Productive self development

Personally i like labelling things, here are three labels that I find useful to create a clean mental model.

1. Career
2. Relationships
3. Self

You can replicate something similar to the following for all three, but it is probably mostly related to career development.

In this article I am going to write a few notes about setting goals and how to make progress in your career.

Objectives

I believe in creating systems and habits over a series of goals being achieved, but your system needs to have a direction the goal is the compass

Deciding your career goals / objectives

Be honest where do you want to go in your career, are you committed enough to make it to CTO or run your own startup one day?

You may be happy with a senior role in a company without this stress and only working 9-5, decide what you want your life to look like.

Defining goals

So we need goals - how do we define them? OKR's are well known concept, they consist of mainly;

• Objectives: Whatever you want to achieve
• Key Results: How you measure your progress towards your objective
• Tasks: What you need to do - the individual tasks, projects, and processes that drive progress towards a key result

So create a few OKR's for your life - where do you want to be in 3 months time - what does success look like? How would you achieve this? What habits are required to achieve these goals?

I like short term objectives, such as three months. I find a week is too short a time-frame and a year is too long, but this process belong to you.

Align what you want from your career with what the company is offering

If you want to progress in management and thus want to develop management skills / to start mentoring others and there are some opportunities to mentor people take those opportunities, or more accurately go out and look for those opportunities, talk to more junior staff and see if they would like to formally set some sessions up with you.

If the company is offering work with React and you want to be a better React / technical engineer then there is a fit, continue to work on those projects, or go and look for how you can integrate the latest technology with the current tech stack in the company, you need to take the initiative, not be told to.

Taking the iniative also means you guide your career in the direction that you would like to take it.

Agreeing what you want to achieve with your manager

So you have some OKRs for your life, you know how to measure success, you know the tasks that you need to complete to achieve success and you have done this all by yourself - and you have taken steps to help out in the company with what they need already so you have already delivered value for your manager... what next?

Tell your manager - explain where you want your career to go, what do they need to do to assist you solving the problems that this company has? Do they have any problems or tasks that you have on your list and want to solve that you have not thought of?

It is a good thing to leave a company that is not supporting your growth in the direction that you would like. The company would benefit from finding someone who fits their company better and you would grow faster at a company that supports you in your own journey.

121's

So you have decided goals and you are making progress, you would benefit from external input on your performance, so in your 121, ask:

• What specifically have i been doing well since our last 121?

This question forces your manager to think of you in a positive light, it also highlights the things that you have been doing well and should continue doing

• What specifically could i have done better?

This is the hardest and most valuable question, your manager will probably not like giving this feedback to you as the conversation will be hard. It can cause conflict if not received with gratitude and thanks for honest feedback on how you can improve, and it requires your manager to be actively engaged in your daily work, thus building a relationship with them.