Frameworks for setting targets are widely taught in workplaces and personal development writing. Their usefulness depends on assumptions that hold for some pursuits and not for others.
They assume the endpoint is knowable in advance
A target has to be stated before the work starts, which requires that the person setting it already knows what success looks like.
For well-defined tasks this is unproblematic, since the finished state can be described precisely at the outset and progress measured against it.
For exploratory work the requirement inverts the process, because the point of the activity is to find out what is worth achieving, and an early specification forecloses that.
Measurability selects what gets attention
Anything specified as a target receives effort, and anything left unspecified competes with it for the same limited attention.
The consequence is well documented in organisations, where measured aspects of a job improve while unmeasured ones quietly decline.
Applied to a personal practice this can hollow out the activity, as the count of sessions completed gradually replaces whatever the sessions were for.
Difficulty and specificity have opposite risks
A target that is too easy produces no effort, and one that is far beyond reach is abandoned rather than approached, which most systems acknowledge.
What they discuss less is that specificity itself carries a cost, since a narrow target ignores useful outcomes adjacent to it.
Practitioners who treat their targets as provisional and revise them as the work reveals itself tend to describe better results than those who treat revision as failure.
Process targets behave differently from outcome targets
An outcome target names a result that depends partly on circumstances outside the person's control.
A process target names an action that is entirely within their control, and is therefore unaffected by luck, other people or timing.
Contemplative and craft traditions overwhelmingly favour the second, prescribing what to do daily rather than what to attain, and treating attainment as something that follows or does not.
Contemplative traditions largely reject the framing
Practice literature commonly warns against pursuing particular states as goals, on the grounds that measuring progress interferes directly with the practice being measured and introduces an evaluator where none is wanted.
The prescribed alternative is regularity without self-evaluation, with assessment left to a teacher who can see patterns over months that the practitioner cannot see from inside a single session.
That is a genuine disagreement with modern goal-setting rather than a softer version of it, and it is worth noticing when the two vocabularies are used together.