10 Free Goal-Setting Templates & Planners in Excel & ClickUp

Goal setting is an important process for any individual or organization. When done correctly, goal setting can help you prioritize tasks, identify milestones, and ensure that you’re on the right trajectory to achieve your goals.

However, many people find goal setting to be difficult and time-consuming. That’s where templates come in!

In this blog post, we’ll cover the benefits of goal setting and provide you with a variety of templates to help you set and achieve any business, personal development, and life goals.

What is Goal Setting?

Strategic goal setting is something that is often overlooked, but it’s one of the most important things you can do for your personal development and growth in all areas of your life. 

When you set goals, you’re essentially putting a roadmap in place to help you get from point A to point B. With a clearly mapped outline of your goals, you’re more likely to act on your plans. Combined with the right tools, goal setting can help you take the most effective way to it your short and long-term goals, and encourage you to measure progress regularly.

Bonus: SMART Goals for Students

Here are some other key benefits of goal setting:

• Increases productivity: Outlining and breaking down your goals into targets can help you focus on achieving the smaller steps, which helps boost motivation and builds momentum
• Creates a clear roadmap to follow: Clear SMART goals help you stay motivated by providing a clear roadmap of priorities and major milestones with a time frame in mind, preventing you from putting off your goals
• Promotes accountability: Establishing and noting your goals down can help you bring your thoughts into reality by giving you a plan of action that you’re solely responsible for 
• Improves time management: Goal-setting helps teams determine priorities, set realistic time-bound goals, and ensures that your team manages time and other resources effectively as they work towards achieving the goals highlighted
• Promotes positive behavior: Setting goals with achievable steps can elicit positive behaviors and habits that, in time turn into a way of living and mindset

Needless to say, you can benefit a lot from goal setting. So whether you’re new to goal setting or want to improve your process, these goal-setting templates can provide guidance and a framework to help you get started on the right foot.

Each one is designed to help you achieve your goals in a specific way. Get to know what each one is for and how you can use them to level up your goal-setting strategy!

10 Free Goal Setting Templates

1. ClickUp SMART Goals Template

What do you want to achieve this year? How about this month? This week? 

When you set goals and achieve them, you create a pattern of success that leads to even more success. But there’s more to goal setting than just writing down a list of goals. You need to use SMART goals if you want to see real results. 

SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Setting goals with this approach in mind can help you focus on one thing at a time and prevent you from making too many goals that can derail your progress.

Set goals in ClickUp and take advantage of the ClickUp SMART Goals Template to give you a framework for goal setting, and help you organize your goals and targets into a manageable system. You could also customize this template in any way to ensure it works for what you need and gear you up for success.

2. ClickUp OKRs Template

OKR stands for Objective and Key Results—objectives are considered the “what,” and key results are the “how.” These goals are often created quarterly and are typically short-term goals, and help individuals and teams that want to set ambitious goals with measurable progress.

With ClickUp’s flexible structure and with the assistance of ClickUp’s OKRs Template, you’ll be able to build out a team, department, and company-wide business objectives more effectively! 

Use this template for goal setting to help you create an organized, functional, and high-level List view of your OKRs, and measure your progress every step of the way. 

Bonus: OKR software for startups!

3. ClickUp Balanced Scorecard Template

A balanced scorecard (BSC) is a goal-setting and strategic management performance metric that organizations use to help improve their performance and operations. BSC provides companies with a framework for tracking and managing their strategy and gives decision-makers a high-level picture of the organization’s performance. 

In simple terms, these key indicators let organizations know whether they’re hitting their goals and if they’re on track to accomplish future goals. 

Plan smarter and start strong by using the ClickUp Balanced Scorecard Template! This goal-setting template can help by providing a foundation for prioritizing and tracking your tasks and projects and creating a clear plan of action.

4. ClickUp Sales KPI Template

If you work in sales, then you already know that there are a lot of things to keep track of. Take a load off of your shoulders by creating an organized and functional system for keeping track of your sales metrics all in one place.  

With the ClickUp Sales KPI Template, you’ll be able to build a hefty and detailed view of your sales metrics from multiple angles. Use this template as part of your goal-setting strategy to improve your sales performance, easily identify opportunities, keep track of your prospects, and accelerate sales growth. 

