Detailed Notes
This special topic presentation comes during a time when things have been hectic for a while. Therefore, we are at a crossroads and it is a good time to stop and reset our goals and plans. The situation is not that different from our annual review and planning. However, it is a good time to do a deeper assessment and take advantage of the calm amidst the storm.
SPARK Your Next Steps
While much of this reset discussion is an emphasis on past processes, we have added a twist. The presentation provides the SPARK approach to thinking through where you are and where you want to go. We rarely have an opportunity to come to a full stop before planning our next steps. These are times where we can stop all momentum and freely reset then take our next step. Take advantage of this opportunity to use past experience for a strong step into your future.
Transcript Text
[Music] it's the end of the year basically uh this is the last definitely going to be the last mentor class we have this year anyways and while we've done a lot of tutorial and more uh technical presentations this year and really haven't spent quite as much time on the i guess the i had the business side or the entrepreneurial side and talking about planning and goals and road maps and things like that i think it's a good time to do so we're getting to the end of the year which sometimes i always struggle with a little with this because i try to plan out my year that the last couple of weeks are are slow i know a lot of people that do and but on the other hand i've had the years where things have gotten really crazy and i know there's some people that is it either has gotten that crazy or if you're in you know retail or some of that kind of stuff it is by yeah by its nature it's it's crazy this is the busy time of the year but even with that even when you're busy there are some i think for most people there are some times to reflect at least because you're going to have hopefully a couple of days off you're going to have you know christmas day and christmas eve and new year's day and new year's eve and things like that and and you also have other people that are on vacations and holidays it's just one of those parts of a you know times of the year uh toward in the winter and then also in the summer where things sort of slow down a little bit you're allowed to you're more likely to have days where you can go in and just work as opposed to have interactions with co-workers and distractions and things like that and of course there's the you know the famous new year new year's resolution that is always something that's it's worth thinking about so after 2020 has been a uh remarkable year in many ways i think it's a you know even better a good time for us to go back over some things we've talked about actually in the past and you know spend a little time thinking about how we can best make 2021 as good a year as possible for us so i'm just going to go through some things that are in many ways i think these are sort of obvious i think we've we have talked about them before they are things that if you sat down you could probably come up with this list but it's also one of those things i think it's an exercise that is good to go through these and actually think about it to say oh yeah but yeah i do need to make sure i do that and so the key things were to talk about is looking backwards to look forward finding a theme or a why uh setting the table so that you have a good start as you go into the new year setting goals and making plans which are always a part of all of those pieces so first let's think about this potential for review here that's you know we're ending a year so we can look back for the year that's gone gone past and see how that can maybe help us to look ahead now in looking back there are some key things that we need to make sure we we cover some you know things we check off and these are these are actually overlooked on a more often than i would expect when i've worked with you know companies and organizations and individuals and we've talked you know whether it's mentoring or consulting and looked at sort of what did you accomplish last year and what do you want to accomplish next year you know or the in the years ahead and the first one is what went right it's very easy to see things that are still on our plate and ignore or forget about the things that we actually accomplished and removed from our plate during the year so it's good to actually look back and see what um what was what was accomplished you know what sort of almost like where did we start back in january one and how was what things did we knock off that list you know now as we get towards the end of the year keith another key thing is looking at what was unexpected what things came up this year that took us off track because contingencies are really built on that is trying to think through at least not necessarily even worst case scenarios but also likely scenarios i think 2020 could easily be considered a worst case scenario in many ways when you look at businesses that you know died or are were unavailable for long periods of time and and changes in customer interactions and things like that so there's particularly when you've had such a big change there's a lot of opportunity to see what could we maybe have done to prepare for that and that's going to help us a lot as we as we start looking forward another key thing is what what is it that stopped in the last year or we didn't need to do anymore because there are some of those it may be that there's a there could be a change in regulations there could be a change in management there could be a change in style there could be licensing agreements that end and things like that that can change your business whether it's regardless of what it is and not only the business but even how you do your job you know there may be things like uh you know maybe you you know this year probably would have been a long way to do it but maybe you worked on windows xp for a very long time and your company finally got off of it or maybe you you know worked on uh in in-house or on-prem servers and those have all been moved to the cloud you know there's things like that is trying to mark some of those those changes and then looking at you know still looking back is what one of the things that we did were larger or took more resources you know that we underestimated and then what are the ones that we overestimated it's trying to get a feel for you know where where are we missing the mark on our estimations whether it's over over or under um but that's you know obviously the ones that are over we're gonna have to figure out how to estimate them higher and the ones that we're under we're going to have to figure out why we should have estimated those lower so that we get better and as we move forward so now based on that once we which is not you know it's not a 30 seconds or you know just quickly looking at a list it's really um if you look at each of these is each of these probably is going to be sort of a category or two of tasks for us to think about and sort of you know bookmark those as we start looking forward so based on what we want to do moving forward then we've probably got a rough list or a rough idea let's take a look at what we're going to be doing that maybe some of these projects are similar to the ones that we've succeeded in the past and a great those are great because that means we know how to get it done a lot of what we do is actually learning what not to do you know it's we have failures and we say oh well we shouldn't do that but once you get to a point where you do know what is it that we are supposed to do that's going to be the fastest way to reach your destination that is i think part of the reasons that they they say success breeds success because if you know how to do it right and you know you did it right logically you should be able to reproduce that that success a big thing that is a part of that uh if you go back to the things that ended or became unneeded is using that to maybe find some unnecessary tasks that you can take off your list sometimes there's going to be things such as maybe there's a bunch of reporting that you did that wasn't needed or maybe there were features that you started to go down that path and they ended up being unneeded or there may be entire projects that were started and didn't finish because for some reason another they became unnecessary examining the reasons for that unnecessariness if we can make that word up going to help you uh look for maybe warning signs for some of the things that you have on your list to do in the year ahead it's always uh take the you know go with lessons learned so what is it that we we ran into what were the challenges and the obstacles that we've dealt with in the year behind and how can we maybe factor those in a little bit as we move forward so that we are at least uh less impacted in a negative sense by some of these unexpected things and it may also adjust how we approach things you know maybe we do something that's a little more uh risk sensitive essentially is that we we think about it and approach it in a way so that we're not you know maybe going headlong into it and instead we find a way to sort of incrementally get our way into it so that we have a you know sort of like climbing a mountain so you make sure you have a really solid foothold before you move on to the next spot and then um you know looking at what we've done in the past is there's going to be we're going to adjust our estimates is looking at where we under or overestimated things let's try to take that and a lot of times it's sort of a it may be as simple as a applying a multiplying factor to our estimates it's sort of well known that developers generally speaking take their estimates and double them and then you're going to be a lot closer to what a real estimate is going to be but we know i'm sure we all know developers that you're probably going to have to multiply it by five and there's others out there that are gonna you know really pad their numbers and maybe you have to knock 20 off or something like that particularly for your personal uh edification and and career it's good to get a feel for what your approach i guess estimates are is whether you tend to be maybe overly optimistic or overly pessimistic and you know try to build that into your estimates as you move forward so one of the biggest things that i would like for us to take out of thinking about our your you know our upcoming year is finding your why and this is really can a lot of what you did in the last year can help you with this and you want to think about things like what this is probably one of your your your biggest things what is it that you did that you enjoyed and not at a a big level but even down to a sort of a micro level do you enjoy uh designing do you enjoy coding do you enjoy requirements do you enjoy uh mentoring or managing or testing or especially in the world of i.t there's so much there's so many facets to the job to your career that it's important to note where did you you know what is the stuff that you like to do and hopefully you know there's somewhere in your year behind gone by there were things that you enjoyed that you found times where you like you know what i'm it may be you know challenging and stuff like that but it was an enjoyable way um think about market changes you know there may be some things that you know in looking back or there may be some things that you didn't like to do that now are going to be more likely to show up or things that you did like to do that are going to be more likely to show up so let's say for example you like coding in a specific language whatever it is say you enjoy coding in react you know you like javascript libraries you you like doing that well yeah it may be that what you positioned yourself as two years ago i'd say maybe you're a java developer let's just you know two years ago you're a java developer you came into last year and you're looking for java jobs well in the last year you've realized you really do enjoy react programming well it may be that because of the market changes now react is something that's much more feasible as a as a career choice for a while so maybe you can shift gears a little bit and find a way to get more of those you know those react jobs or whatever it is that you you came across similar to that is that you maybe you found a new love maybe there's something that you got to this year that you realize i really enjoy doing that and it's not again this is something i think a lot of us experienced in our career because depending on where we're at we have i guess for lack of a better term access to different roles and tasks and if you're if you're starting out you're not going to be you know your first month of work you're not going to be asked probably to manage somebody else if you're a developer you're not going to be asked probably even you may not be asked to talk to a customer or gather requirements or do anything other than just code but then if you fast forward a couple of years maybe you're in a situation where now you can be exposed to actually designing you know in the real world and maybe you're growing into uh you know leading a team or things like that you know as you go through maybe your move up to management or architecture or all these things that we we don't necessarily have access early in our career that you know we maybe we did it a little bit in school but it's not the same so that when we got to do it in the real world you know in our career we realized that wow i really i really enjoy doing that so you want to think about that as you may your why from year to year may actually change a little bit uh similar to that there may be a new season ahead that may be that you are in your career or your life that there is there are going to be some changes ahead that you need to take into account as you're planning for the year ahead uh there's you know life things maybe that you you know maybe you got married or you've got a house or you've got kids or you've got kids that are graduating or uh you're retiring or you know the gambit of personal stuff that comes up and maybe you move you