We're probably not the first podcast you're listening to this year that talks about setting goals or setting resolutions, making changes in your life, doing something different than you did yesterday, last year, last decade. And there's a good reason to talk about it around the first of the year, not just because it's something that everybody does, but because we actually do have a more effective opportunity to make changes at certain junctures in life. This has been proven by research. So let's take advantage of it, right? This is not just to jump on the bandwagon, but actually take advantage of the changes that you want to make. In today's episode, I'm going to give you a little bit of a rundown of what's going on in your life. I'm going to give you a simple framework to think about perhaps some of the resolutions that you've already made, some of the goals that you're setting today. Maybe in your next journaling session or even in your next one-on-one or conversation with a significant other or friend over dinner, you're likely to talk about these changes with someone else. And maybe some of these are going to crystallize over the coming week or so. Maybe you already have them. I want to encourage you. I want to encourage you to use this framework because what you're likely doing is setting your goals or resolutions as a statement of intent. A statement of intent. All that really means is that you want to do or become something. Whether your goal is to lose weight, maybe it's to learn a new language, programming language, or actually a spoken language, or maybe it's to improve your relationships. Whatever it is. You are stating some intent. And there's nothing specifically wrong with these intents. You likely have reasons for them. But I want to talk with you today about a framework to dissect your intent so that you can understand how to get there better. Before we do that, let's talk about today's split. Today's episode is sponsored by Split. Split. Split. Split. Split. Split. Split. Split. Split. Split. Split. Split. Split. Split. Split. Split. experimentation platform. What if a release was exactly what it sounds like? A moment of relief, an escape from slow, painful deployments that hold back product engineers. With Split, you can free your teams and your features. By attaching insightful data to feature flags, Split helps you quickly deploy, measure, and learn the impact of every feature you release, which means you can turn up what works, turn off what doesn't, and give software innovation the room to run wild. Now, you can safely deliver features up to 50 times faster. And finally, exhale. Split, feature management and experimentation. What a release. See what they did there? Reimagine software delivery and start your free trial and create your first feature flag at split.io slash developer team. That's split.io slash developer team. Thanks again to Split for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Team. Take your, let's say, top three resolutions. If you only have two or one, that's fine as well. Just don't do any more than three or else it'll take too long. And that goes against the spirit of this podcast. Your three most important goals or statements of intent. I want you to get those in front of you in some way or bring them back into your mind. Pause the podcast so you can have a at least the first one available, the number one goal that you have in mind. So the framework is very simple. What this does is it creates structure around your intent. Structure around your intent. So let's think about what an intent really is. Your intention is some state or activity that you want to make a reality. So, perhaps becoming better at X, Y, or Z. That might be a state. It might be a process, something that you wish you could do more often. A common resolution is to see more sunsets. Well, that's not a state. That's a behavior change. But both of these can fit into the framework. The idea is that your intent is to bring something into reality. This is ultimately your goal. Now, I would encourage you to ensure that your goals are actually goals, that you're expressing them in terms of what you really want, rather than in terms of some specific state you're trying to achieve. What does that mean? Well, for example, to see more sunsets or to see more sunrises, that's the more common one. What you may really want is to be more productive. That might be one actual goal that you have. Or maybe the goal is to be more productive. That's the more common one. Or maybe the goal is to start your morning more peacefully, rather than feeling rushed. These are two different goals. But the state or the process of watching more sunrises could be the same for both of those goals. So, it's important to be very clear about your intent. The same is true for something like losing weight. You might think that your intent is to lose weight, but actually, what you care about might be a list of things that come along with losing weight. For example, feeling healthier or feeling more confident, for example. So, do a little bit of work to make sure that you've turned these intentions into exactly that, real intentions, what you really care about achieving. Now, I want you to take this intention, and you're going to apply the framework that I'm getting ready to give you. But remember that a framework always leaves things out. Just because you have this framework, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to lose weight. