I had my yearly review at work recently and as part of that I’ve been defining goals for the next year with my manager. So far I’ve been working in the frontend with React and Next.js and so I wanted to create goals around increasing my breadth. This gave me a couple of basic goals:
(1) Contribute X times to backend code
(2) Earn the first AWS certificate
However, after a chat with my manager, these goals need further refinement. The recommended framework for setting goals has been “SMART” goals - Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timed.
The first goal especially is lacking specificity, “contribute how?” would be the first question. The second goal perhaps lacks relevance. You can complete a certificate but if you don’t then use that knowledge for something useful was the certificate relevant?
At this point I saw a Youtube video from “Theo - t3.gg” chatting about setting goals and why most people suck at it. In the video he made it clear the differences between “goals” and “aspirations”.
The goals I created came from a place of having the aspiration to be someone that could contribute in all the major areas of our codebase. That is not a goal.
An example goal may be to reduce our average bundle size by 10% (specific and measurable), in the next month (timed). It may be relevant because we want to improve site performance and based on the context it may or may not be achievable. By proxy of doing these kinds of goals over and over again, I’ll eventually achieve the original aspiration but it’s never the thing to aim for.
My original fluffy goals/aspirations still stand: learn backend, learn AWS. Obviously these things on their own are mammoth tasks that you can’t say are definitively done at any point. I’d also like to
Two birds with one stone - create a backend making use of AWS. Not very specific, not easily measurable, achievable, relevant, not timed (but that’s the easiest bit in my opinion - just add “in some time frame”).
By the end of May 24, build an Instagram clone backend using GQL. It should make use of deployment and storage services in AWS. Users should be able to post, see a list of posts from other users they follow.
I mentioned in my first post that one of the motivations behind this page is to improve my documenting skills. Appending on to the above goal…
Write a blog post or series of posts, documenting the experience of the above mentioned project.