The Code Room #6 - Setting and Achieving Goals as a Developer

Hey! 👋

So last week assignments were released for all students at college, which is part of the reason why there wasn’t a newsletter post, so apologies for that. With this new thing added to my already weirdly organized calendar, I realized that the next few weeks were going to get really hectic.

The worst part? This is just one assignment. There are still 4 exams coming up during October 😬. So, with this new assignment, I had to reorganize my calendar.

The majority of my audience is aged 18-24, so I’m going to assume that most are students just like me. But I wouldn’t say that my suggestions today are limited to students.

Maybe you find what I came up with to be helpful for yourself, in which case feel free to let me know by replying to this email :)

1. Setting Clear Goals

This sounded pretty straightforward to me at first. Just set goals of what you want to achieve. But there’s a lot of different factors you should consider with this. I started asking myself the following questions when setting a goal:

1. What is the goal?

   This is where I just list the goal without any filters. I know I’ll be refactoring this goal over the next few questions.

2. Is it well-defined or too vague?

   I’ve noticed that very vague goals usually end up taking a lot longer to achieve. Sometimes this even makes it demotivating to get it off my checklist.

   If it’s possible, I break it down even further to smaller goals while making sure to also set a reasonable timeframe on when I expect to complete it.

3. How important is this to me?

   Here I notice the things I waste my time on. Usually when something’s not important to me and it’s taking up a huge block on my calendar, I try my best to break it down to something that can be achieved much quickly, or just leave it altogether (kind of like the “Hell Yeah or No” approach).

4. Is it realistic?

   Sometimes I go too far thinking about certain things. Things way out of my reach. So, with this I assess whether the goal and the timeframe I’ve set is realistic.

   I’m not saying it’s bad to set big goals, but being realistic about it is just as important.

With this new goal, I list it down in a general document with the rest of my goals. For me this is usually in a Notion page, but to be fair something like Google Docs, or even a physical paper will work just fine.

2. Setting Tasks in a Calendar

I recently started using Google Calendars to list tasks, which has made it very easy to track things. So, in this stage it’s all about breaking the above goals down to achievable tasks.

Now there’s a time for this. I usually do this in the morning when I get on my laptop before getting started with any work. But I’ve also noticed people do this the day before at night. I personally tried that too but found that the mindset I had the day before usually doesn’t last through to the next day (it may work for you though, just give it a shot).

So based on the importance of the goals, I start setting tasks on when I think will be the best time to do them based on the behaviour of the task itself. I’ve noticed something like doing my assignment is best during the morning through to the afternoon, and something like recording a video at night. So do what’s best for you!

But one problem I noticed about this approach is that I only really gave importance to the most important tasks, which may sound like an obvious thing to do. But this usually led to goals with overall lesser importance, which still need to be achieved left piling up.

So, my workaround to this is when setting tasks in the morning before starting my work, I first work on listing the most important tasks, but also made sure to include at least 1-2 tasks of lesser importance.

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And would you believe it, that’s really it! So far, this approach has been working pretty well. Sure, there’s still days I don’t feel motivated to do certain things, but for the most part this approach has been a great success for me.

Although I am interested to see how well it holds up when I have 4 frickin’ exams to do in October. I guess we’ll see when it’s time.

Do you have ways of setting and achieving goals that have worked for you? I’d love to hear more about it! Make sure to reply to this email with what’s worked for you!

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That was it for me for this week. See ya around 👋