Make a PACT, Not a SMART Goal
Anne-Laure Le Cunff · 2019
"SMART goals fixate on an outcome you do not control. Le Cunff's alternative, the PACT — Purposeful, Actionable, Continuous, Trackable — commits you to a repeatable output for a set period, turns the result into data, and is the unit of what she later called tiny experiments."
'Get 5,000 subscribers in 25 weeks' is a SMART goal: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound. It is also almost entirely outside your control, and for ambitious, long-horizon aims — learn to code, write a book, change careers — the framework quietly discourages you from starting at all, because you cannot know how long it will take or whether it is 'achievable'. Anne-Laure Le Cunff's replacement is the PACT: 'Publish 25 newsletters over the next 25 weeks.' Same ambition, but every part of it is an action you can take this week and mark as done or not done.
PACT is Purposeful, Actionable, Continuous and Trackable. Purposeful means aligned with a long-term aim rather than merely relevant right now — you will not sustain a commitment you do not care about. Actionable shifts attention from distant outcomes to present outputs you control: the run, the call, the draft. Continuous means the action is simple and repeatable, which sidesteps the research-forever paralysis of too many options and lets you adapt as you learn. Trackable is deliberately not 'measurable': stats are overrated for most goals, so the tracking is binary, like a GitHub contribution graph — did you do the thing today, yes or no? The shift is from outcome to output, from a finish line to a cadence. In her 2025 book Tiny Experiments Le Cunff makes the PACT the core unit of a curiosity-driven life: 'I will [action] for [duration]', run for the stated period, then reviewed — continue, tweak or stop — with the outcome treated as information rather than a verdict. A missed day is a data point, not a failed goal, and the review is where the learning happens.
What is the key difference between a SMART goal and a PACT, in Le Cunff's framing?
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The explanation above is written with AI assistance. These are the originals — go to them to check it.
- SMART goals are not so smart: make a PACT insteadAnne-Laure Le Cunff / Ness Labs
Interstitial Journaling
"Logging a few sentences at the exact transition point between tasks — what you just did, how you feel, what's next — reduces cognitive load and counters procrastination more effectively than either rigid daily planning or end-of-day review, because it intervenes precisely at the moment attention is most likely to drift."