know maybe you're moving from uh you know could be one city to another or maybe one country to another that is going to change a lot of your environment and access to certain tasks and roles and skills that you're going to have to incorporate into thinking about well how do i where do i want to be three months from now six months from now a year from now and i think it's another key one is looking back at the year that you've gone through is there's just some things where you're just burned out or you got bored with something yeah using that sort of uh developer example let's say you came into the year and you just loved writing java code and you realize about halfway through the year that you're just done with it you know you've done it for enough years that you just it's just wrote that it doesn't it doesn't challenge you anymore you don't get the same excitement out of it or you know joy from it so if there's some things that you and that may be probably the most challenging of these items if there's something that you've particularly that you've done for a while that you're pretty good at it but you're bored of it or burned out then you know you may have to sort of leave at the top it's where one of those kinds of things where you may need to see if you can adjust your career path a little bit to make that something you don't do the other probably the most famous of these kinds of things would be when michael jordan many years ago went from basketball to baseball yeah i think he never i don't think he ever said he was bored with basketball but obviously there was something about it that he that did not appeal to him as much so he literally changed careers and there are plenty of people out there that do that that are you know maybe not even not at the height of their career necessarily but they realize that the career path they're on is is not um it's just not satisfactory to them it's not bringing them satisfaction or joy and if you're in that situation it's i think i always have said it will be better in the long run for you to find the thing that you do enjoy as opposed to you know just cutting it out with something you don't enjoy money and all that other kind of stuff just isn't isn't worth it if you're if you're not happy so think about what is your why what are the why do i want to continue in this career what are the things that i want to work with you know what are the things that bring me joy and incorporate that into our plans in the year ahead and that may include that work itself our career maybe doesn't bring us quite the same joy as something outside of it so we need to you know adjust our approach to our career so we're not burning 80 hours a week and instead we can go do you know whatever that other thing is that we want to do i think it's very important and i've i've found this in the past few years at least is to sort of set a theme for a year it helps at least for me it helps um sort of organize goals if that makes sense is you know sort of keep things that are in there that are focused on that theme it if you think of it as a from an academic point of view if you want to pursue a certain degree then especially like a university there's tons of different classes you can take but there are only certain classes that are really going to direct you towards that degree so if you wanted to get that degree as fast as possible you would make sure you got all of your core classes for that degree and then you minimize the stuff you know the extra stuff you need to do otherwise you may just look at all the classes and take almost a random scheduling of them and could take you many many extra years to get that degree so there's in setting a theme there's a lot of you know different things to think about and and it is all very personal but here's some things that sort of have helped me as well uh first one the theme is remember this theme is basically your focus is what is it that you want to what is it you want to accomplish in the year ahead and this is key because it's a focus it is it's not 10 things it's really ideally one another may be multiple things that are part of that and maybe you want to be your focus is that you want to be a better value as an employee and maybe part of that is that you're going to learn uh you know a little spoken language a new programming language a new platform you may there's a couple of things that you know they all go towards that theme but in that case your focus would be become more valuable to my employer um it may be that your focus is i want to learn uh i want to be a better developer of mobile applications and things like that so that would still it may be a you don't want your focus to be too broad but you do want uh you it is okay if it's somewhat broad because the key is that you're gonna bring that into a tighter focus by adding a couple of key you know goals one things i find that's been very helpful is finding a word you know from the focus point it's finding a word that i'm going to use for the year now i do this on a personal level that is that goes beyond career but it is and that allows me to actually set a theme for both you know from career and personal and financial and all this kinds of other stuff they all sort of wrap into that and i think if you can get it down to a word and it's not a bad theme to have uh for example i had one year where the word was learn and i really reset uh several things that were on my my road map i guess and focused on learning some new things it's expanding my skills again i hadn't done it for a while i realized enjoyed doing that that i missed that and so that became my theme as i was like you know what i'm gonna learn that's that's my year and those kinds of things it's it it may be sort of broad but i think if you can keep that word and that focus that theme um it will really help you figure out what you should be doing and maybe what you shouldn't worry about in doing those things maybe there's a task or um a series of tasks that you just it will help you to just finish them that you want to get these things done that they they've been sitting on your plate they've been languishing for a while um and the theme may actually be depending on what that you know there may be a task that you need to finish so it could be get a degree or write a book or start a podcast or create an application or uh do a professional presentation or get married or buy a house or there's there may be certain things that are sort of that that task is sort of your primary focus so you want to work towards that um you definitely want to have in your theme some things that are uh you're going to want it coming down to some things that are doable within the year you know being uh i want to be the best baseball player in the year ahead you know maybe a bit yeah it's probably going to be a bit too much particularly if you don't even know how to play baseball for example but if you're pretty close if you're already playing at professionals then maybe that's your theme and it's not that you have to achieve that task but maybe the the focus on that task is what will drive you through the year and allow you to really set some things in place to maybe maybe not complete that necessarily this year but maybe in the years ahead think about maybe maybe there's some new goals as we've talked about you know a word and a focus and this theme maybe there's some goals that are some new goals that you need to build into this year maybe you need to tweak a few of them that are that you had on your you know your roadmap or your list maybe there's a few you need to throw out maybe there's a couple of things where you say you know this is i've got some really cool stuff i want to do this year this thing would be nice but i'm not going to deal with it this year you know if i'm not even going to let it distract me because it's not part of that focus it's it's watering down my focus and all of this comes down to think about the you that you want to be and how do you get there in the year ahead not what your boss wants or your parents want or people your friends want or whatever it's like what will make what makes you happy what will you be proud of doing accomplishing or becoming in the year ahead and allow that to filter through your theme your in your focus so that you you know ideally and that's really what we want out of this is that three months six months 12 months from now you're actually more comfortable in your skin and happier being yourself and with and more proud of what you've accomplished so once we put all that together we're getting close down you know basically we're coming up to january 1 and so what are we going to do we want to make sure we start strong that we come out of the gate you know and it with a good pace and ready to go it's really hard to to you know wait until january 31st or december 1st and really accomplish you know our especially annual level goals so one of these things that you you know you see all the time and it just sort of stumbled across this so i decided that hey you know we can call this spark which works pretty good for you know sparking you uh onto your new year and uh it really is set immediate short and long term goals this is about accountability really if you've got really you know immediate like one or two days and short term uh within the first month or even you know maybe as far out as the first quarter and then of course the rest of your goals for the year but giving yourself something that is a target that is achievable early is very key to things like setting up habits i mean if you think about the classic idea of habit is you you know if you do the same thing for i think they say 21 days straight that defines a habit well that means that you're doing something that you've accomplished every day and usually it's very short stuff i mean it's uh like if you want to get in the habit of making your bed when you get up in the morning go make your bed every day for 21 days straight but that's minutes maybe you know to get that done maybe less than that depending on how wild you are when you sleep but generally speaking that's something that you can get accomplished quickly and you want to make sure as you're building your road map and your goals and your plan for the year ahead that's one of the things you keep in mind is what can uh or i guess as part of your planning is what can i do on a maybe on a daily basis or a weekly basis or you know every work day or every weekend what is something that i can put on my task or to-do list that is reasonable for me to to get done uh which means you're probably not gonna it's probably not gonna be something that's gonna take you uh 20 or 30 hours a week you know to do it or 20 or 30 hours whenever you get it done to get it done um it could be as short as something that takes you 15 minutes maybe something takes you an hour or two but then you know maybe not maybe it's an hour to a week that you spend on something and so you can you know sort of sprinkle that throughout the week and the key is on those immediate goals when you're starting i become hell or high water you want to hit that first couple of times that that goal comes up you want to hit it you want to succeed and get it done start getting the momentum to build that habit now something that we often fail to do is the next one is the p of spark is plan plan to start get things in motion so that when you get to that first day you have the things in place to get the work done a developer example would be you don't want to get into that first day where you're going to let's say you're going to build a java application and you don't have the latest version you know the right version of java installed on a machine or you maybe don't have a machine set up to be development at all or you haven't picked out an integrated development environment so the first day instead of actually working on that application you end up losing hours of time installing stuff and configuring things stuff like that think about what that first day doing that task is going to be like and plan for it enough to make sure that you have the things in place that you need this may be setting aside certain time there may be some people that you need to talk to to let them know that hey this is what i'm going to do or there may be some people that you need something from there may be something that you need to get um you know exam if you for some reason let's say you want to grill out every day you want to go use your grill every day and start on january 1 well if you don't have you know a grill then you have to go get a grill the first day or if you don't have your coals or your you know gas or whatever it is that you need to use you need to make sure that you have the materials so plan and be ready to hit the ground running avoid and this is as we're you know we get getting our first day and we're moving forward we're starting to set these habits up avoid scope creep you know we complain about it with others when we're doing our you know through our career and and doing all these projects and stuff like that and i think we recognize it somewhat to ourselves but i don't know that we realize how damaging that can be is is scope creep can very quickly take us off rails and get us completely you know diverted from our goals so we want to as we're you know as we're getting these things done we want to make sure that we are you know regularly at least depending on how you do it how often regularly needs to be but take a look at what you're doing and see if there's some scope creep are there some things you're doing that have taken you beyond what you really need to do and if so trim the fat a little bit is get yourself back to focus a great idea a great concept that is similar to this is the idea of a cornerstone if you have a cornerstone in a building that is what sets what is the proper alignment and if you think about a let's say a you know one foot by one foot block that is a cornerstone well if if you keep adding blocks on that thing and you don't refer back to the cornerstone and you probably have seen this and this is why contractors work the way they do you'll see that it will actually end up drifting it will not be a straight line