Whatever the nature of your challenge on any given day, it will be easier to deal with if you've set yourself clear goals. Without goals, you have nothing clear to work toward, which means that your day-to-day focus can lose its edge. Goals can be flexible, however — there's no reason why you can't change them as you go or add new ones.

If you miss your goal, it's not the end of the world; it simply means that you need to reassess what you're aiming for or perhaps how to achieve it. In the meantime, you'll find it useful to remember the popular S.M.A.R.T. acronym for goal-setting. Making your goals Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timed helps you on your way, as does writing your goals down.

Specific Goals

The best goals are those that are specific enough in nature to offer a clear path. It's not enough to say that you want to improve your professional development. Instead, you need to be specific: For example, you could set a goal of taking two online courses in the next year on sales techniques and on bookkeeping. In fact, if you noted the source of the classes, that's even more specific…and even better.

Measurable Goals

The concept of measurable goals is directly connected to specific goals. If the goal isn't measurable, how will you know when you've achieved it? How will you know when you're making progress? “Increase sales” is something that most business owners would like to do, but it's not measurable in a meaningful way; even an increase of one or two sales could technically mean that the goal was achieved. In this case, it would be more effective to set a goal of increasing sales of gift baskets by 15 percent compared to the previous year.

Attainable Goals

An attainable goal is one that you have control over. If you're writing a book that you want to have published, for example, you might think that your goal is to have a publisher publish your book. But you really have no control over what the publisher does or doesn't do, so it's not fair to set yourself this goal. Instead, set a goal that you can attain, i.e., to send the book proposal or manuscript to ten agents and ten publishers, for example.

Realistic Goals

It's easy to set goals that sound great, but that are, in fact, unrealistic. Think about the time and resources that you have available to you and the effort that it will take to achieve the goal. The goal should feel as though it's stretching you, but not that it's unachievable. For example, if you want to increase publication of a newsletter, it might not be realistic to go from six to twelve issues a year in the space of a year — but going to eight issues might be achievable and beneficial to your business.

Timed Goals

The best goals have a time frame attached to them. For example, in the gift basket example, increasing sales by 15 percent in the next twelve months is specific, measurable and timed — and powerful. Keep time frames in mind when you're setting goals, so that you're setting short-, mid- and long-term goals. In fact, some of the shorter term goals might be ones that help you achieve longer term goals.