5. ClickUp Career Goals Template

How do you want your career to look like? This is a question that many professionals ask themselves, but they might not have a confident answer because they haven’t planned it out yet.

That’s why creating a roadmap of your desired career path is important! It can help you visualize your professional journey, create career development goals, guide you to stay on course, and prevent you from diverting far from your goals. 

Use the Career Path Template in ClickUp to give you a solid starting point, and easily map out your pathway from A-Z. You could also customize it to fit your specific needs, goals, and preferences. 

So whether you’re just starting in your career or are looking to switch gears, this template will help you create actionable steps that can steer you in the right direction!

6. ClickUp Exercise Log Template

This might seem a little out of place, but hear us out. We’re big believers in having a strong work-life balance so we highly encourage you to reconnect with your core values and set personal goals!

The ClickUp Exercise Log Template is designed with your fitness goals in mind. No matter if you’re training for a marathon, or simply want an organized way to log your exercises, use this template as a fitness journal to stay on track to hit your goals, all big and small wins!

ClickUp also offers a variety of other templates for personal use. Explore other useful templates like the Self-Care, New Year’s Resolution, and Personal Development Templates by visiting our Template Center!

7. Excel Goal Setting Worksheet Template

Most people know Microsoft Excel for its spreadsheets, and use them to tabulate results and come up with additional analyses and results to match their expectations in the company, but did you know you could also use it for goal-setting purposes, too?

Whether you’re planning your weekly or monthly goals, use Microsoft Excel’s printable goal-setting worksheet to set SMART goals, plan your actions, track progress, and help keep your goals visible and top of mind.

8. Microsoft Word Task and Goal Reward Chart Template

Achieving goals is exhilarating. It’s even better when you have a reward system in place for yourself to help you celebrate your wins.

Hold yourself accountable for your goals by using the Word Task and Goal Reward Chart Template. This template for goal setting promotes personal accountability and positive reinforcement by enabling you to plan out your week, visualize your performance, and determine whether you’ve done enough to achieve your goals.

Download this goal-setting worksheet and start rewarding yourself for doing the work!

9. PowerPoint SMART Goals Template

The PowerPoint Smart Goals Template presents the goal-setting concept in PowerPoint. With this template, PowerPoint users can use the app’s features to create powerful visuals such as infographics to show their specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-based goals, and add textual content to give more context about their goal-setting process.

10. PowerPoint Milestone Goals Template

The PowerPoint Milestone Goals Template is useful for visually highlighting the key milestones in your project. This template is great for goal setting as it can help you visually map out your milestones by using modern infographics to show compelling and clear, and easy-to-follow visuals within a timeline.

Goal Setting Template FAQs

• What is the purpose of a goal setting template?
  • A goal setting template is an effective tool that allows you to organize and plan out your desired goals, objectives and strategies in one place. It can also help you stay on track and ensure you are moving toward achieving those goals.
• How do I create a goal setting worksheet?
  • Creating a goal setting template can be as simple or complex as you like. Generally, it starts with outlining the specific goals you want to achieve and then breaking them down into achievable steps. Once this is done, create columns for each step and add any additional details needed to measure your progress.
• What are the benefits of using a goal setting template?
  • A goal setting template provides direction and guidance on achieving success in any endeavor or project. It allows for better organization of data in order to track progress, set deadlines and focus attention on specific tasks or objectives that need to be completed for success. Additionally, having a clear roadmap makes it easier to spot opportunities or challenges along the way so adjustments can be made quickly if needed.

Hit Your Targets Faster with Goal Setting Templates

Goal setting is an important process that can help you succeed in any area of your life. However, we know it’s not always that easy, especially when you don’t know where to start or know how to create effective systems to help you stay on track. That’s why goal-setting templates can be so helpful!

Whether you’re goal-setting for business, personal development, or any other life goals, the templates above can help you set achievable goals, create an action plan, and map out your priorities in an organized and functional way.

Once you have your template of choice, turn to ClickUp Goals to connect your targets to your work, help you keep track of your progress, and manage all your goals in one place!