Rolling goals: How to get things done?
By: Migsar Navarro
Tags: Procrastination, Time, Software Development, Productivity, Time Management

I’ve been trying to write this post for a few weeks now, every time I start writing my mind just start traveling and I cannot get it done. The funny thing is that this post is just about that, I have a really hard time being clear about the things I want to do but I don’t need to.

Once a thing is a must it magically gets crystal clear to me what needs to be done, that’s a piece of cake:

I need to finish my work

I need to buy some food

I need to deliver the paper before the deadline

Now, there are things that I don’t need but want to do, and that’s a whole different story:

I want to create my personal website

I want to write a book on Web Mapping using Mexico as the topic

I want to publish more photos on Unsplash

I want to get an idea for an open source project into an usable prototype

I want to go out running at least three times a week

Those are real items for my list, and sadly, have been there for a long time. But things get worse, I thought this was only happening to me but then job after job I realized it is a very common problem in enterprises.

In this post I decided to put a few ideas together on the topic and share with you some insights that seems to be working for me. My only original idea here is the approach to the problem, and probably even that have been discussed more than once on books or other posts, all the ideas are from books that I’ve been reading and I’ll be happy to share the titles if you are interested, I am bad at keeping track of pages and quotes, so don’t ask me for that, I often change words a lot and just keep sources as inspiration.

I know sometimes things don’t seem to be related but please, bear with me until the end of the post. TL;DR Goals as any other thought evolve inside our heads, write it down and frame it as much as possible, it does not mean the problem won’t change, but it means you’ll have something to work upon, changes can be applied incrementally or not, but in both cases that will be part of a new goal.

The first step to solve a problem is to define the problem

First I thought it was procrastination, I thought it was lack of discipline and I thought it was my fault. None of this was true. I am a very active person, I am into many things at the same time, that is true, but I am really efficient doing some stuff that needs to be done, like laundry, washing the dishes or work, I am usually on time for appointments and for things that I need to deliver. So that was not the problem.

Then I discover that sometimes at work, when I had to do things I did not want to I start feeling anxious and getting distracted easily, even if I end up doing things as expected it was really inefficient. That was the first clue to find what my problem really was. The things I didn’t want to do were usually things that I knew that should be redone in the following weeks, or things that I was not sure what really meant but I did not wanted to ask, because even if it was not openly accepted, reading minds is a task that is often confused with seniority in a job.

At this point it was clear, I am too lazy to work twice, at least on the same thing… and I get bored.

Make the problem appealing to all parties involved

I had a problem, but it was not only my problem, it was really common on both a personal and a professional level. But we all agree that saying that you are lazy to your employer is not the best thing to do. So I had a second problem, make others understand that my problem and their problem was really the same problem, I know, it sounds like a tongue twister.

The first argument is, always, that things change, you know, time is money and business move fast kind of argument. I am not talking about my long term job expectations, 10 years from now, I am talking about what I’ll be doing, today, tomorrow, next week, and how to plan a bit ahead. So I needed to take a deep breath and patiently explain that is not about flexibility or rigidity. You can be very flexible with proper definition and short term goals or very rigid without proper definition and long term goals.

The second argument, common as well is that polls did not show that people have a feeling of uncertainty or anxiety, that is, task are already well defined. Well people have feelings about uncertainty for some completely unreachable and vague things like crisis and global economy but they don’t feel anxious by gaining weight because of poor fast food consuming habits. That’s the way we are, we have biases in place. Our brain trick us to thing we have things sorted out, otherwise we would not be able to deal with it. If estimations are systematically wrong and people cannot work without “having to confirm some facts” chances are task are not well defined even if everyone feels they are.

Human mind is a marvel of evolution, but it do have its short-comings, if you don’t have clear well-defined and framed goals, chances are by the time you get there you will have a very different perspective than the one you had when you started. It makes sense, since we all learn by doing and we are doing things, thus we are learning.

Fitting all pieces together: the solution

I know I started talking about me and my goals and suddenly I was talking about work experiences, well, I thing that is one of the beautiful things about human kind, we are social by nature and we can extrapolate things from different contexts. To suffer those things at my workplace open my eyes to solve problems I face as an individual.