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to work perfectly. Not every intention is going to fit into this box perfectly. You may not be able to put it, you know, check every part of the framework for your intention. But I do believe that if you start breaking your intentions apart, you'll be more likely to actually achieve them. So, the framework is very simple. It is the strategy, tactic, and operation framework. This is probably something that you've heard over and over in a business context. And it's important in business, too. The idea is that a strategy is going to help you achieve a particular goal. Right? So, maybe your strategy to feel better is to lose weight. And it's important to recognize that most of the time, the way that we pick our strategies is by weighing them against other strategies. Looking at the side effects, looking at the other external outcomes, looking at the cost, the investment, the timeline. All of this helps us determine what strategy we want to take in order to feel better. For example, you may be able to feel better by eating comfort food. But an external or secondary effect of that is that over time, you'll feel worse. You'll have less energy. You'll probably gain weight. Maybe have health issues as a result of that. So, it's a bad strategy, most likely, to eat comfort food in order to feel better. Right? So, the strategy is what state change specifically are you trying to create in order to achieve your intent? The tactics are how you're going to achieve your strategy. Generally speaking, losing weight is pretty much a result of a caloric deficit. But how do you actually achieve the caloric deficit? This is where you might choose a tactic. For example, you might increase your energy expenditure. Or you might decrease your food intake. Or you might mix those two tactics. And the reality is there are multiple versions of both of those tactics. For example, do you decrease certain types of calorie-dense foods? Do you restrict into a smaller eating window? Maybe you do a lot more walking throughout the day. Or maybe you have a few more intense exercise sessions throughout the week. There's multiple ways, multiple tactics that you can use to achieve the strategy. of losing weight. And finally, and this is the one that most often is skipped, right, but perhaps is the ultimate secret to success here, what are your operations to achieve, your tactics? What operations are you participating in to serve the tactics that you've chosen? Let's say, for example, that you've chosen to eat only in a particular window, to restrict your eating to a four-hour window per day. Now, operationally, what kinds of actions do you take to achieve that tactic? One example of this might be creating a particular window in your calendar so that you actually have time to eat sufficiently in that four-hour window. Or maybe you've chosen a different strategy. Maybe you've chosen the intense exercise a couple of times a week mixed with, you know, consistently limiting your calories. Well, how do you achieve that? Well, you can do that by creating a window in your calendar. How do you operationally make this happen? First, choosing exactly when you're going to do those exercise sessions. Maybe your operations include meal prepping. But think about these very atomic small actions that all lead up to success in your tactics and therefore success in your strategy and theoretically success in your overall intent. And this is where you start to get into some revolving changes. Over time, as you succeed in that cascade of action, take some time to determine if that cascade is actually serving your intent as you expected it to. The important thing to remember is that everything beyond the intent can change. Your strategy can change, your tactics can change, and certainly your operations can change as well. Additionally, strategy, tactics, and operations can all be the same for two totally different intents. So when possible, try to find some strategies or tactics that serve more than one intent. The simplest example is that you want to spend more time with a particular person and you want to be more active. Well, you might have a strategy of being active with that person. The tactic might be that you choose a new type of physical activity that you're going to use. You might have a strategy of being active with that person on a weekly basis. And then the operations might be actually filling out a list of activities that you both are interested in, maybe choosing them together on a weekly basis, having a specific meeting set aside to determine what event you're going to participate in in the next week or two weeks or three weeks. But recognize that all of these things are flexible, and this is how you ultimately achieve your intent. You're much more likely to succeed if you can remain flexible in your strategy and your tactics and in your operations. Importantly, you are most likely to change your operations more regularly than your tactics, your tactics more regularly than your strategy, and your strategy more regularly than your intent. If you find yourself changing your intent more often, then it might be time to pause and do a little more introspection before setting an intent to begin with. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. Thank you again to Split for sponsoring today's episode. Split is the feature management and experimentation platform that reimagines software delivery. Start delivering software 50 times faster by heading over to split.io slash developer tea. That's split.io slash developer tea for a free trial. Thanks so much for listening to this, the first episode of Developer Tea in 2023. I'm excited to be here in just a few days. I'll see you in the next episode. Bye. We're celebrating our eighth year, eight years that we've been doing this podcast. I can't believe we're knocking on the door of a decade of Developer Tea. We couldn't make this happen without your support, without your listenership. So thank you for being here. Many of you for years on end now listening to the show. I appreciate you personally. And I also like to interact with you personally. You can join the Developer Tea Discord community. I'm in there. So are a bunch of other software engineers who are improving in their careers or helping each other improve. We allow any kind of questions in that group. We have a book club. We have all kinds of things happening there. Head over to developertea.com slash discord. You can join totally free today. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea.