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SMART Goals Checker

Type a goal and it is scored against all five SMART criteria — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound — with the reasoning shown for each number. The three that live in your wording are read off the sentence; the other two are yours to judge. No goal yet? The builder writes one from five short prompts. SMART was coined by George T. Doran in a 1981 Management Review article.

Inputs

Type the goal as you'd say it out loud. Three of the five dimensions can be read straight out of the wording — the scores below fill in as you type. No goal yet? Build one with the five prompts underneath.

What your wording says

Overall rating
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Total score
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Average
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Weakest dimension
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Suggestion
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Build the sentence

Five short answers, one finished goal. Each prompt maps to a letter of SMART, so a filled-in sentence scores well by construction. Send it up to the box above to check it.

One action verb plus its object — the S.
The number that settles "did I do it?" — the M.
Evidence you can, or the time you'll commit — the A.
Who benefits and what changes — the R.
A date, not "soon" — the T. "by" is added for you.

About SMART Goals Checker

Origin

George T. Doran coined "SMART" in a November 1981 article in Management Review titled "There’s a S.M.A.R.T. way to write management’s goals and objectives".

Variants

SMARTER adds Evaluated and Reviewed. Some swap "Attainable" for "Achievable" or "Aggressive". OKRs (Objectives & Key Results) supersede SMART in many companies — broader, more quarterly.

Why time-bound matters

A deadline-less goal will be deprioritized indefinitely. Even loose deadlines ("by end of Q3") create the pressure that distinguishes a goal from a wish.

How the auto-score reads your goal

It is plain pattern-matching on your wording, not an opinion about your life. Measurable looks for a quantity — digits, a currency symbol, a percentage, or a unit such as miles, minutes, pages or clients — after date-like numbers have been set aside, so "by 2026" never counts as a measurement. Time-bound looks for a calendar date, a month, a year, a countdown ("in 8 weeks"), a repeating cadence ("every weekday"), or a named horizon ("end of Q3"). Specific rewards a concrete action verb and a sentence long enough to act on, and subtracts for filler like "better", "more", "some" or "improve". Every score comes with its reasoning, and every score is editable — type over any box and that dimension keeps your number.

Why Achievable and Relevant are your call

Nothing in a sentence reveals whether you have the hours, the money or the appetite for it, so those two start from a neutral prompt instead of a fake verdict. The panel still tells you what would move them: name the resource you will commit ("30 minutes before work, four days a week") to raise Achievable, and finish "…so that ___" to raise Relevant. If you cannot finish that clause, the goal may be someone else's.

The builder sentence

The five prompts slot into one template: I will [what], measured by [how], by [when]. This is realistic because [evidence], and it matters because [why]. Answering all five produces a goal that scores well by construction, because each prompt is one letter of SMART. Blanks show up as bracketed gaps so you can copy a half-finished draft and come back to it.