Now, I’ll start with the work context but end up at the personal level. Agile is a common methodology nowadays, and everyone jumps on board, but everyone have a different definition about what it means. Two core concepts are Acceptance Criteria and Definition of Done, and no, they are not the same concept, or they should not be. Here is the misconception in two lines:

It will be accepted when it is done

It will be done when it is accepted

Can you spot the trick? There is a circular reference! And people will use it at their convenience.

I won’t dig into Agile here, but let’s get this clear, acceptance criteria is about a checklist, how can I say that a given task is done? and the answer lies on the description of the task, what was expected of it? Definition of done is a more general procedure, what done means within a project? What tests are expected to be applied? The link between the two is: Definition of Done is used to create an acceptance criteria for each task. Definition of done is a theoretical thing (properties satisfied when something is done) and the acceptance criteria is a practical and often pragmatic checklist of things that must be worked upon in a task.

In leadership and career counseling they often recommend a kind of tangible actionable items as objectives, and usually it is also mentioned that this must be measurable. Well, the thing is, it is hard to evaluate something if it does not have those properties, for work related issues, and for personal issues as well.

Often when we are working on personal projects in our spare time, we want to move fast and cut some corners, but we are biased and we do it in a not so intelligent way. We are afraid of over thinking or not getting to action so we avoid sitting down and defining a plan, but that plan is what we need in the first place and it will be really helpful to keep us motivated.

Granularity is very important, it refers to how much detail is needed for each definition, or, what the minimum information is. There is no simple rule to say how much is enough. It is an introspection exercise to define that, I guess the best guidelines are previous definitions, we already left all the Agile thing, it is not about time estimation or efficiency but about a well-being and self-awareness, did it really worked? was I happy with the end results? did I spent more time or energy that I wanted to? At the end, it all started from things I wanted to do, so there is no right or wrong but a delta or a difference between actual results and desired/expected outcome.

Write it down!

It is very important, as I mentioned, our mind is not created in a way that is good tracking absolute things, everything is relative to our current state, to have a written record can help you realize how your mind plays tricks on you.

Examples

I know it is a complex topic, and this probably won’t make much sense without examples, please feel free to disagree with them but use them as a guide for define your own.

Writing a post

Bad idea: I’ll write a great post about parenting

Good idea: I’ll write a two pages post about the problems that parenting poses on young people with unreliable income

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

It is hard to define what is great, also, it depends on who do you ask, and parenting is a really broad topic. So, saying it is a two pages makes you be aware that when you have the first page you are half way there and framing it to a subgroups makes it easier to keep yourself focused. It is not saying anything about the title, it can be as short or long as you wish, it is a definition of the task. If you are a writer and have a lot of experience maybe saying that you’ll write 3 articles a month is more than enough, everything else is assumed to be constant, that is, as it has been the last months, but if you are starting maybe even more definition is needed, like, write a paragraph a day on that topic.

2. Contributing to open source

Bad idea: I want to get 5 fixes in a month.

Good idea: I want to contribute 5 code-related fixes in a month on a given project that I’ve been working for some time/ I’m interested in learning and get them merged.

Photo by NESA by Makers on Unsplash

You may think that the hard part is to get the code working, usually it is not, there are tons of guidelines in the projects, some projects, although not a majority are open source but does not accept external contributions. If you are not clear enough from the beginning you might end up discouraged by the first rejection or you may have a few talks and then abandon the ship. To be clear about your expectations helps you get the discipline needed, not the other way around.

3. Reading a book

Bad idea: I’ll read 52 books a year.

Good idea: I’ll read 20 minutes a day of books that I like and 10 minutes of books I don’t like and I won’t read more than one book at the same time.

Photo by Stephen Andrews on Unsplash

Often once you start reading you will end up reading a bit more, at least that happens to me, but it is a way to do some small but steady work everyday. I think it is as important to put an upper limit as well as a lower one, because it is possible to stop doing something else and then feel guilty about it, and avoid doing something you lack because you know you’ll spend too much time on it, like video games.