because you're there's going to be even if it's just a little bit off from brick to brick to brick that little bit can add up so the way to fix that correct for that is that you measure stuff based off of the cornerstone as opposed to the base you know the most previous thing that was uh that was laid down the whole the old kids game of telephone is similar where you you have one person says something they whispered somebody's ear that whispered the next person whisper whisper whisper and eventually the last person has something that is completely unintelligible based on what the original one was well if the first person whispered the same thing to everybody then you wouldn't have near the uh the degradation of correctness basically that comes up so avoid coat scope creep keep you know regularly look back at what are your goals what's your why what is your your focus and your theme and make sure that you're still maintaining that and that's particularly important as you get further and further into the ear where possible the r is remove remove obstacles managers that are in my opinion at least i think a lot of others out there managers that are doing their job correctly are removing obstacles for their staff for the people that work for them if we are driving our own careers and and goals we are we have to manage that as well that means we have to remove obstacles so as we go through particularly hopefully setting habits and things like that we're going to experience things that maybe slow us down or a problem for example maybe you want to study something where you want to spend a half hour studying something every day and then you find out that you know one of the problems with you being able to spend 30 minutes studying that thing is that you end up watching you know you watch tv six hours a day or something like that where you say okay well maybe i need to change you know remove that that tv habit or change it so that i free up some time maybe there are some things that there's something needs to be automated you know maybe i find myself spending hours a week working on uh or maybe outsource you know maybe i find myself spending hours a week working on my lawn and it would be better for me to just get somebody else to do it and take you know so i can get that time back and things like that is look at what the obstacles are what are the challenges to getting those hitting those immediate short and long term goals what are the things that sort of drag you down and look for ways to remove those obstacles and it it may be a life-changing kind of thing if it's think about diets you know maybe your obstacle is that you have uh you want to lose weight and you have ice cream readily available so maybe you need to find a way to not have ice cream readily available and the k keep your focus the key to success is you look at all the different things that are out there in all the different ways people achieve success you're going to find out that really a lot of times you can find stuff boils down to keeping your focus if you're trying to get to a destination and you keep that destination in mind you're more likely to get there than if you are constantly thinking about other destinations or allowing yourself to get distracted to other destinations so keep your focus set your goals plan to get that those things plan to hit the ground running avoid scope creep remove your obstacles keep your focus so let's talk a little bit about setting goals as we you know think about our we've put all this stuff in place we've got our theme and our why and our word and we've reviewed what we did last year and all that kind of stuff i want to spend a little bit more time looking at here you know setting those goals short medium and long are going to be key for accountability we want to be able to see on those short ones we want to be able to give ourselves some victories where we have succeeded in doing something you know doing a task that moves us forward that builds momentum and that's that momentum is going to help us get some of those medium goals that are some things that are they are uh milestones basically these are things where we know that as we achieve these medium length goals we're going to see real progress for example maybe you want to learn to play guitar your short goal is maybe learn a note here and a key there or chord there and maybe medium turn goals as maybe there's certain songs you know learn a song or learn a specific song and then your long-term goals are really you know your annual or beyond goals that are basically going to serve as the follow-through is that you're doing this thing on it you're you're succeeding on a daily basis you're completing tasks you're hitting these milestones and these longer-term goals are really that's it may be the actual ultimate prize of you know i want to be able to get a degree that may be your long-term goal but it may be something that's that's a little bit longer that is a little less defined that is the you know i want to improve my career or i want to learn another language or something like that that while is defined you know you want to have some definition to it also maybe is open-ended enough so that you achieving it is not necessarily a uh a stopping point and maybe that is but there's a lot of goals out there that it helps us to have a a big win you know multiple milestones like releasing version 1.0 but also enough of a definition that we know that once we release 1.0 we're actually looking forward to 2.0 and trying to sort of drive through that first version release enjoy it celebrate it and have something that's going to be you know it's the the bigger uh they call it it's uh um they call it a swag and i forget uh it's a a wild awesome gold goal you know something that's just you know be the best ever be the richest or the uh the smartest or most effective or something like that is giving you some long-term goals to really help give you a motivation for the short medium that cornerstone idea review your goals regularly make sure that you're you're trimming away the scope creep with the short the medium in particularly and even some of the long although i guess long can be visionary and you don't have to worry as much short and medium need to be well defined and realistic if you want to let's say you've never picked up a guitar and your goal is that you want to be able to play 50 songs in the next month i'm pretty sure that's not realistic for probably just about anybody um or maybe that yeah it may not be well defined so it's just like i want to be able to play a lot of songs in a month well that's what is a lot you know or things like that you want it to be well defined because you want to be able to say yes and this is for your own edification really because we'll say yes i accomplished it or no i didn't and it needs to be realistic because you want to be able to push yourself but not push yourself in such an insane way that either you know you you cause yourself harm to do it or that it's fairly quickly easy to say you know this was unrealistic so i'm just going to bail out completely you need to find that right balance of pushing yourself but not pushing too hard track or log progress even with personal goals doing a regular um you know whether it's journaling or uh maybe some people use blog sites where they just sort of blog regular you know daily weekly whatever what they worked on things like that that is actually very valuable because it's going to help you is a retrospective essentially when you're done as you complete things the more information you have to review it in the year you know in the next year is going to allow you to better plan for future years and this is particularly it's a good time if you're looking back and there's a lot of things that you just don't remember or have a lot of data about them to help you figure out how you can use those successes for future successes or avoid those failures as you continue on similar products projects tasks at all then this may be a good opportunity for you see where you know there's some data that you want to track there's some things that you want to log fewer better you gotta this goes back to focus if you're if you've got a whole bunch of different goals it's going to be so hard to hit them because you're going to be changing gears all the time and you're going to have competing priorities this is where you know a theme and things like that is going to help because if you have two or three very disparate goals that end up essentially almost fighting against each other that friction is going to slow you down whereas if you have a couple of goals that are you know moderately similar or have a lot of similar tasks or traits then you're going to be able to build momentum on multiple things at a time it's that killing two birds with one stone that's why so often i have mentioned the idea of learning a language part of learning a new development language is find a product or a project that you want to do and do it in that development language because then you are creating that you know creating that product and you're learning at the same time and those things work together there may be some cases where they would fight against each other a little bit for but for the most part those are going to take you along the same path and so you're gonna you're gonna be able to often get some work done in on both towards both of those goals in the same period of time you know with the same exact work so making a plan when you're actually making a plan to go through the these goals and you know this year ahead there are some things that i find are very important to think about the first one is how much time are you really willing to spend on these goals looking at the year behind and what you did or did not like this is that why thing with these things that you want to do especially when you factor in all of the time that you have to spend doing other things you know whether it's as simple as you know sleeping and eating and just healthy exercise maybe your day job uh you know personal relationship time stuff like that how much time do you are you willing to spend and this is one of those things i have seen change dramatically through my career at least where there's you know when you're young and single you may have a whole lot of time to spend and then you get married and maybe you got a little less time if you've got kids you may have less time um if you're an empty nester you may have a ton of time you know if you've got uh illinois uh healing if you have ill or uh you know sick parents or relatives or or you know anything like that or spouses or siblings maybe that's going to adjust how much time you have available because you've got to deal with these other things all of that should factor in to temper your goals in your roadmap is there maybe a lot of it may it's a situation where you may have a lot of things you really want to do or a couple of big things that you really want to focus on but the reality is you really don't have that time that's not really what you're going to be willing to spend and you don't want to set yourself up for failure by putting this big lofty goal you know almost particularly putting this thing that you really want to do into a situation where it is going to be you know constantly a battle of that and spending time on that versus spending time on other things it's the it's the sort of the point of very large number of christmas movies that are out there you know if you think of like uh gosh almost all of them you know jingle all the way and even a little bit the santa claus and some of those kinds of things where you always have the it's almost always it's the dad that works all the time spends his time focused on his job instead of on his family and he realizes he really wants to spend more time with his family well if you set your career up as this big thing and it's taking away from personal stuff then you want to adjust you know if you're or maybe you're spending so much time with your family that your career is suffering you realize that you can't you know that you're going to have to actually cut back a little bit i don't know if that's not many movies meant you know based on that but there could be situations where you you're you know maybe wasting a lot of time maybe you spend too much time i don't know watching tv or or reading pointless articles or something out on facebook arguing with people that you don't know stuff like that maybe you need to make some adjustments so make sure that you have the right at the right time available as you're making a plan um i'm going to jump to the last one here first which is daily or weekly time blocks i think it is very helpful to have a schedule that is easy to conceive it to grasp mentally a full year-long schedule can is i think sometimes too big because of just the amount of time if you work that down to how is this going to how is this going to look on a daily or a lot of times a weekly basis how much time am i going to need to spend on this and that and how much do these other things time do these other things take up give yourself a give yourself a framework to work with and to see where you're going to have opportunities to work on these goals now as you start setting your goals and setting sort of the scope of what you want to achieve you're going to need to think of to set aside some time or have an opportunity to catch up because life will happen they're going to be things that are happening they're going to take you off schedule and so it helps immensely to have something factored in that is a way to catch up maybe it's uh a day a week that you don't plan on doing any work but that you could you know put a little hours towards you know these goals or maybe it's you know once a month maybe you're gonna say you know what i'm going to do all these things but one weekend a month i'm going to go i'm going to set aside so i can catch up you know for the whoop for the the work that i've done in the last month things like that build those into your schedule and then this goes back to really defining your goals properly is know when to stop whether it is stop for the day stop for the week uh you know stop and mark