Kathy Oneto urges employees to ask six questions before accepting work goals to prevent wasted effort and burnout

Kathy Oneto recommends a six-question checklist employees should use before accepting new work goals. She says AI can draft objectives, align them to strategy, and track progress but cannot decide if a target is right or whether a team has capacity.

Kathy Oneto published a practical guide advising employees to ask six specific questions before committing to a new work goal, arguing that this step can prevent wasted effort and burnout. She warns that while AI tools increasingly handle the mechanics of goal-setting, the key decisions about whether a target is appropriate, feasible, and sustainable still require human judgment and negotiation. This matters for individual contributors, managers, and teams using AI to draft and track objectives because it shifts responsibility for final decisions back to people.

Oneto outlines what AI can and cannot do in the goal-setting process. AI can draft objectives, map proposed outcomes to broader strategy, and help track progress and metrics; it cannot decide whether the target itself is the right one or whether a team actually has the capacity to deliver. Her practical framework asks teams to shape initiatives around three explicit requirements — make it clear, make it matter, make it manageable — and to use a short set of questions to guide the conversation with a leader.

Two of the six questions are given as concrete examples. First, determine whether the goal is tactical (fixed deliverables and timelines) or adaptive (ambiguous and likely to change as the team learns), since each type requires a different management approach and review cadence. Second, map stakeholders and their expected impact to avoid misdirected effort; she suggests discussing this prompt with your leader: does this goal have a set deliverable, or could it shift, and how should you handle changes in conditions?

Oneto frames the checklist against workforce trends to show the risks of skipping the discussion. She notes that most organizations still manage and measure work as if it were purely tactical, even though modern roles often demand both tactical and adaptive approaches, and that 73% of employees report experiencing change fatigue. Failing to ask the six questions, she argues, leads to unfocused effort, empty activity, and burnout rather than measurable progress.

For teams building or using AI-assisted goal tools, the guide implies several product and process requirements: surface whether a goal is tactical or adaptive, capture stakeholder expectations and acceptance criteria, expose capacity constraints, and include mechanisms for revisiting scope. Treat AI outputs as drafts that require explicit human confirmation and periodic re-scoping for adaptive initiatives. As a practical next step, Oneto recommends that when a manager proposes a new initiative, employees and leaders jointly answer the six questions and agree on a cadence for scope reviews, success metrics, and resource limits so teams can aim for sustainable delivery.