If you are not meeting your goals, it could indicate they are unrealistic or not clear. Most of the tasks you do might be mundane, but they are necessary. The satisfaction from completing a list of tasks will drive you.
I have a method, which I find it extremely effective:
- At end of day, spend 30-45 minutes reviewing it, following up with people, and planning next day (already have a list of tasks saved). If I feel I need to improve in some areas (for example, presenting), I will create tasks from it (research presentation classes, book presentation class etc.)
- Each morning, spend 30-45 minutes entering tasks into my calendar so I know what I need to achieve for the day. Each task has a time period assigned to it. Make sure tasks don't overlap - pad the time
- Check emails every 45 minutes or so. Delete, defer, delegate or action (loosely based on David Allen's GTD)
- For new projects, break down into small parts and turn these into tasks. Some tasks might seem trivial, but that's okay
- Set-up two monitors. One has a task app open, so if something comes up (let's say by email), I can create a task out of it. Inbox is always visible. On my other monitor I have everything I need for the task at hand. If you don't need your browser open to complete the task, close it
- Reward myself for completing all tasks for the day
Other tips:
- Read about how people become great at something - focusing on the task itself is paramount. If you fail, gather feedback, make adjustments and do it again and again and again and again
- Burnout is very real. A particular industry might have a culture of late nights and 60-hour weeks, but humans are not designed for this. Burnout kills relationships. Stick to a reasonable work day and devote time to other activities, for example playing sport in a social setting, and most importantly spending time with those you care about
- Create a personal skills document, where you list out what you want to learn about/become skilled at. You can then create tasks and set a clear path for success. That way, you can let the goal drive your search for information instead of aimless browsing driving your goals
"Most things that I perceive as tasks are either not important in the end, or they go away. The ones that remain receive my undivided honest attention and in the meantime I procrastinate."
Every honest organization system is trying to teach you that very point.
You can amass an infinite tasklist in finite time, but only the important things matter. It's much better to accomplish one important thing in a day than twenty inconsequential jobs.
...the difficulty is in discovering what isn't important.
But I see the point of the author's idea of mixing all the tasks together: To be able to answer the question "what's the most important thing I should be working on now (across all projects)?".
I've just been working on this with my add coach, the challenge is to be objective. I had some tasks pop up amd I wanted to take them on rather than work the thing I'd been putting off. But to work on the motivation for tasks I think about the payoffs for completion and why they are important and realized the thing I was putting off in this case (retrofitting a yucky code base with a slick mew interface, but not fixing any debt) was actually less important than the popup which had a short timeline and high visibility with a customer. So "do what you don't want to" doesn't always work, and there is no substitute for thinking it through.
Most of my actions do not achieve goals in themselves. Example: I don't work for its own sake, nor do I work for the sake of money. I work because it is one in a chain of actions I take to satisfy my actual values.
I love the phrase, "Better done than done better." It's suitable for many situations in life.
In the last few months, I've been running my life off a weekly task list that includes both my personal and business tasks and objectives. I build the task list each Monday morning based on goals I set out at the beginning of the year (such as improve my Chinese, for a personal goal, or get software license signed, as a business goal.) This has definitely pushed me to complete many tasks that could have easily just not gotten done.
That said, I think he paints a binary picture of people who are either go-getters who act now to achieve their goals vs. dreamers who never get anything done. In my experience, these are two ends of a spectrum, where it's important to move back-and-forth between each end to achieve goals and objectives.
By the way, he has a wonderful point about "The Go-Getter loves what he does (and delegates the rest)" I am way too guilty of doing it all myself, when I should instead spend a little bit of money to have other people do things for me that are not key to what I want.
Some of the other sibling comments touch on this, but I’ve had more success inverting the paradigm as thesephist notes in “Build tools
around workflows, not workflows around tools”[1], which is worth a read even if it’s not directly related to goal setting (although I’d argue goal setting is certainly part of a workflow)
I’ve tried so many different types of productivity systems over the years, but the ones have stuck for me are the ones that don’t overly prescribe how they’re supposed to be used and give you some implementation leeway.
Fair enough. The title was meant to be a bit provocative for sure.
The point we're trying to make is that a tool can help nudge you in a certain direction, and we're trying to make Kitemaker the tool that nudges you towards working in a way that gets the whole team focused on outcomes instead of focusing on small tasks.
If teams are able to achieve that in their current tool of choice, that's ok too. We just believe working in this way is healthy and productive and hope to see more teams thinking along these lines.
> focus on process-oriented goals, rather than results oriented goals.
THere's a third facet which I think better describes what you're talking about: being "purpose" oriented.
Results-oriented and process-oriented are usually fine at any given moment in time, but there's a danger that one can end up in a rabbit-hole of meaninglessness upon introspection and looking back at the big picture.
In other words, things like to-do lists, check-lists, and constant metric assessment have a dark flip side. You can only avoid that darkness by a clear-headed evaluation of your intention and your path. That's being "purpose" oriented.
Another take on what the author proposing is to simply not care about the output of the task, but focus on how that person approaches the problem (even if they don't manage to complete the task at all).
Productivity follows when people are working for a worthy cause. In fact the core of productivity isn't lists, management techniques or whatever, it is a thing called 'constancy of purpose'
There exist no such a thing called 10x burger flipper.
> So I feel like I always need to be doing something and then when I do something I feel like I should be doing something else that is "better"
I know that feeling from when I studied. What helps is to clearly set yourself time slots for work (studies, projects,...) and play (meeting friends, doing sports, gaming,...). I've been most productive on days where I either had deadlines to meet or some fun activities in the evenings to look forward to. Avoid „analysis paralysis” and the „dark playground” [1].
> I would also consider myself a perfectionist, so that makes me feel like everything I am doing has to be perfect [...] I like to take well thought out steps in anything I do [...] but sometimes I feel like that holds me back from actually doing the thing I am thinking about and lead to no progress again.
Try to get over that mindset. Embrace the pareto principle (80:20 rule) instead. Done is better than perfect. Have a bias for action, for just doing things and embracing failure instead of overthinking. Applies to both personal and professional life.
> I find side projects to be fun, but motivation to continue working on them dies off within a week or two
If you really want to have a side project that will keep you engaged over a longer time, don't do „portfolio projects” or TODO examaple apps. Instead, try maintaining an existing project that actually has some users. Getting feedback from real users is really motivating, even if the project just has a few dozen stars. It's also a better preparation for your first job, because you'll most like get onboarded on an existing codebase instead of working on a greenfield project.
Build up a regular workout routine. Make it a habit so that at some point you don't have to force yourself to do it but you're the kind of person who simply does it. As a bonus, workouts in the morning provide a lot of mental clarity for the whole day.
If doing CS/studies stuff is easy for you but socializing is difficult, work on being social and enjoying to make friends and talk to people. To me, having a partner and some good friends provides a lot happiness and burnout prevention.
Don't obsess about your studies. You'll need the degree as entry ticket, a good final grade is useful. But nobody in the industry cares about which courses you took.
The promise that I will achieve something. That could be helping someone, building something for myself, etc. The worst blocker to my performance is the corporate lie that hard work and loyalty are rewarded. Once you see through it and get screwed over a few times, you're just done.
There are two problems with setting goals for anything but menial tasks:
1) It's incredibly hard to set goals for complex projects without having unforeseen problems or side-effects (e.g. the product shipped on time, but it's buggy)
2) Experiments have consistently shown that creativity is negatively impacted by incentives (possibly due to stress causing narrowed focus)
I think this is a good illustration of the value of process-based goals over outcome-based goals. The things under control, you completed. Those not under your control you did not. Sounds pretty cool to me.
reply