a task complete it is not uncommon for us to continue to work on something beyond when it needs to be worked on or to get sidetracked by something we're working on it may be that to get the right amount of sleep you need to be stop working it you know 10 o'clock at night otherwise you're going to end up working too late and you're not going to sleep well and then all that's going to add up so know that you know this is this is what i need to do i've got this schedule i've blocked these things off i've blocked off 15 minutes a day that i'm gonna work on this thing if if i go to 30 minutes a day it's going to start eating into other stuff that i don't want it to so you know when you need to stop and when you have hard stops and when you can uh adjust or shift things as needed and it may be that you say all right you know i'm on a roll i'm going to spend 30 minutes today but then i'm going to not work on it tomorrow for 15 minutes so i'm going to get that that 15 minutes i'm going to take back and use to apply to something else that needs to get done so hopefully as we've sort of walked through this and in some cases almost trudged through some of these things um hopefully you've seen that we can find material for improvement in the future based on some of the past experience we can look at where we have failed and we want to avoid those we can look at places where we've succeeded and we want to replicate that as much and as often as possible we want to think about what life's going to look like on day one moving forward and plan for a good start and that's that whole spark idea that i came up with which is not taking my you know holding my mind yet so it's you know set your goals plan avoid scope creep remove obstacles and keep your focus set meaningful goals set things that will you know that are milestones or something so that you know you've achieved it and hopefully that uh well one that work our goals that one as you achieve them they work you towards these bigger goals this you know this theme but also things hopefully that you can you take a second and celebrate so that builds your sense of confidence and is a morale booster that you did get that done and then i preach this so often but i find that this is so huge in uh goal setting and resolutions and sticking to them and stuff like that is hold yourself accountable if you've got somebody else to hold you accountable you know like a mentoring group or something like that then you know throw those ideas out to them write this stuff down tell somebody that matters so that at the very least every so often they'll say how's that thing going and that will be you know that'll maybe stick in your mind that gosh the next time they ask me how this thing is going i want to be able to say that it's going well and that's going to help us you know make a plan and stick to us is that we you know we've we've got to go that's why we start with these small goals is get some things in motion get some things accomplished and allow that to build momentum and build habits and get you to the end goal all right questions or comments i have a a comment that's going to lead into a question that's based in a story i used to listen a lot to dan carlin's hardcore history rob i think you've introduced me to him yeah uh there's a podcast on uh there's a session on um winston churchill and i kid you not every time i listen to that episode i feel like i'm just ready to just go it's a very he's a very inspiring figure from history uh i felt that same urge during uh this um presentation so again thank you and so this leads now into my comment and question uh you know one of the things that i uh there are multiple things that i need to get better at debriefing after projects debriefing after a year um and then planning ahead what i find is that it's easy for me to to know the how if i get a get a problem with the uh in front of me i know how to get it done and oftentimes i will take steps and complete that project you know but it's all in my head it's the how that's in my head and then i implement what's in my head the the translation from how to do something to planning to do something can you help me close that gap how do i plan how do i translate the how that's in my head to a well flushed out plan that can be executed executed upon uh by people outside of me that's a it's actually it's an excellent question and um i i think it's you know sort of from a personal point of view i think that's exactly the kind of question you need to be answering at this point you know that you be or need to be asking and determining and answering for where you're at that is a to me that is that's part of a growth in our careers and really i think almost any career as you go from being able to do to being able to um to plan which allows you to to maybe incorporate uh contingencies and things like that a little better but then also to be able to then communicate that to other people to to lead you know or to mentor and it is for me i think i'm not sure that this isn't something that is a sort of is really sort of personal to each individual uh how they best do that um so i'll sort of throw some ideas out of what i have done over the years and hopefully that sparked some things and we'll see if that's you know if that's something that works for you as well i do know that the you know some of the stuff is i've talked through it with other people and actually listening to other um i guess their productivity specialists and stuff like that you know getting things done things like that um i think there are definitely some some common traits that you'll find now the the interesting thing about the how is um and this was for me when it's in your head then you just you sit down and you start doing it it actually in a sense takes more time well actually and not even in a sense i mean directly it takes more time to put that down to create you know if you think about a um like a jira project to do x and you already know how to do it in your head it would take you time to build out each of those tickets and then you know even even if you just built them out to put it out as a server roadmap but especially then if you do that and you you move them to in progress to complete and stuff like that that's additional time that you didn't necessarily have to spend the flip side of that is that when i list out what i'm going to do when i spend that it really it's sort of like a design time and i write down these are the steps i'm going to take it helps me to flesh those steps out because there's things that i'm going to that i know i've got to do but sometimes i don't think about them right away and i start implementing and i come back and i go oh yeah that's right i got to do this other thing and so it's it's not a straight line of work that i do i sort of you know go off in a direction and i'll go oh yeah i gotta go to this other thing and so i jump over there and do the other thing and then come back and theoretically it's all in my head it's been in my head from the start but when i write it out i'm more likely to have a uh i guess a logical approach to getting those things done if that makes sense that it's these things are gonna i'm gonna get the things i should do early i'm going to get done earlier and the things i can wait till later i'm going to get those things done later and initially the way i did it was i would just like this i would sit down at the beginning you know usually at the end of the year to plan for the year ahead and i would just write some things down and say i want to accomplish this i want to accomplish that and it really i think initially was a was an accountability thing so i would look at my list and say oh shoot i didn't get that done or oh hey i did get that done but doing that and learning how you think in my case how i think and where i'm likely to have gaps the other things i'm more likely to forget about actually helped me not forget about those going forward because i would say oh yeah don't forget you know this is something you almost always forget about you you know you've you did this project and you didn't think about this thing right away and it it ended up being a you know sort of a pain because you had to you know shoehorn it in late and stuff like that and it allows others potentially if you write this stuff down and allows others to take a look at it and say hey did you think about this did you think about that um and that's that is the i think the next step step of evolution it's the first thing is to do it is to at least start and give yourself some period of time and the end of the year is always sort of a good one to just say you know i'm going to take you know on a one of my days off i'm going to take an hour and just sort of sit down and think through what do i want to do in the year ahead ideally you know look at what you did in the year behind you know this presentation basically ideally is what you're going to do but if you at least start with looking at your head and thinking through that a little bit and writing a couple of things down or taking some notes or you know at least setting some markers for yourself then the next time you do it you'll probably want to you'll have learned so you'll do it a little better but also you'll probably grow that process there'll be more details to it because of uh past failures and successes where you've seen that you know these are some things i failed to do and that hurt me you know hurt my progress and here's some things i did well and i want to do those more or do those deeper you know maybe it's you said you find that you set three goals for the year and it really worked out well so now you're gonna back that track off you're gonna set three goals for every quarter and you know they maybe not as big but um the idea here is that you're you're seeing this thing and so now you can use it you worked in one context and you can apply that to another context um i do want to mention the whole uh positive boost that you you got out of this presentation i mean first of all thank you very much for those kind words but the other thing is there are as you mentioned you've got the uh you know the hardcore history episode that spoke to you um there's things like that i i i like the four hour work week i don't know why that's that's just something that i listen to that on audiobook you know i don't know every maybe every other year or something like that uh there's also rework that is the uh was it the 57 signals or 37 signals uh i can't think i think it's joshua freed i think his name um is a pretty good one or crush it uh by gary vaynerchuk chuck just because it's just it's just a positivity kind of thing um there's things like that that are good for us to know that are you know cheerleaders for us or something that sets us on a positive track yeah maybe if you feel yourself you know if you get to a point at any point where you feel like you're i don't know floundering a little bit or you feel like you're you know you don't have the same you know pep in your step you know maybe it's a good time to go back and you know listen to things like that uh so that may be you know part of what you want to think about in the year ahead is that maybe as you as part of your annual review and planning is that you listen to one of those things or you re-read one of those things that is a yeah that that sparks you to do something better that that gets you motivated to do it so that you have that motivation at the right time when you can sit down and you can do some planning and you can do some reviews and you have that extra energy that comes from that that positivity did that i know i i went took a long way around did that sort of give you some ideas and answer your question a little bit yes sir excellent excellent advice and one thing that resonated with me uh especially was um i i'll praise it in the way that i received it uh promoting the benefit of planning in my mind right i i know the benefit but it doesn't outweigh my drive to solve problems sometimes and so i'll just dive into problem solving whereas if i promote it and give it a heavier weight uh i'll do it more often and uh everything about you know going to those things that you know inspire me and you know give me a pep in my step and i'd definitely add that in as well to uh to to do that more thank you yeah i think you probably uh this is something i know i struggled with and that maybe is a similar struggle you have is that desire to get something done i think it's useful for me it's proved very useful to remember the old saw of measure twice and cut once and that applies to design you know designing what we're building and so i've thought about you know that's allowed me to or pushed me to spend more time on design as opposed to jumping into implementation at times and then also from a a life planning or you know goal setting is to spend that time is to design design those tasks and those goals and those milestones a little bit uh and i you know i refine them more as i've i've gone further along so that i you you sort of think through that a little bit and hopefully will help us maybe avoid some obstacles and uh you know have a smoother road in doing so actually question comments and all around any other questions you've been motivated for this year um i'm probably going to go back and listen to vandertruck again this week good that was that was one of the things i was hoping you know to get out of this presentation and it's actually that's the it's sort of been the theme of uh i haven't done i've cut back a little bit on a couple of the the number of epis podcast episodes this month just because i've got a lot of other stuff going on and but that's been sort of the theme as well is and it's been partially driven by me as i just i felt like it was a good time for me to get i needed to get re-motivated on some stuff so i'm glad that this you know has been has seemed motivational as well because that was definitely one of the goals any other questions or comments all right well as always thank you for your time thank you for your your questions your comments um we've got plenty of ways to get a hold of us if you have any you know any additional information or questions or anything that you need from us info development dot com for email we've got the contact us form on developernoor.com you can follow us on twitter at developmentor we've got our youtube channel that you can find links to that vimeo vimeo dot com slash developer newer facebook.com uh yes we're still on facebook you're still out there on youtube and uh we've been cranking out you know decent amount of content so uh definitely feel free to enjoy that wherever possible share with your friends your families and anybody else that would care and if you have any you know questions comments or suggestions we're always open to those because our goal is making every developer better and the best way to do that is to you know help you be the you that you want to be thank you for your time and we will talk to you next time [Music] you
