I’m not very good at writing blog posts, but I’ve been told that I’m good at writing verbose emails. I suppose that’s a good enough starting point for me.
2015 was the first year I’d ever set New Year’s goals, and was the first year I saw the power of setting goals in general. For me, the distinct difference between a New Year’s resolution and a New Year’s goal is that the former comes across as a general nebulous feeling towards an abstract direction, while the latter is much more measurable and manageable.
From my day-to-day work, I’ve learned that setting measurable metrics and goals is something important and useful to guide yourself towards achieving an objective. Having regular check-ins with yourself on your goals and keeping yourself accountable (either by your own records or via a feedback loop from other people such as your team members) helps immensely, not only to make sure you are on track towards what you originally set, but also to see if those goals you first initially set make sense, or if they need to be tuned, because of a realization of a more sensible metric to measure against, a change in situation, or even a change in overall vision or mission. This is why the concept of a Sprint in Scrum is so helpful — the idea that you break down a problem into smaller sub-problems, and then you solve each of those sub-problems individually to completion within a time-box, learning from each of the individual sub-problems about how to approach the next sub-problem better.
Last year was the first year I took setting personal New Year’s goals seriously. And while there were some goals that I had met and exceeded, others I was not able to achieve. In retrospect, one interesting thing I noted was that the goals I was able to achieve, I broke down into very specific and measurable steps, with very specific numerical milestones.
One thing I did learn from setting goals is that it gave me a much more concrete and achievable objective towards which to work. Having a general idea of how you want to improve yourself is great, but what you can’t measure, you can’t manage. While I wasn’t able to achieve all my goals for 2015, setting these goals did let me see how far I could push myself, and how much more I am capable of. It gave me a sense of accomplishment whenever I hit each milestone. After that, every consecutive milestone became much more enjoyable and purposeful to work towards.
Another thing I learned about setting goals is that even if you have a very nebulous/abstract goal (let’s say, “Be a nicer person”), you can still put some level of metrics around it. This is not to say that “niceness” (substitute for any other abstract goal) is something that is easily quantifiable, but there are some resulting quantifiable results that can go along with it. For example, you could set as a measurable metric the number of people you ask about how they are doing throughout the day.
To that end, this year as I was setting my New Year’s goals for 2016, I became a lot more intentional on planning out these goals. I made a list of 10 or so end-goals I wanted to achieve before 2017, and broke each one down into smaller, time-boxed sub-problems — first, broken down by which quarter I wanted to achieve that goal, and then by the individual steps I would need to take to achieve them. For each step that I needed to take, I broke them down into individual two-week sprints (for convenience, I coordinated them with the same sprint schedule at work) that I wanted to time-box.
For me, this first sprint is officially over, and upon retrospect it looks like I’ve been able to achieve and complete my sub-tasks towards each of my goals for this quarter. I’m currently using Trello to organize my goal lanes and sprint to-dos, which I first started using for personal to-do lists (thank to a recommendation from teammate). Using Trello for this purpose is definitely pushing this piece of software in a way I never thought it could be used, but so far it has helped me plan my year better — your mileage may vary. Trello has written up a nice guide here.
