Setting goals and planning actions

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TRANSCRIPT: Feedback doesn’t always tell you exactly what to do. So, turning feedback into effective action often takes more thought than it first appears. That’s where goal setting and action planning come in.

Goal setting is about identifying what you want to achieve. Action planning, on the other hand, is about figuring out how to get there—step by step. Let’s suppose that after receiving feedback, you conclude your main goal is to develop a stronger argument in your writing. That’s a good starting point, but it’s still quite broad. An effective action plan breaks your goal down into practical steps: those might include researching your arguments more thoroughly, or revising your draft to support your points with more evidence. The goal gives you direction; the action plan gives you a path to get there.

Sometimes, feedback can seem vague—like being told to “be more creative”. In this particular example, your first step might be to reflect on what “more creative” could even look like in your work. Do you need new ideas perhaps, or a different approach, or better delivery? Once that’s clearer, you can set more meaningful goals and plan actions to reach them.

And even when feedback seems specific, it’s still useful to look for deeper goals. For example, if dozens of typos in your work were highlighted for you to fix, then fixing them might be sensible, but a deeper goal might be to find ways to avoid so many typos in future. An action plan for meeting this goal might then include reading your work out loud, using a spellchecker more effectively, or building in extra time for proofreading.

A helpful action plan will often prompt you to consider three questions:

1. What specific steps do I need to take?
2. Which resources can help me, such as books, websites, or AI tools? and
3. Who can I talk to for greater clarity, such as peers, tutors, or mentors?

Think about how you can make yourself accountable for achieving your goals and completing your actions. Writing your plans down can be a useful way of creating a sense of commitment, but sharing these plans with someone else can sometimes be even more helpful.

Finally, keep your plan flexible. Focus on one area at a time, track your progress, and be ready to adjust based on how things go, or when you get further feedback. Goal setting and action planning aren’t one-off tasks—they’re processes that depend on you learning, trying things out, evaluating, refining, and then learning and trying again.