare in 6 months, realistically. It is relevant – I need the LSAT in order to reach my larger goal, and it is relevant to my career in that it is continued learning. And it certainly is time-bound, given that my deadline is July.

I probably will not take the LSAT this summer. Or maybe I will. We’ll see.

As a professional technical writer, I can hone in more specifically.

My company is adopting a new technology to assist users by adding in-line help to our customer-facing text. It offers targeted help messages, and on-demand walk-throughs. Not everyone on the technical writing is a superuser of this software, but I think becoming one of the experts would be a great thing for me. So… I’d write a SMART goal something like this:

Support technical content team adoption and understanding of customer experience software by attending two webinars and presenting learning to the team by Q3.

Here’s another:

Implement a team adoption and use plan for new customer experience software by becoming a lead learner/power user of the tool and updating the technical content strategy team monthly in Q3 and Q4 at lunch and learn or content drop-in meetings.

Both of these demonstrate ways that a technical writer can work outside the general product domain, but still provide measurable value, and therefore important goals, as a writer.

What if your primary direction, though, is actually product improvement? Well, then, SMART goals are even smoother to set. Think about the specific thing about your product or service that you think needs more clarity. (Let’s say, a migration guide.) Then determine the part(s) that you can improve most effectively right away. (This part is achievable.) Recognize how you will break it into component parts. (How will you measure your progress?) List why it is meaningful to your team. (Relevancy is all over this part.) And last, set a finish date or intended submission. (This is how you make it time-bound.) Here’s an example for that:

My goal is to revise Sections 1-3 of the User Migration Guide to minimize sentence length and remove broken URLs to improve user experience and decrease page load time. By the end of Q2, I should have the first revision ready for review by SMEs and by the end of Q3, a final version ready to release.

This kind of straightforward documentation thinking is how verbose, “clunky” documentation is streamlined and improved every day. Just bringing it up in a meeting with your manager or team can help to spur conversations about ongoing ways to improve documentation that might otherwise be considered final, and not touched again until the next release boundary. With today’s tools and more consistent documentation updates, users really appreciate the tweaks that we can make, like omitting needless words, and broken link cleanup!

When you think about what you want to do in 2022, don’t limit yourself to a specific area of work. Think about whether you want to learn a new skill (Programming in Python), or add another area of product knowledge to your growing arsenal (check out the latest in APIs or integrations), and see where that leads you. And absolutely remember to toss in a personal goal or two (or three). As for me – Law School is not out of the question, but becoming a yoga instructor is definitely on the goals list.

And to that – Namaste.