How I Actually Use SMART Goals in Notion and Zapier

How I Actually Use SMART Goals in Notion and Zapier

ByUS Stacked

1. Why SMART goals mostly fail inside productivity apps

The first time someone taught me SMART goals, it was scribbled on a whiteboard in a project kickoff, and everyone nodded as if we’d all just agreed on something highly logical. That feeling lasts until you try putting it into any actual tool. What happens instead is this:

  • You define a Specific goal: great.
  • You look for a field for Measurable… nothing obvious.
  • You give up and hope the notes suffice.

I mostly see SMART goals documented in Notion, Coda, or Airtable. But rarely enforced. Even when you set up templates with separate fields for each SMART attribute, nobody uses them consistently. Zapier automations break because a field got left blank. Filters silently exclude goals. Next quarter, everything resets.

One time, we had a trigger that depended on the “Achievable” field being marked as true—or at least anything not null. But someone just wrote a dash. Technically an entry, but not useful, and the automation moved it to “in progress” anyway. From a team perspective, it looked like I had approved something I hadn’t even seen. That’s when I started defaulting undefined fields to explicit values like “UNSET”.

Turns out, SMART goals can’t live well in a document. They have to be active objects you manage—tracked, validated, and monitored. Otherwise, every other Zap is just guessing at intent.

2. Mapping SMART goal fields into Notion without nesting madness

I rebuilt our Notion SMART goal tracker five times before stopping. Each rebuild was a reaction to someone asking something like “wait, where do I actually write the numbers?” or “does the due date go in the same place?” So instead of making it prettier, I dumped all five SMART letters into flat-level properties.

For a single goal, the Notion database has:

  • Goal Title (text)
  • Specific Description (long text)
  • Measurable Criteria (number, sometimes formula)
  • Achievable Justification (text)
  • Relevant To (relation to project/team table)
  • Time Bound Deadline (date)

The issue is that most goal-tracking templates want to visually prioritize the goal and keep the SMART parts buried in a modal or inline toggle. That hides the data that would let your automations do anything useful. I made them all separate properties near the top of the page layout. Ugly, but scannable.

Small “aha”: when fields like “Measurable Criteria” are a formula instead of manual, you can drop goal types into categories like “Summed from Subtasks” vs. “Manually Entered”. This surfaced a whole log of goals nobody was even updating.

3. Using property-based templates for frictionless goal creation

A SMART goal template in Notion is fine until it’s not. My early version was a multi-block template button that pre-filled sections with prompts. Looked slick, but nobody used it more than twice. Eventually the workaround was embarrassingly simple: precreate 10 goal entries with blank fields and dates one week apart. Team leads would just duplicate an existing one and tweak the values. It wasn’t even using Notion templates at that point—just regular copy-paste habits.

Then I found a better workaround using linked entries. I created a Mini Goals table where each entry had a “Template Type” select menu. Depending on the option, a formula would reformat text to pre-populate SMART content:

if(prop("Template Type") == "SEO Goal", "Specific: Improve keyword rank\nMeasurable: Rank top 10\n...", "")

That way my team had a pick-and-go pattern without needing to learn templates at all. The templates live in formulas, surfaced through visually readable text blocks. Not technically dynamic fields, but very close for fast copy-pasting. It’s hacky, but way more used than the official templates ever were.

4. Triggering Zapier flows only when SMART fields are complete

This got complicated faster than expected. I had a Zap listening to new goal entries in Notion. It was supposed to filter out anything missing required SMART properties. Sounds easy—just stack a bunch of conditions in Filter by Zapier like “Measurable is not empty” and so on.

Problem? Notion API returns blank fields inconsistently. True story: sometimes an empty rich text field comes in as an empty array. Sometimes as null. Sometimes it’s not included at all.

So I wrote a formatter step that runs a basic value check against each field and stores the flag:

{
  "isSpecificSet": !!inputData.SpecificDescription,
  "isMeasureSet": Array.isArray(inputData.Measurable) && inputData.Measurable.length > 0,
  ...
}

Still wasn’t catching all the weird cases, especially when someone just typed a space. Eventually routed everything through a Code by Zapier step to properly normalize blanks. Honestly, this fix was more duct tape than logic, but at least it stabilized the workflows. Ended up copying the same code snippet into three Zaps just so the settings would stay consistent.

The undocumented gotcha here is that Notion field behavior in the Zapier trigger depends on property type AND current value types—especially for rich text and multi-selects. And no, that’s not detailed in any official handoff docs.

5. Building a light validation layer inside Zapier instead of Notion

I thought about using Notion rollups + formulas to spawn a validity flag per goal entry. But that slowed the database view so badly that people stopped even filtering. So I flipped it: run validation inside Zapier instead, where performance doesn’t bottleneck the UI.

Quick Fix Pattern

Create a Code by Zapier step between the trigger and anything else. In the code, build an object with flags for each SMART component. Then under conditional paths, route incomplete entries to an “alert” path that just posts a Slack DM with what’s wrong. Full entries go onward.

Here’s a snippet that worked weirdly well:

const missing = [];
if (!inputData.specific) missing.push("Specific");
if (!inputData.measurable) missing.push("Measurable");
...
output = { missingFields: missing.join(", ") }

Now when people submit something half-filled, they get a Slack message saying “Missing: Measurable, Relevant.” It’s become kind of a running joke now—people try to guess which part they’ll get called out for. But the completion rate jumped. Nobody wants a bot shaming them in public channels.

6. Translating SMART fields into actual deliverables for status reporting

So you’ve got 50 goals in Notion. Cool. But which ones are progressing? That answer depends entirely on how you define measurable. If “Measurable” is just a text description again, it’s unreadable to the system. So I started building a second table: Goal Metrics.

Each SMART Goal links to one metric object, which contains:

  • Target Value (number)
  • Current Value (number)
  • Delta (formula)
  • Status (rollup + logic)

In practice, nobody wanted to update these values manually. So I linked them to external Trackers in Airtable or Google Sheets where those metrics already lived. A few Make.com flows pushed values into Notion every week. That dynamic let Zapier send auto-summaries into Slack: “Goal X has reached 84% of its target.”

A weird thing I found: rollup formulas inside Notion ignore zeros for numbers but treat them as null in certain comparison conditions. Took me a day to figure out why Goals at 0% were showing up as “no data.”

7. Slack reminders triggered by missed deadlines and unset values

This Zap I set up against my better judgment. Every Friday, it pulls in all SMART goals with:

  • No value in “Achievable Justification”
  • Deadline within 7 days or overdue
  • Measurable Criteria still blank or static

The Slack bot posts these in a dashboard channel. Reactions vary. Some folks edit their goals immediately. Others say they thought their task was done and hadn’t realized the metric didn’t track any live data. It’s hit-or-miss, but more visible than Notion filters people never check.

Once, one goal got surfaced like five times in a row because the “Measurable Criteria” was hardcoded as “Rank top 3”, but we had automated tracking for rank and never connected the two. That’s when I manually added a “Linked Metric URL” field so the Slack message could include realtime numbers.