goal setting and achieving objectives

This is building better developers, the developer podcast. We will accomplish our goals through sharing experience, improving tech skills, increasing business knowledge and embracing life. Let's dive into the next episode. Hello and welcome back. We are continuing and actually sort of wrapping up our season of interviews. I probably will not add another. It's one of those I may try to squeeze one more in, but I think we've gotten to a point where we're gonna call this a season, wrap it up, take a couple of weeks off and then come back and probably do some, essentially some holiday specials, get back to some general topics that we haven't talked about in a while. This episode, I actually want to start into that idea just a little bit. And this really comes from the season of interviews. I wanna talk about goal setting and achieving some of our objectives, particularly when these are personal objectives, when they're things that we have set and really nobody is going to be affected about by them, whether, other than ourselves. There may be an audience. And for example, I'm gonna talk about how I, some of the work I did and the approach I took to this particular season. So in that case, the audience that's out there, you guys that are listening, you would have been impacted somewhat. Maybe that an episode would have been delayed, something along those lines. So there's a, and I don't get a ton of feedback, particularly if I were to skip a week, just straight up, I would get very little, if any feedback from anybody that says, hey, where's that episode? Where's that missing episode? It's one of those things that I think everybody's used to the fact that sometimes something happens. However, there is a lot of value to being consistent. So that is a goal that we've tried to keep from the start of doing this podcast, whether we did the Monday, Wednesday, Friday approach or currently doing the Tuesday, Thursday approach to releasing episodes. And you may have noted that even within the season, there are a couple of times I threw an extra little episode in to try to keep the interviews starting on a Tuesday. And then typically there were four parts. So it'd be Tuesday, Thursday, Tuesday, Thursday, starting a new interview. With setting goals, in this case, and I'm gonna use this as an example throughout this episode, I said, hey, I'm gonna do a season where I'm gonna have interviews. I did not have a whole bunch of interviews backed up in the backlog that were in the can and ready to go. This was much more a set things up and have discussions as you go. And you may have picked that up, I'm not sure from some of our discussions that typically what you got once I got a release, at least part one, was usually within a week or two of actually having that conversation with whoever it was I was talking to in that episode. So it was a pretty tight schedule, which is a little different from what I've done in the past. Usually I've been able to get ahead of the game a little bit more. So usually there's about a two or three weeks before something releases that I have, that I'm doing the work on that episode, or at least the final work on it. I have it in the can, scheduled and ready to go, usually two to three weeks ahead of time. And that's part of the goal setting is to give yourself enough leeway for milestones that you can still hit them even if something comes up. So even if I had a bad week, and sometimes I did, just work got busy, life issues, whatever, that may have otherwise derailed and caused something to be late, I was able to make up for it. I could put a little extra work in on that next week because I had at least a week buffer. I had some time that I had built in a little buffer to make up for whatever happens. If it's something critical, if I'd been on a car accident and I had been down for a month, okay, wouldn't be able to handle it. But the more common things are gonna happen, then you have to build some leeway into it. So the first thing, and I've already mentioned, is whatever your goal is, make sure you have some milestones. In this case, my goal was I'm gonna have a season that's full of interviews. Well, milestones were setting up multiple interviews. We're having, scheduling those, having the discussion, and then editing and posting them. So there's a number of milestones. But the nice thing about those, and key to setting up valuable milestones, is for them to be markers along the way, whatever your project is, whatever your path is, set those milestones up, put dates to them, have something about them that is very specific so that you have no, it's just straight black and white. You have no wiggle room about whether you hit the milestone or not. That is key. Because you need to know when to declare victory or when you had a loss. And I mentioned dates, because if you have a milestone that's just, I wanna get there sometime, it's always gonna be easy to say, I'm gonna push that back. I'm gonna push that back. And you may never reach it because you just never, it never bubbles up in priority enough. If you have a date, I'm gonna have this by March 1st, I'm gonna have this by the end of the week, I'm gonna have this by tomorrow, whatever it happens to be, then you know that if you don't get it by that date, you've missed, you've failed to successfully complete that milestone. And now that doesn't mean that you just say, oh, I stop. Although I guess in some cases it may be something that if you miss a deadline, that's it, you're done. But usually particularly the ones we set for ourselves, we can adjust. So within planning, you can make changes, but if you do so, it should be, I'll say painful, it should be enough of a problem for you to miss a deadline that you really don't want to. And this does get to the idea of being, a little bit being a self-starter and being able to motivate yourself. So when you set those milestones, it may be that you have them sitting in front of you every day so that you just, you feel a little bit of the weight of, hey, I've got these things I need to do. Or maybe you have a mastermind group or something along those lines, or close friends or associates that you share those things with. And with the expectation that they will come back and ask you about them at some point. So that you will have to answer to your schedule to some extent. If you're the kind of person that you're okay, that you work well, just answering to the schedule to yourself. So, I was gonna get this done by Saturday, it's Saturday, I need to get this done. I will change stuff around and bubble this up in priority. Then great. If you're somebody that, I wanna get this done by Saturday and it's Saturday and I'm just gonna say, oh, well, I'm just gonna push it back. Then maybe you need to find somebody else that can give you a little more accountability for those milestones. Now, I mentioned that they need to be paced, they need to set a pace. They need to be spaced out in a way that makes sense. And the reason I say that is that a lot of times the challenge with the project is that it's too big a scope. And we end up getting either frustrated or demoralized by saying, wow, that's just too far to go. This is back to the whole idea of being a better developer, not being a great developer or something like that, but just, it gives us two things. When we say better, it means there is no end, we're always gonna improve, which is the nature of whatever your choice is. In our case as developers, there is no, okay, I'm great, I'm whatever, pick your title or your label for it. There's always more that you can do, you can always improve. And that's in really everything in life. So we're gonna have those open-ended kinds of goals and milestones. But there are many, many things that we're gonna run into that is like, hey, I'm gonna build an application that does X, I'm going to start a podcast, I'm gonna write a book, I'm gonna write a blog article, things like that. Those have definite ends. And the key to the milestones is to give us steps to get to that. I mean, they're really a process to get to whatever that goal is. So if I wanted to write a blog article, my milestones may be things like, I need to think about a topic, I need to set a date for it, I need to figure out how, you know, put some sort of an outline together, I need to write the article, I need to edit and post the article, and things like that. In this case, I'm going back to my example, is I would have, really it was, I need to find people that are interview worthy, we'll say they're people that I wanna interview, and then I need to reach out to them and try to see if they're available, and then I need to schedule some sort of a, you know, schedule the time for us to do the interview. I need to, a milestone was always that I need to review their history, you get to know them a little bit better and build out at least, even in this case, even though they were discussions, I always had sort of a rough list of things I wanted to talk about or questions I wanted to ask, and then it was, you know, perform the interview, do the interview, talk to them, and then, you know, it was basically for each of the, you know, most cases four episodes, pull out, edit and pull out enough content for episode one, for episode two, for episode three, episode four, and then there would be milestones for the blog post related to those, and then posting, and then actually, and then there was always a follow-up of letting them know that, hey, it's out there, here are the links and things like that. So there are a number of milestones, and within those milestones, I had dates, because once I started the first episode, I knew I needed to have a portion of an interview available on, you know, next Tuesday, next Thursday, the Tuesday after that, the Thursday after that. So I had a steady stream of dates and a steady stream of milestones that were somewhat repetitive. I was doing, hitting those same milestones over and over again for interview E1, for interview E2, for interview E3, and I have a JIRA board that I use to sort of keep myself, keep to track things such as this, and that's what it was, is I would have, you know, JIRA items that I was gonna work on that was interview E1 part one, you know, interview one part two, interview one part three, things like that. And, you know, that's the nice thing about having a system like a JIRA or a Trello or something like that, is you can see those items up there, you can have dates on them, and you know whether you're gonna hit them or not. Now, in order to hit them and to actually achieve those milestones, I wanna go back a little bit and talk about that, is the idea of buffer. When we're doing this for ourselves, when we're setting personal goals, a lot of the people I've talked to struggle with adjusting. They set a goal, I wanna do this this month, this quarter, this year, and then they get to a certain point and they bail on it, and they reschedule it. Just reschedule, reschedule, reschedule. And think about it, if you were using a GPS and you keep doing random turns, it's gonna recalculate and recalculate and recalculate, but you may never actually reach your destination, because you're saying, I'll just take this random turn, I'll let it recalculate, I'll make a few changes, sort of head back towards the destination, but then maybe I'll take a random turn again. It's sort of what we do when we keep pushing stuff off. So we need to one, set meaningful and realistic goals and milestones. The goals may seem very unrealistic, but if we set realistic and meaningful milestones, you will find that you can achieve those goals. I've seen that in numerous projects that I started out saying, gosh, this is gonna be way too big. Writing a book is a great example. If somebody says, I need you to write a book, or you say to yourself, I wanna write a book. It may seem very daunting. You may look at books that are out there and say, there's no way I could do that. However, if you break it down, it's not as bad. It may still be a challenge, but it may be something where you say, all right, I wanna write a book, one milestone, I'm gonna put together what is this book's gonna be about? Maybe what's the title or the subtitle? And then what are the chapters gonna look like? Assuming there's chapters, what's the outline gonna look like? And then as you hit those milestones, you're gonna start putting that structure together, that framework that's gonna be the book. And then you start essentially just saying, okay, I'm gonna write a page a day or a paragraph a day. And next thing you know, it may not, it's not gonna happen overnight, but you could go, you know, you do that for a while, couple of weeks, couple of months, maybe a year. Suddenly you've got a lot of content. Then you go back and you can find an editor or do editing over that. But the key with these personal milestones is to not wait till the last second, is to look at them and have, as you would anything else, a feeling that you need to be making progress on them before you get to the deadline. This is something we all should have learned at some point in our past, particularly in our academic careers, that if you wait till the night before the final exam to study, it's really difficult. And if anything happens that night, then you have no recourse. You're done. You know, if you get to that, if you wait till the night before the exam and you happen to be sick that night, then you're stuck, you're gonna fail the exam. You're not gonna be able to study for it. So that's the other key part of these milestones is to make sure that you're making regular progress on whatever your overall objective is and that you have enough buffer within those and enough regular progress on them that you're not completely derailed if you have something come up, because something will. I have these discussions all the time where things are, the schedules are laid out and they're essentially personal ones. We talk about them every mentor class. We talk about goals that we've set. And these are usually two-week goals. We say, okay, I'm gonna get A, B and C done over the next two weeks. And almost every time somebody's had, maybe work got really busy or there was maybe some family or life-related thing that came up. Sometimes it's just, I was just busy and I just couldn't get to it. Just generally my schedule was too full. And so there's those situations, yeah, those goals can sit around for a long, long time and you're gonna get frustrated because you're never gonna make progress on them. Instead, keep them realistic, set them up in a way that there's, if you're working on a regular basis, even five minutes a day on it that you can make some progress and be able to reach that goal and move forward. Because that's the other key is being able to say, yes, this has been achieved and move on as opposed to the sort of the flip side, I guess, of this is when we get near the end and we keep adjusting, essentially we move the finish line. We keep adjusting what that milestone is. We say, well, I wanna do this little thing. I wanna make this little touch. I wanna tweak this, I wanna tweak that. And the next thing you know, you've been, in quotes, almost done for months. And I've seen projects that have done this where you get basically done. You're maybe 90% of there, 90% of the way through the timeline and the project budget and things started getting added on. And the next thing you know, this project that you could have declared victory on, on time, on schedule, on budget is now double what the schedule and budget was. That three month project we were gonna work on, we're six months into it and we're still working on it. There is a certain point where it's, in the coding world, it's code freeze, where you say, all right, we're done. We are freezing code. We're not making any more progress on this. This is what we're gonna go with. You need to do that with your milestones as well. You need to be able to find them and set them up in such a way that when you reach it, you have reached it. And you can put a little thumbtack in it, say, got it done. This is when I got it done and move on to the next milestone. Because otherwise your progress is gonna end up stalling out at one of those milestones. I'll probably, well, actually not probably. I'm gonna end up talking a little bit more about this in another episode because there's just enough information here and some of the things that I've learned that I wanna share as part of this season, as part of wrapping it up, because it feels pertinent. It's still fresh in my mind. So we're gonna come back and we're gonna do a part two to this and probably at that point, depending on how long winded I am in that one, that will probably wrap this season up. I do want you to sort of as a challenge, is sort of flip back through maybe some of the interviews that have happened in the season, whether you listen to them or just sort of, you know, flip through some of the articles and look at some of the highlights. Because there, again, there's a lot of information that has come out of this season. And I think it's worthwhile, particularly now, you know, 30 episodes in to go back to something from a few months ago and be like, oh yeah, that's right. I forgot that they had this discussion. And that person that Rob was talking to had this gem of an idea that I wanna work with. Now try to make sure that you don't let these things fall through the cracks or just get lost in the content that you've consumed. But find a way to make use of them. That being said, before I get too long winded, I'll wrap this one up. So go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Developer Nord podcast. For more episodes like this one, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, and other podcast venues, or visit our site at developernor.com. Just a step forward a day is still progress. So let's keep moving forward together. 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