Transcript Segments
[Music]
it's the end of the year
basically uh this is the last definitely
going to be the last mentor class we
have this year anyways
and while we've done a lot of
tutorial and more uh technical
presentations this year
and really haven't spent quite as much
time on the i guess the
i had the business side or the
entrepreneurial side and talking about
planning and goals and road maps and
things like that
i think it's a good time to do so
we're getting to the end of the year
which sometimes
i always struggle with a little with
this because i try to plan out my year
that the last couple of weeks are
are slow i know a lot of people that do
and but on the other hand i've had the
years where
things have gotten really crazy and i
know there's some people that is
it either has gotten that crazy or if
you're in
you know retail or some of that kind of
stuff it is by yeah
by its nature it's it's crazy this is
the busy time of the year
but even with that even when you're busy
there are
some i think for most people there are
some times to reflect at least because
you're going to have
hopefully a couple of days off you're
going to have you know christmas day and
christmas eve and new year's day and new
year's eve
and things like that and and you also
have other people
that are on vacations and holidays it's
just
one of those parts of a you know times
of the year
uh toward in the winter and then also in
the summer where things
sort of slow down a little bit you're
allowed to you're more likely to have
days where
you can go in and just work as opposed
to have
interactions with co-workers and
distractions and things like that
and of course there's the you know the
famous new year
new year's resolution that
is always something that's it's worth
thinking about
so after 2020 has been a
uh remarkable year in many ways i think
it's a
you know even better a good time for us
to go back
over some things we've talked about
actually in the past
and you know spend a little time
thinking about how we can best make
2021 as good a year as possible for us
so i'm just going to go through some
things that are
in many ways i think these are sort of
obvious i think we've we have talked
about them before
they are things that if you sat down you
could probably come up with this list
but it's also
one of those things i think it's an
exercise that is good to go through
these and
actually think about it to say oh yeah
but yeah i do need to make sure i do
that
and so the key things were to talk about
is looking backwards to look forward
finding a theme or a why uh setting the
table so that you have a good start as
you go into the new year
setting goals and making plans which are
always a part of all of those pieces
so first let's think about this
potential for review here that's you
know we're ending a year so we can look
back for the year
that's gone gone past and see how that
can maybe help us to look ahead
now in looking back there are some key
things
that we need to make sure we we cover
some you know things we check
off and these are these are actually
overlooked on a
more often than i would expect when i've
worked with
you know companies and organizations and
individuals and we've talked you know
whether it's mentoring or
consulting and looked at
sort of what did you accomplish last
year and what do you want to accomplish
next year you know or the
in the years ahead and the first one is
what went
right it's very easy to
see things that are still on our plate
and ignore or forget about the things
that we actually accomplished and
removed from our
plate during the year so it's good to
actually look back and see
what um what was
what was accomplished you know what sort
of almost like where did we start
back in january one and how was what
things did we knock off that list
you know now as we get towards the end
of the year keith
another key thing is looking at what was
unexpected
what things came up this year
that took us off track because
contingencies are really built on that
is
trying to think through at least not
necessarily even worst case scenarios
but also
likely scenarios i think 2020 could
easily be considered a worst case
scenario in many ways
when you look at businesses that you
know died
or are were unavailable for long periods
of time and
and changes in customer interactions and
things like that
so there's particularly when you've had
such a big change there's
a lot of opportunity to see
what could we maybe have done to prepare
for that
and that's going to help us a lot as we
as we start looking forward
another key thing is what what is it
that stopped
in the last year or we didn't need to do
anymore
because there are some of those it may
be that there's a
there could be a change in regulations
there could be a change in management
there could be a change in style
there could be licensing agreements that
end and things like that
that can change your business whether
it's regardless of what it is
and not only the business but even how
you
do your job you know there may be things
like
uh you know maybe you you know this year
probably would have been a long way to
do it but maybe you worked on
windows xp for a very long time and your
company finally got off of it
or maybe you you know worked on uh
in in-house or on-prem servers and those
have all been moved to the cloud you
know there's things like that is
trying to mark some of those those
changes
and then looking at you know still
looking back is what
one of the things that we did were
larger
or took more resources you know that we
underestimated
and then what are the ones that we
overestimated it's trying to get a feel
for
you know where where are we missing the
mark
on our estimations whether it's over
over or under
um but that's you know obviously the
ones that are over we're gonna have to
figure out how to estimate them
higher and the ones that we're under
we're going to have to figure out why we
should have estimated those lower so
that we
get better and as we move forward
so now based on that once we which is
not
you know it's not a 30 seconds or you
know just quickly looking at a list it's
really
um if you look at each of these is each
of these probably is going to be
sort of a category or two of tasks
for us to think about and sort of you
know bookmark those
as we start looking forward so
based on what we want to do
moving forward then we've probably got a
rough list or a rough idea
let's take a look at what we're going to
be doing that
maybe some of these projects are similar
to the ones that we've succeeded in the
past
and a great those are great because that
means we know how to get it done
a lot of what we do is actually learning
what not to do you know it's we have
failures and we say oh well we shouldn't
do that
but once you get to a point where you do
know what is it that we are supposed to
do
that's going to be the fastest way to
reach your destination
that is i think part of the reasons that
they they say success breeds success
because if you know how to do it right
and you know you did it right
logically you should be able to
reproduce that that success
a big thing that is a part of that
uh if you go back to the things that
ended or became unneeded
is using that to maybe find some
unnecessary tasks
that you can take off your list
sometimes there's going to be things
such as
maybe there's a bunch of reporting that
you did that wasn't needed or maybe
there were features that you started to
go down that path
and they ended up being unneeded or
there may be entire projects that were
started and didn't finish because for
some reason another they became
unnecessary
examining the reasons for that
unnecessariness
if we can make that word up
going to help you uh look for maybe
warning signs for some of the things
that you have on your list
to do in the year ahead it's always
uh take the you know go with lessons
learned so what is it that we
we ran into what were the challenges and
the obstacles that we've
dealt with in the year behind and how
can we maybe
factor those in a little bit as we move
forward so that we are
at least uh less impacted in a negative
sense
by some of these unexpected things and
it may also adjust how we approach
things you know maybe we
do something that's a little more uh
risk sensitive
essentially is that we we think about it
and approach it in a way so that we're
not
you know maybe going headlong into it
and instead
we find a way to sort of incrementally
get our way into it so that we have a
you know sort of like climbing a
mountain so you make sure you have a
really
solid foothold before you move on to the
next spot
and then um you know looking at what
we've done in the past is
there's going to be we're going to
adjust our estimates is
looking at where we under or
overestimated things
let's try to take that and a lot of
times it's sort of a
it may be as simple as a applying a
multiplying factor to
our estimates it's sort of well known
that developers generally speaking take
their estimates and double them and then
you're going to be a lot closer to what
a real estimate is going to be but we
know i'm sure we all know
developers that you're probably going to
have to multiply it by five
and there's others out there that are
gonna you know really pad their numbers
and maybe you have to
knock 20 off or something like that
particularly for your personal
uh edification and and career
it's good to get a feel for what your
approach i guess estimates are is
whether you tend to be maybe overly
optimistic or overly pessimistic
and you know try to build that into your
estimates as you move forward
so one of the biggest things that i
would like for us to take
out of thinking about our your you know
our upcoming year is
finding your why and this
is really can a lot of what you did in
the last year can help you with this
and you want to think about things like
what this is probably one of your
your your biggest things what is it that
you did that you enjoyed
and not at a a big level but even down
to a sort of a micro level
do you enjoy uh designing do you enjoy
coding do you enjoy
requirements do you enjoy uh mentoring
or
managing or testing or
especially in the world of i.t there's
so much
there's so many facets to the job
to your career that it's important to
note where did you you know what is the
stuff that you like to do and hopefully
you know there's somewhere in your year
behind gone by there were things that
you enjoyed that you found times where
you like you know what i'm
it may be you know challenging and stuff
like that but it was an
enjoyable way um
think about market changes you know
there may be
some things that you know in looking
back
or there may be some things that you
didn't like to do
that now are going to be more likely to
show up
or things that you did like to do that
are going to be more likely to show up
so
let's say for example you like coding in
a specific language
whatever it is say you enjoy coding in
react you know you like javascript
libraries you you like doing that
well yeah it may be that what you
positioned yourself as two years ago
i'd say maybe you're a java developer
let's just you know two years ago you're
a java developer
you came into last year and you're
looking for java jobs well
in the last year you've realized you
really do enjoy react programming well
it may be that because of the market
changes
now react is something that's much more
feasible as a
as a career choice for a while so maybe
you can
shift gears a little bit and
find a way to get more of those you know
those react jobs
or whatever it is that you you came
across
similar to that is that you maybe you
found a new love maybe there's something
that you got to this year
that you realize i really enjoy doing
that
and it's not again this is something i
think a lot of us experienced in our
career
because depending on where we're at we
have
i guess for lack of a better term access
to different
roles and tasks and if you're
if you're starting out you're not going
to be you know your first
month of work you're not going to be
asked probably to manage somebody else
if you're a developer
you're not going to be asked probably
even you may not be asked to talk to a
customer or gather requirements or
do anything other than just code but
then if you fast forward a couple of
years
maybe you're in a situation where now
you can be exposed to actually designing
you know in the real world and maybe
you're growing into uh you know leading
a team
or things like that you know as you go
through maybe your move up to management
or
architecture or all these things that we
we don't necessarily have access early
in our career
that you know we maybe we did it a
little bit in school but it's not the
same
so that when we got to do it in the real
world you know in our career we realized
that wow i really
i really enjoy doing that so you want to
think about that as you may
your why from year to year may actually
change a little bit
uh similar to that there may be a new
season ahead that may be that you
are in your career or
your life that there is there are going
to be some changes ahead
that you need to take into account as
you're planning for the year ahead
uh there's you know life things maybe
that you you know maybe you got married
or you've got a house or you've got
kids or you've got kids that are
graduating or uh you're retiring or
you know the gambit of personal stuff
that comes up and maybe you move
you know maybe you're moving from uh you
