A sentence becomes a target when there is a moment at which you can mark it done. Without that moment, and without one action, a clear owner and an end date, it stays a statement of intent, however nicely it's written.
A target has to be finishable
Much of what sits on a business owner's list looks like targets. A good part of it is sentences that only look like one, and a few simple tests tell them apart.
The first test separates a target from an intention. According to the source, targets need to be finishable: doable, endable, completable. There has to be a moment when you mark it done. If there isn't one, you have a good intention and no target.
The source offers a counter-example that is funny until you find it in your own business: maintain good relations with the neighborhood. At what point were you done?
Suppose an insurance broker sets an annual target of keeping in good contact with clients. There is not a single moment of done in it. When he replaces it with calling five long-standing clients a week and logging each call, the thing starts to happen.
Compare improve the service with answer every inquiry within a working day. The first sounds bigger, yet it gives you nothing to start on.
A sentence that can't be finished also has a price. In the last chapter of the booklet, a garage owner replaces two employees in the same position, then discovers the target for that position was never doable. Two people paid for a sentence that looked like a target.
One action, and a clear owner
The next rule is simple and constantly broken: each target contains one action, and no more than one.
A target with three actions looks efficient on the page, because everything sits on one line. In practice it usually gets done only in part. Whoever received it closes one action and feels progress, and the other two stay open. So three actions are really three targets.
Suppose a line like photograph the products, write the descriptions, put them on the site. That is three targets written as one. Split up, all three close in the same week.
Another rule from the same list: responsibility for each target goes to a single entity, one person or one team. A target with two people responsible is a target nobody is responsible for.
It sounds backwards, since two owners look like backup. Suppose a target is handed to the team in general. Nobody starts, because each person assumes somebody else picked it up. And the wording that practically guarantees it won't get done is we're both responsible for this.
Start, change, finish
A target has to carry a time cycle you can see: a start, the changes along the way, and an end.
Without it the target stays open forever. There is no moment when you can say it succeeded or failed. It just drags. According to the booklet, most of the targets that drag in a small business never failed. Nobody gave them an ending.
Suppose a move to a new supplier drags on for nine months. The moment a date is set, by the 15th, otherwise we stay with the current one, the decision is made within a week.
Notice what the date did. Beyond marking an end, it forced a decision, because it was clear what happens if nothing has moved by that day.
Or a designer who puts a finish date on every target, including those that depend on other people. She finds that most of the delays were hers, and her suppliers' share was small.
A target that repeats
Not every target closes once. Some repeat, and can be completed many times, with every completion counting.
That matters in a small business, because much of the important work is exactly that: an action that comes round again, where a project would end. A repeating target that isn't marked as one looks like something that never gets finished, which is frustrating.
The broker's weekly calls are such a target. They come round every week, and that is their job. When they come round, the target is doing what it should. Mark them as a project that is supposed to end and they will look like a failure that repeats.
Suppose an owner marks three repeating targets separately from the projects. The project list gets shorter, and the feeling of getting nowhere disappears.
What the booklet has on this
In the booklet From Goal to Target, this chapter ends with two exercises, spot it and build it, and both work on targets you have already written. The next chapter takes a plan and breaks it down to the order somebody receives on a Tuesday.
A target you can mark done is a target you can finish.