Maybe the thing you need most in your career right now is not acceleration. Maybe it's not moving as fast as possible, climbing the ladder as quickly as you can. Maybe the thing that will help your career the most today is to slow down for a minute. To take a step back. To see the bigger picture. And so I want to help you do that in a functional way today. Not just an artificial way where somebody asks you what your five-year plan is. Because that can be just as overwhelming as trying to move quickly. We're going to go somewhere in the middle. Here's a simple question. Do you have a goal right now? I don't mean does your company have an OKR that you're attached to somehow. And I don't mean do you have a ticket that you're working on. Do you, for your career, for yourself, do you have a goal? In fact, your goal doesn't necessarily have to even be just for your career. It can be any goal that you have that puts clarity into your schedule. This is the collision that so often we ignore. That we have goals and we have a schedule. And so what ends up happening is we allow our schedules to run on. We allow people to put meetings on our calendar that we never visit the meeting for. We never consider whether that meeting was actually worth our time or worth their time. We allow our work schedules to spin up like an out-of-control treadmill. And never put any guards, any boundaries on those schedules. We allow the career ladder to let go. We allow the career ladder to lay out before us. As if we have no other choice but to follow it blindly. Are you setting goals? That's the point of this question. Do you have a goal for yourself now is a proxy to the question of whether or not you're setting goals. If you don't have a goal now, it's likely because you have trouble setting goals for yourself. Now, this is something I struggle with. It's something that most people honestly struggle with. What do you want to get out of today, out of this week, out of this month? It's very hard to answer that question for most people. Sometimes it's because the answer is implicit rather than explicit. We talk a lot about this dichotomy on the show. The implicit goals we have are to continue on without much interruption. We feel comfortable. We feel comfortable because it's in our human nature to try to become comfortable. And we're very good at doing that. We become comfortable with our situation. And therefore, our implicit goals are to remain comfortable. Our implicit goals then often are at odds with what we would consider our explicit goals. Usually those explicit goals, if you were to sit down and write out, what do I want to accomplish this month? You would probably not write, maintaining the status quo. You probably wouldn't write, I don't want to accomplish anything new because that puts me in a position of uncomfortability. And yet these implicit goals should be respected. Here's the interesting thing. Part of why we end up with our careers running like an out of control treadmill under our feet is because it is uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable to say no to that progression. It's uncomfortable to step off of the treadmill and instead set our own goals. And so strangely, we burn out. We end up running ourselves ragged. We end up letting our schedules get totally misaligned with what we actually care about, our goals. And instead, we allow ourselves, our sense of momentary comfort, to create a long-term discomfort, a long-term misalignment. This idea that our goals are left long behind, and in fact, we're so disconnected from our goals, we don't even remember what they are. All of that to say, today is a chance to slow down. Today is a chance for you to take a step back. So I'm going to give you a very simple exercise to do as a reflection. It's an adjustment reflection. This is a reflection on the gap, the gap between what you do on a day-to-day basis. What are your activities? And what do you say you want? Where is that gap? So here's the exercise. However you reflect on your goals, how you reflect on your past behaviors, and hopefully this is something that is observable. In other words, you can go back and look at proof, not just try to remember it, because when we remember things, we change them, right? But instead, some kind of proof. Maybe you can go back and look at a calendar. You can look at activity and code bases or something like that, if that suits you. Maybe Slack activities or messages from the past week or the past month. Make it relatively simple. Make it relatively recent. And ask yourself, if I was somebody outside, so if I was someone else looking at all of this, looking at all of this evidence, all of this activity, what did this person do with their time, what would I guess is their goal? So only using this evidence, right? Imagine trying to guess as an external party what that person is trying to accomplish through those activities. What do they care about? What are they trying to do? What do they value? And I want you to do this first, because remember we said that people tend to have a hard time setting goals. My guess is if you're listening this far, if you're doing this exercise, it's because you want to get better at setting goals. And the first step to doing that is to observe what you are telling yourself. What are you telling yourself through your own activities? You can send messages to yourself by simply spending time. When we say that we value something, but then we do something totally different, there are a few reasons for this gap. And this is why we want to observe it. The two main reasons, one is that we have aspirational values or aspirational goals, that we're not aligning our behaviors to. Okay, this means that I want to be like a person who does those things, but I don't want to do all of those things. Or I want to be known as a person that does something. These are aspirational goals, aspirational values. I want to have the label of having done that thing. Now, notice that there's nothing necessarily wrong with this. It's insightful for you to understand this about yourself, that there is a gap between what you aspire to and what you're actually doing. Fixing this gap, if you care to fix it, if you actually want to become whatever that thing is, or if you actually want to adopt those values in practice and close that gap, that might mean that there's some behavior modification. It might mean that there is some kind of reckoning with the cost or the investment required to close that gap. The other reason is because we actually don't know what we want. We think we know, but then we're telling ourselves through our own actions that we have values that we haven't explored. We have things we care about that we haven't explored, or maybe we used to care about something that we no longer do. And so we may have dropped a habit. We may have dropped an activity, a hobby. We may have stopped doing something that we used to value because we no longer value it. So there's a lot of reasons why there might be a gap here. But the important thing is to observe the gap between your behaviors and what you believe your goals are. So write the story, write down maybe the top one, two, at most three goals that you would say the person who, who, engages in the activity that you've observed yourself engaging in. That person would have these three goals. And then I want you to do something very simple. I want you to set a goal, but I want it to be for a short horizon. A short horizon. This is something like a week or maybe a month. Set a goal that is that short, and I want you to keep it somewhere visible. This seems so simple. In fact, we've probably talked about doing something like this, just a very short horizon goal on this show a hundred times before. Other, it's not novel. We're not making it up here. But yet, as many people who are listening to this episode right now, you haven't done this because nobody's reminding you, or maybe you haven't found it valuable. And yet you continue every day hammering away on that same schedule, spending tons of time working on your career without really knowing where it's going. So write that goal down. What is your absolute most important goal in your life in that short horizon? Finally, I want you to take one moment to observe your plans, however you plan. Maybe it's a calendar, maybe it's a task list, whatever that accounting for your future. Observe that plan and evaluate what parts of your life are going towards. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. have the opportunity to say, maybe if I'm not willing to adjust my plan, this isn't actually my number one goal. Maybe this is aspirational. Maybe this is something that I used to have as a goal that I'm trying to import into my life now. In that case, revise. The ultimate idea here is to try to align your goal with something that you can actually invest in. You can spend time revising your goal or you can spend time revising that future plan. One or the other has to change to make space for the opposite side. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. This idea of slowing down and observing at a very atomic level. Are you actually aligning your actions with a goal? If so, what are you doing? If you're not, what are you doing? If you're not, what are you doing? Are you aligning your plans for the future with your most important goal? If you do this, I can almost guarantee that your productivity towards your goal is going to increase simply because you actually have a goal to begin with. Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community. That's developertea.com slash discord. 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