know could be one city to another or
maybe one country to another
that is going to change a lot of your
environment and access to certain
tasks and roles and skills that
you're going to have to incorporate into
thinking about well how do i
where do i want to be three months from
now six months from now
a year from now and i think it's another
key one is
looking back at the year that you've
gone through is there's
just some things where you're just
burned out or you got bored with
something
yeah using that sort of uh developer
example
let's say you came into the year and you
just loved writing java code
and you realize about halfway through
the year that you're just done with it
you know you've done it for
enough years that you just it's just
wrote that it doesn't it doesn't
challenge you anymore you don't get the
same
excitement out of it or you know joy
from it
so if there's some things that you and
that may be probably the most
challenging
of these items if there's something that
you've particularly that you've done for
a while that you're pretty good at it
but you're
bored of it or burned out then you know
you may have to
sort of leave at the top it's where one
of those kinds of things where you may
need to see if you can adjust your
career path a little bit to make that
something you don't do the other
probably the most famous of these kinds
of things would be
when michael jordan many years ago went
from basketball to baseball
yeah i think he never i don't think he
ever said he was bored with basketball
but obviously there was something about
it that he
that did not appeal to him as much so he
literally changed careers and there are
plenty of people out there that do that
that are
you know maybe not even not at the
height of their career necessarily but
they realize that the career path
they're on
is is not um it's just not satisfactory
to them it's not bringing them
satisfaction or joy
and if you're in that situation it's i
think i always have said it will be
better in the long run for you to find
the thing that you do enjoy
as opposed to you know just cutting it
out with something you don't
enjoy money and all that other kind of
stuff just isn't
isn't worth it if you're if you're not
happy
so think about what is your why what are
the
why do i want to continue in this career
what are the things that i want to work
with
you know what are the things that bring
me joy
and incorporate that into our plans
in the year ahead and that may include
that work
itself our career maybe doesn't bring us
quite the same joy
as something outside of it so we need to
you know adjust
our approach to our career so we're not
burning 80 hours a week and instead
we can go do you know whatever that
other thing is that we want to do
i think it's very important and i've
i've found this in the past few years at
least is to sort of
set a theme for a year it helps at least
for me
it helps um sort of organize
goals if that makes sense is you know
sort of keep things that are
in there that are focused on that theme
it if you think of it as a from an
academic point of view
if you want to pursue a certain degree
then
especially like a university there's
tons of different classes you can take
but there are only certain classes that
are really going to direct you towards
that degree
so if you wanted to get that degree as
fast as possible
you would make sure you got all of your
core classes for that degree
and then you minimize the stuff you know
the extra stuff you need to do
otherwise you may just look at all the
classes and take almost a random
scheduling of them and could take you
many many extra years to get that degree
so there's in setting a theme there's a
lot of
you know different things to think about
and and it is all very personal but
here's some things that sort of have
helped me as well
uh first one the theme is
remember this theme is basically your
focus is
what is it that you want to
what is it you want to accomplish in the
year ahead and this is key because it's
a focus it is it's not 10 things
it's really ideally one another may be
multiple things that are part of that
and maybe you want to be your focus is
that you want to be a better value as an
employee
and maybe part of that is that you're
going to learn uh
you know a little spoken language a new
programming language a new platform you
may there's a couple of things that
you know they all go towards that theme
but in that case your focus would be
become more
valuable to my employer um it may be
that your focus is i want to learn
uh i want to be a better developer of
mobile applications
and things like that so that would still
it may be a
you don't want your focus to be too
broad but you do want
uh you it is okay if it's somewhat broad
because the key is that you're gonna
bring that into a tighter focus
by adding a couple of key you know goals
one things i find that's been very
helpful
is finding a word you know from the
focus point it's finding a word that i'm
going to use
for the year now i do this on a personal
level that is
that goes beyond career
but it is and that allows me to
actually set a theme for both you know
from career and personal
and financial and all this kinds of
other stuff they all sort of wrap into
that
and i think if you can get it down to a
word and it's not a bad
theme to have uh for example i had one
year where
the word was learn and i really
reset uh several things that
were on my my road map i guess and
focused on
learning some new things it's expanding
my skills again i hadn't done it for a
while
i realized enjoyed doing that that i
missed that and so
that became my theme as i was like you
know what i'm gonna learn
that's that's my year and
those kinds of things it's it it may be
sort of broad but i think if you can
keep that word and that focus
that theme um it will really help you
figure out what
you should be doing and maybe what you
shouldn't worry about
in doing those things maybe there's a
task or
um a series of tasks that you just
it will help you to just finish them
that you want to get these things done
that they they've been sitting on your
plate they've been languishing for a
while
um and the theme may actually be
depending on what that you know there
may be a task that you need to finish so
it could be get a degree or write a book
or start a podcast or create an
application
or uh do a professional presentation
or get married
or buy a house or
there's there may be certain things that
are sort of that that task is
sort of your primary focus so you want
to work towards that
um you definitely want to have in your
theme
some things that are uh you're going to
want it coming down to some things that
are doable
within the year you know being uh
i want to be the best baseball player in
the year ahead
you know maybe a bit yeah it's probably
going to be a bit too much
particularly if you don't even know how
to play baseball for example but if
you're pretty close
if you're already playing at
professionals then maybe that's your
theme
and it's not that you have to achieve
that task but maybe the
the focus on that task is what will
drive you through the year
and allow you to really set some things
in place to maybe maybe not complete
that necessarily
this year but maybe in the years ahead
think about maybe maybe there's some new
goals as we've talked about you know
a word and a focus and this theme maybe
there's some
goals that are some new goals that you
need to build into this year
maybe you need to tweak a few of them
that are that you had on your you know
your roadmap or your list
maybe there's a few you need to throw
out maybe there's a couple of things
where you say you know this is
i've got some really cool stuff i want
to do this year this thing would be nice
but
i'm not going to deal with it this year
you know if i'm not even going to let it
distract me because
it's not part of that focus it's it's
watering down my focus
and all of this comes down to think
about the you
that you want to be and
how do you get there in the year ahead
not what
your boss wants or your parents want or
people your friends want or whatever
it's like what will make what makes you
happy
what will you be proud of
doing accomplishing or becoming in the
year ahead
and allow that to filter through your
theme your
in your focus so that you you know
ideally
and that's really what we want out of
this is that three months six months 12
months from now
you're actually more comfortable in your
skin and happier being yourself and with
and more proud of what you've
accomplished
so once we put all that together
we're getting close down you know
basically we're coming up to january 1
and so what are we going to do we want
to make sure we start
strong that we come out of the gate you
know and it with a good
pace and ready to go it's really hard to
to you know wait until january 31st or
december 1st and really accomplish
you know our especially annual level
goals
so one of these things that you you know
you see all the time and it just sort of
stumbled across this so
i decided that hey you know we can call
this spark which works pretty good for
you know sparking you uh onto your new
year
and uh it really is set immediate short
and long term goals
this is about accountability really
if you've got really you know immediate
like one or two days
and short term uh within the first month
or even
you know maybe as far out as the first
quarter and then
of course the rest of your goals for the
year but
giving yourself something that is
a target that is achievable early
is very key to things like
setting up habits i mean if you think
about the classic
idea of habit is you you know if you do
the same thing for i think they say 21
days straight
that defines a habit well that means
that you're doing something that you've
accomplished every day
and usually it's very short stuff i mean
it's uh
like if you want to get in the habit of
making your bed when you get up in the
morning
go make your bed every day for 21 days
straight but
that's minutes maybe you know to get
that done maybe less than that depending
on how
wild you are when you sleep but
generally speaking
that's something that you can get
accomplished quickly and you want to
make sure as you're building your road
map and your goals
and your plan for the year ahead that's
one of the things you keep in mind
is what can uh or i guess as part of
your planning is
what can i do on a maybe on a daily
basis or a
weekly basis or you know every work day
or every weekend
what is something that i can put on my
task or to-do list
that is reasonable for me to to get done
uh which means you're probably not gonna
it's probably not gonna be something
that's gonna take you uh
20 or 30 hours a week you know to do it
or 20 or 30 hours
whenever you get it done to get it done
um it could be as short as something
that takes you 15 minutes
maybe something takes you an hour or two
but then you know maybe not maybe it's
an hour to a week that you spend on
something and so you can
you know sort of sprinkle that
throughout the week
and the key is on those immediate goals
when you're starting
i become hell or high water you want to
hit that first
couple of times that that goal comes up
you want to hit it you want to succeed
and get it done
start getting the momentum to build that
habit
now something that we often fail to do
is the next one is the p of spark is
plan plan to start get
things in motion so that when you get to
that first day
you have the things in place to
get the work done
a developer example would be
you don't want to get into that first
day where you're going to let's say
you're going to
build a java application and you don't
have the
latest version you know the right
version of java installed on a machine
or you maybe don't have a machine set up
to be
development at all or you haven't picked
out an integrated development
environment
so the first day instead of actually
working on that application
you end up losing hours of time
installing stuff and configuring things
stuff like that
think about what that first day
doing that task is going to be like and
plan for it enough to make sure that you
have the things in place that you need
this may be
setting aside certain time there may be
some people that you need to talk to to
let them know that hey this is what i'm
going to do
or there may be some people that you
need something from there may be
something that you need to get
um you know exam if you for some reason
let's say you want to grill out
every day you want to go use your grill
every day and start on january 1
well if you don't have you know a grill
then
you have to go get a grill the first day
or if you don't have
your coals or your you know gas or
whatever it is that you need to use
you need to make sure that you have the
materials so plan
and be ready to hit the ground running
avoid and this is as we're you know we
get getting our first day and we're
moving forward
we're starting to set these habits up
avoid scope creep
you know we complain about it with
others when we're doing our
you know through our career and and
doing all these projects and stuff like
that
and i think we recognize it somewhat to
ourselves but i don't know that we
realize
how damaging that can be
is is scope creep can very quickly
take us off rails and get us completely
you know diverted from our goals
so we want to as we're you know as we're
getting these things done
we want to make sure that we are you
know regularly at least
depending on how you do it how often
regularly needs to be
but take a look at what you're doing and
see if there's some scope creep are
there some things you're doing
that have taken you beyond what you
really need to do
and if so trim the fat a little bit is
get yourself
back to focus a great idea a great
concept that is similar to this is the
idea of a cornerstone
if you have a cornerstone in a building
that is what sets what is
the proper alignment and if you think
about a let's say a you know one foot by
one foot
block that is a cornerstone well if
if you keep adding blocks on that thing
and you don't refer back to the
cornerstone and you probably have seen
this
and this is why contractors work the way
they do
you'll see that it will actually end up
drifting it will not be a straight line
because you're there's going to be even
if it's just a little bit off from brick
to brick to brick
that little bit can add up so the way to
fix that correct for that is that you
measure stuff
based off of the cornerstone as opposed
to
the base you know the most previous
thing that was
uh that was laid down the whole the old
kids game of telephone is similar where
you you have one
person says something they whispered
somebody's ear that whispered the next
person whisper whisper whisper
and eventually the last person has
something that is completely
unintelligible
based on what the original one was well
if the first person
whispered the same thing to everybody
then you wouldn't have near the uh the
degradation of correctness
basically that comes up so avoid coat
scope creep keep
you know regularly look back at what are
your goals what's your why
what is your your focus and your theme
and make sure that you're still
maintaining that
and that's particularly important as you
get further and further into the ear
where possible the r is remove remove
obstacles
managers that are in my opinion at least
i think a lot of others out there
managers that are doing their job
correctly are removing obstacles for
their staff for the people that work for
them
if we are driving our own careers and
and goals we are we have to manage that
as well that means we have to remove
obstacles
so as we go through particularly
hopefully
setting habits and things like that
we're going to experience things that
maybe slow us down or a problem
for example maybe you want to
study something where you want to spend
a half hour studying something every day
and then you find out that
you know one of the problems with you
being able to spend 30 minutes studying
that thing is that you end up watching
you know you watch
tv six hours a day or something like
that where you say okay well maybe i
need to
change you know remove that that tv
habit or change it so that i free up
some time
maybe there are some things that there's
something needs to be automated you know
maybe i find myself spending
hours a week working on uh
or maybe outsource you know maybe i find
myself spending hours a week working on
my lawn
and it would be better for me to just
get somebody else to do it and
take you know so i can get that time
back and things like that is look at
what the obstacles are what are the
challenges
to getting those hitting those immediate
short and long term goals
what are the things that sort of drag
you down
and look for ways to remove those
obstacles and it it may be a
life-changing kind of thing
if it's think about diets you know maybe
your obstacle is
that you have uh you want to lose weight
and you have ice cream readily available
so maybe
you need to find a way to not have ice
cream readily available
and the k keep your focus
the key to success is
you look at all the different things
that are out there in all the different
ways people
achieve success you're going to find out
that really
a lot of times you can find stuff boils
down to keeping your focus
if you're trying to get to a destination
and you keep that destination in mind
you're more likely to get there
than if you are constantly thinking
about other destinations or
allowing yourself to get distracted to
other destinations so
keep your focus set your goals plan to
get that
those things plan to hit the ground
running avoid scope creep
remove your obstacles keep your focus
so let's talk a little bit about setting
goals as we
you know think about our we've put all
this stuff in place we've got our
theme and our why and our word and we've
reviewed what we did last year and all
that kind of stuff
i want to spend a little bit more time
looking at here you know setting those
goals
short medium and long are going to be
key for accountability
we want to be able to see on those short
ones we want to be able to give
ourselves
some victories where we have succeeded
in doing
something you know doing a task that
moves us forward that builds momentum
and that's that momentum is going to
help us get some of those medium
goals that are some things that are
they are uh milestones basically these
are things where we
know that as we achieve these medium
length goals
we're going to see real progress
for example maybe you want to learn to
play guitar
your short goal is maybe learn a note
here and a key there or chord there
and maybe medium turn goals as maybe
there's certain
songs you know learn a song or learn a
specific
song and then your long-term goals are
really
you know your annual or beyond goals
that are basically going to serve as the
follow-through
is that you're doing this thing on it
you're you're
succeeding on a daily basis you're
completing tasks
you're hitting these milestones and
these longer-term goals are
really that's it may be the actual
ultimate prize of you know i want to be
able to
get a degree that may be your long-term
goal
but it may be something that's that's a
little bit longer that is
a little less defined that is the
you know i want to improve my career or
i want to
learn another language or something like
that that
while is defined you know you want to
have some definition to it also maybe is
open-ended enough
so that you achieving it is not
necessarily a
uh a stopping point and maybe that is
but there's a lot of goals out there
that it helps us to have a
a big win you know multiple milestones
like
releasing version 1.0 but
also enough of a definition that we know
that once we release 1.0 we're actually
looking forward to 2.0
and trying to sort of drive through that
first version release enjoy it
celebrate it and have something that's
going to be you know it's the
the bigger uh they call it it's uh um
they call it a swag and i forget uh it's
a a wild
awesome gold goal you know something
that's just
you know be the best ever be the richest
or the uh
the smartest or most effective or
something like that is giving you some
long-term goals to really
help give you a motivation for the short
medium
that cornerstone idea review your goals
regularly
make sure that you're you're trimming
away the scope creep
with the short the medium in
particularly and even some of the long
although i guess long can be visionary
and you don't have to worry as much
short and medium need to be well defined
and realistic
if you want to let's say you've never
picked up a guitar and your goal is that
you want to be able to play
50 songs in the next month
i'm pretty sure that's not realistic for
probably just about anybody
um or maybe that yeah it may not be well
defined so it's just like i want to be
able to play a lot of
songs in a month well that's what is a
lot you know or
things like that you want it to be well
defined because
you want to be able to say yes and this
is for your own
edification really because we'll say yes
i accomplished it
or no i didn't and it needs to be
realistic because you want to be able to
push yourself but not push yourself in
such an insane way that either
you know you you cause yourself harm to
do it or
that it's fairly quickly easy to say you
know this was unrealistic so i'm just
going to bail out completely
you need to find that right balance of
pushing yourself but not pushing too
hard
track or log progress even with personal
goals
doing a regular um you know whether it's
journaling or uh maybe
some people use blog sites where they
just sort of blog regular
you know daily weekly whatever what they
worked on things like that
that is actually very valuable because
it's going to help you
is a retrospective essentially when
you're done as you complete things
the more information you have to review
it in the year
you know in the next year is going to
allow you to better plan
for future years and this is
particularly it's a good time
if you're looking back and there's a lot
of things that you just don't
remember or have a lot of data about
them to help you figure out how you can
use
those successes for future successes or
avoid those failures
as you continue on similar products
projects tasks
at all then this may be a good
opportunity for you see where
you know there's some data that you want
to track there's some things that you
want to log
fewer better you gotta this goes back to
focus
if you're if you've got a whole bunch of
different goals
it's going to be so hard to hit them
because you're going to be changing
gears all the time and you're going to
have competing priorities
this is where you know a theme and
things like that
is going to help because if you have two
or three very
disparate goals that end up
essentially almost fighting against each
other
that friction is going to slow you down
whereas if you have a couple of goals
that are
you know moderately similar or have a
lot of similar tasks
or traits then you're going to be able
to build momentum on multiple things at
a time it's that
killing two birds with one stone that's
why
so often i have mentioned the idea of
learning a language
part of learning a new development
language is find a
product or a project that you want to do
and do it
in that development language because
then you are creating that you know
creating that product and you're
learning at the same time and those
things work together
there may be some cases where they would
fight against each other a little bit
for
but for the most part those are going to
take you along the same path and so
you're gonna
you're gonna be able to often get some
work done in on both towards both of
those goals
in the same period of time you know with
the same exact work
so making a plan
when you're actually making a plan to go
through the
these goals and you know this year ahead
there are some things that i find are
very important to think about
the first one is how much time are you
really willing to spend
on these goals looking at the year
behind and what you
did or did not like this is that why
thing
with these things that you want to do
especially when you factor in all of the
time that you have to spend doing
other things you know whether it's as
simple as you know sleeping and
eating and just healthy exercise
maybe your day job uh you know personal
relationship time stuff like that
how much time do you are you willing to
spend and this is one of those things i
have seen change
dramatically through my career at least
where there's
you know when you're young and single
you may have a whole lot of time to
spend and then you get married and maybe
you got a little less time if you've got
kids
you may have less time um if you're
an empty nester you may have a ton of
time you know if you've got
uh illinois uh
healing if you have ill or uh you know
sick parents or relatives or
or you know anything like that or
spouses or siblings
maybe that's going to adjust how much
time you have available because you've
got to deal with these other things
all of that should factor in to
temper your goals in your roadmap
is there maybe a lot of it may it's a
situation where you may have a lot of
things you really want to do or a couple
of big things that you really want to
focus on
but the reality is you really don't have
that time
that's not really what you're going to
be willing to spend and you don't want
to
set yourself up for failure by putting
this big lofty goal
you know almost particularly putting
this thing that you really want to do
into a situation where it is going to be
you know constantly a battle of that
and spending time on that versus
spending time on other things
it's the it's the sort of the point of
very
large number of christmas movies that
are out there you know if you think of
like
uh gosh almost all of them you know
jingle all the way
and even a little bit the santa claus
and some of those kinds of things where
you always have the
it's almost always it's the dad that
works all the time spends his time
focused on his job instead of on his
family and he realizes he really wants
to spend more time with his family
well if you set your career up as this
big thing
and it's taking away from personal stuff
then
you want to adjust you know if you're or
maybe you're spending so much time with
your family that your career is
suffering you realize that you can't
you know that you're going to have to
actually cut back a little bit i don't
know if that's
not many movies meant you know based on
that but
there could be situations where you
you're
you know maybe wasting a lot of time
maybe you spend too much time
i don't know watching tv or or
reading pointless articles or something
out on facebook arguing with people that
you don't know stuff like that
maybe you need to make some adjustments
so make sure that you have
the right at the right time available
as you're making a plan um i'm going to
jump to the last one here first which is
daily or weekly time blocks i think it
is
very helpful to have
a schedule that is easy to conceive
it to grasp mentally a full
year-long schedule can is i think
sometimes too big
because of just the amount of time if
you work that down to
how is this going to how is this going
to look
on a daily or a lot of times a weekly
basis
how much time am i going to need to
spend on this and that and
how much do these other things time do
these other things take up
give yourself a give yourself a
framework to work with
and to see where you're going to have
opportunities to work on these goals
now as you start setting your goals and
setting sort of the scope of what you
want to achieve
you're going to need to think of to set
aside some time or have an opportunity
to catch up because life will happen
they're going to be things that are
happening they're going to take you off
schedule
and so it helps immensely to have
something factored in that is
a way to catch up maybe it's uh
a day a week that you don't plan on
doing
any work but that you could you know put
a little hours
towards you know these goals or maybe
it's you know once a month
maybe you're gonna say you know what i'm
going to
do all these things but one weekend a
month i'm going to go
i'm going to set aside so i can catch up
you know for the whoop for the
the work that i've done in the last
month things like that
build those into your schedule and then
this goes back to really defining your
goals properly is know when to stop
whether it is stop for the day stop for
the week
uh you know stop and mark a task
complete
it is not uncommon for us to
continue to work on something beyond
when it needs to be worked on
or to get sidetracked by something we're
working on
it may be that to get the right amount
of sleep you need to be
stop working it you know 10 o'clock at
night otherwise you're going to end up
working too late and you're not going to
sleep well and then
all that's going to add up so know that
you know this is this is what i need to
do i've got this schedule i've blocked
these things off
i've blocked off 15 minutes a day that
i'm gonna work on this thing
if if i go to 30 minutes a day it's
going to start eating into other stuff
that i don't want it to so
you know when you need to stop and when
you have hard stops
and when you can uh adjust or shift
things as needed
and it may be that you say all right you
know i'm on a roll i'm going to spend 30
minutes today but then
i'm going to not work on it tomorrow for
15 minutes so i'm going to get that
that 15 minutes i'm going to take back
and use to apply to something else that
needs to get done
so hopefully as we've sort of walked
through this and in some cases almost
trudged through some of these things
um hopefully you've seen that we can
find material for improvement
in the future based on some of the past
experience we can look at where we have
failed and we want to avoid those
we can look at places where we've
succeeded and we want to replicate that
as much and as often as possible
we want to think about what life's going
to look like on day one
moving forward and plan for a good start
and that's that whole spark
idea that i came up with which is not
taking my
you know holding my mind yet so it's you
know set your goals plan
avoid scope creep remove obstacles and
keep your focus
set meaningful goals set things that
will you know that are milestones or
something so that you know you've
achieved it
and hopefully that uh well one that work
our goals that one as you achieve them
they work you towards these bigger goals
this
you know this theme but also things
hopefully that you can
you take a second and celebrate so that
builds your sense of confidence and
is a morale booster that you did get
that done
and then i preach this so often but i
find that this is
so huge in uh goal setting and
resolutions and sticking to them and
stuff like that is hold yourself
accountable if you've got somebody else
to
hold you accountable you know like a
mentoring group or something like that
then
you know throw those ideas out to them
write this stuff down tell somebody that
matters
so that at the very least every so often
they'll say how's that thing going
and that will be you know that'll maybe
stick in your mind that gosh the next
time they ask me how this thing is going
i want to be able to say that it's going
well
and that's going to help us you know
make a plan
and stick to us is that we you know
we've we've got to go that's why we
start with these small goals
is get some things in motion get some
things accomplished
and allow that to build momentum and
build habits
and get you to the end goal
all right questions or comments
i have a a comment that's going to lead
into a question that's
based in a story i used to listen a lot
to dan carlin's hardcore history
rob i think you've introduced me to him
yeah
uh there's a podcast on
uh there's a session on um winston
churchill
and i kid you not every time i listen to
that episode
i feel like i'm just ready to just go
it's a
very he's a very inspiring figure from
history
uh i felt that same urge during
uh this um presentation so again thank
you and so this leads now into my
comment and question
uh you know one of the things that i uh
there are multiple things that i need to
get better at debriefing after projects
debriefing after a year um and then
planning
ahead what i find is that it's easy
for me to to know the how if i get a get
a problem with the uh
in front of me i know how to get it done
and oftentimes i will take steps
and complete that project you know
but it's all in my head it's the how
that's in my head and then i implement
what's in my head
the the translation from how to do
something
to planning to do something can you help
me
close that gap how do i plan how do i
translate the how that's in my head
to a well flushed out plan that can be
executed
executed upon uh by people outside of me
that's a it's actually it's an excellent
question and
um i i think it's you know sort of
from a personal point of view i think
that's exactly the kind of question you
need to be
answering at this point you know that
you be or need to be asking and
determining and answering for where
you're at that is a to me that is
that's part of a growth in our careers
and really i think almost any career as
you go from being able to do
to being able to um
to plan which allows you to to maybe
incorporate
uh contingencies and things like that a
little better but then also to be able
to then communicate that
to other people to to lead you know or
to mentor
and it is for me i think
i'm not sure that this isn't something
that is a
sort of is really sort of personal to
each individual
uh how they best do that
um so i'll sort of throw some ideas out
of what
i have done over the years and hopefully
that sparked some things and we'll see
if that's you know if that's something
that works for you as well
i do know that the you know some of the
stuff is i've talked through it with
other people and actually listening to
other um i guess their productivity
specialists and stuff like that you know
getting things done
things like that um i think there are
definitely some some common traits
that you'll find now the the interesting
thing about
the how is um
and this was for me when it's in your
head then
you just you sit down and you start
doing it
it actually in a sense takes more time
well actually and not even in a sense i
mean directly it takes more time
to put that down to create you know if
you
think about a um like a jira project to
do
x and you already know how to do it in
your head it would take you time to
build out each of those tickets and then
you know even even if you just built
them out to put it out as a server
roadmap but especially then if you do
that and you
you move them to in progress to complete
and stuff like that that's
additional time that you didn't
necessarily
have to spend the flip side of that
is that when i list out what i'm going
to do when i spend that it really it's
sort of like a design
time and i write down these are the
steps i'm going to take
it helps me to flesh those steps out
because there's things that i'm going to
that i know i've got to do but sometimes
i don't think about them right away
and i start implementing and i come back
and i go oh yeah that's right i got to
do this other thing
and so it's it's not a straight line of
work that i do i sort of you know go off
in a direction and i'll go oh yeah i
gotta go to this other thing and so i
jump over there and do the other thing
and then come back
and theoretically it's all in my head
it's been in my head from the start
but when i write it out
i'm more likely to have a uh i guess
a logical approach to getting those
things done if that makes sense that
it's
these things are gonna i'm gonna get the
things i should do early i'm going to
get done
earlier and the things i can wait till
later i'm going to get those things done
later
and initially the way i did it was i
would just
like this i would sit down at the
beginning you know usually at the end of
the year
to plan for the year ahead and i would
just write some things down and say i
want to accomplish this
i want to accomplish that and it really
i think initially was a
was an accountability thing so i would
look at my list and say oh shoot i
didn't get that done or oh hey i did get
that done but
doing that and learning how you think
in my case how i think and where i'm
likely to have gaps the other things i'm
more likely to forget about
actually helped me not forget about
those going forward because i would say
oh yeah don't forget
you know this is something you almost
always forget about you you know you've
you did this project and you didn't
think about this thing right away and it
it ended up being a you know sort of a
pain because you had to you know
shoehorn it in late and stuff like that
and it allows others
potentially if you write this stuff down
and allows others to take a look at it
and say hey did you think about this did
you think about that
um and that's that is the i think the
next step
step of evolution it's the first thing
is to do it
is to at least start and give yourself
some period of time and the end of the
year is always sort of a good one to
just say you know i'm going to take
you know on a one of my days off i'm
going to take an hour
and just sort of sit down and think
through
what do i want to do in the year ahead
ideally you know look at what you did in
the year behind you know this
presentation
basically ideally is what you're going
to do but
if you at least start with looking at
your head and thinking through that a
little bit and writing a couple of
things down or taking some notes or
you know at least setting some markers
for yourself then
the next time you do it you'll probably
want to you'll have learned so you'll do
it a little better but also you'll
probably
grow that process there'll be more
details to it
because of uh past failures and
successes where you've seen that
you know these are some things i failed
to do and that hurt me you know hurt my
progress
and here's some things i did well and i
want to do those more or do those deeper
you know maybe it's you said you find
that you set three goals for the year
and it really worked out well so now
you're gonna
back that track off you're gonna set
three goals for every quarter and
you know they maybe not as big but um
the idea here is that you're you're
seeing this thing and so now you can use
it
you worked in one context and you can
apply that
to another context um
i do want to mention the whole uh
positive boost that you you got out of
this presentation i mean
first of all thank you very much for
those kind words but the other thing is
there are as you mentioned you've got
the uh
you know the hardcore history episode
that spoke to you um
there's things like that i i i like the
four hour work week i don't know why
that's
that's just something that i listen to
that on audiobook
you know i don't know every maybe every
other year or something like that
uh there's also rework that is the uh
was it the 57 signals or
37 signals uh i can't think i think it's
joshua freed i think his name
um is a pretty good one or crush it uh
by gary vaynerchuk chuck just because
it's just it's just a positivity kind of
thing
um there's things like that that are
good for us to know that are you know
cheerleaders for us or something that
sets us on a positive track
yeah maybe if you feel yourself you know
if you get to a point
at any point where you feel like you're
i don't know floundering a little bit or
you
feel like you're you know you don't have
the same you know pep in your step
you know maybe it's a good time to go
back and you know listen to things like
that
uh so that may be you know part of what
you want to think about in the year
ahead is that maybe as you
as part of your annual review and
planning
is that you listen to one of those
things or you re-read one of those
things that is a
yeah that that sparks you to do
something better
that that gets you motivated to do it so
that you have that motivation at the
right time
when you can sit down and you can do
some planning and you can do some
reviews and
you have that extra energy that comes
from that that positivity
did that i know i i went took a long way
around did that sort of give you some
ideas and answer your question a little
bit
yes sir excellent excellent advice and
one thing that resonated with me
uh especially was um i
i'll praise it in the way that i
received it uh promoting the benefit of
planning in my mind
right i i know the benefit but it
doesn't outweigh
my drive to solve problems sometimes and
so i'll just dive into problem solving
whereas if i promote it and give it a
heavier weight
uh i'll do it more often and uh
everything about you know going to those
things that you know inspire me and
you know give me a pep in my step and
i'd definitely add that
in as well to uh to to do that more
thank you yeah i think you probably uh
this is something i know i struggled
with and that maybe is
a similar struggle you have is that
desire to get something done
i think it's useful for me it's proved
very useful to remember the old saw of
measure twice and cut once
and that applies to
design you know designing what we're
building and so i've thought about
you know that's allowed me to or pushed
me to spend more time on design
as opposed to jumping into
implementation at times
and then also from a a life planning or
you know goal setting
is to spend that time is to design
design those
tasks and those goals and those
milestones a little bit
uh and i you know i refine them more as
i've i've gone further along
so that i you you sort of think through
that a little bit and
hopefully will help us
maybe avoid some obstacles and uh you
know have a smoother road
in doing so actually question comments
and
all around
any other questions you've been
motivated for this year um
i'm probably going to go back and listen
to vandertruck again this week
good that was that was one of the things
i was hoping
you know to get out of this presentation
and it's actually that's the
it's sort of been the theme of uh i
haven't done
i've cut back a little bit on a couple
of the the number of epis podcast
episodes this month just because
i've got a lot of other stuff going on
and but that's been sort of the theme as
well is
and it's been partially driven by me as
i just i felt like it was a good time
for me to get
i needed to get re-motivated on some
stuff so i'm glad that this
you know has been has seemed
motivational as well because that was
definitely one of the goals
any other questions or comments
all right well as always thank you for
your time thank you for your your
questions your comments
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thank you for your time and we will talk
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you