you're setting goals most likely on a regular basis as a software engineer you almost have to in order to learn how to write code in order to learn how to work with a new tool you have to be able to set goals and maybe you don't call it goal setting maybe you just set out milestones for yourself to hit so that you stay on track the underlying mechanism is similar the idea is to decide essentially where you want to go and then track your progress towards that destination and it works much better if you have a destination that you can see your goal is instructive in fact there's so many frameworks around goal setting you probably have used one or heard of one way before you heard this episode maybe one of the more popular ones like smart specific measurable actionable reasonable and time bound and these are excellent tools mnemonics ways of controlling your goals of evaluating whether they're going to be an effective goal in the first place but there's one dimension missing from most goal setting frameworks that i've seen before we talk about that explicitly i want to kind of lead you to the reasoning here what is it that you're doing in order to reach your goals more specifically what are you doing differently from what you're doing in order to reach your goals in order to reach your goals in order to reach your goals in order to reach your goals in order to reach your goals in order to reach your goals then if you hadn't set the goal in the first place think about this for a second the actions that you take the way that you spend your time what is it that you are doing differently as a result of your goals the smallest change the most atomic version of an answer to this question what you're doing differently is! making decisions if you've been listening to the show for very long at all you know that we talk about decisions all the time making good decisions is actually what is constituting your change making a good decision is what constitutes change it's what constitutes uh good work it's what constitutes you actually meeting those goals in the first place here's the important part that most of these goals setting frameworks are leaving out and if you instead change them to decision-making frameworks because that's really what a goal setting framework is providing is a destination for your decisions you could write that one down a destination for you a goal is just a destination that you want your decisions to lead you to right you evolution evolution of the If you were to think about it as a decision-making framework or a decision-guiding framework, then you would potentially come across the idea that decisions are often subject to a concept known as resulting. We talked about this on the show before. We've talked about the person who coined this term in the first place came on the show, Annie Duke. The idea is that we judge the quality of a decision based on its outcome. Does this sound familiar? When you think about your goals, I want you to imagine right now your goals for today. Or if you're listening to this on the day it comes out on a Friday, think about next week. What are your goals for next week? Or what are your team's goals? Maybe you have a sprint goal that you put in place each sprint. What is constituting that goal? Very often, the way we set our goals is based on outcomes that we do not have control over. Let's think about this for a second. Imagine. That you were looking at this as a series of decisions. And in order for your decisions to be considered good decisions, you've decided that the outcome from those decisions needs to be good as well. If your goals are based on outcomes, they will not be instructive. They are not attainable. Even though that outcome may actually come to fruition, even though you may have a goal, you may actually be able to do that thing, even though it may seem like it's attainable, it's not in your direct control. You are doing essentially the same thing as resulting, except for your goals. So, what do we do instead? Take a look at your goals, like I said, for today or for next week. Maybe you have goals for the weekend. This works outside of software engineering, by the way. And I want you to, evaluate which of those goals are based on outcomes, versus things you do have direct agency and control over. Sometimes this is in a gray area. You may have some agency or some control, but your time may be taken up. You may not be able to get through every chapter of the book that you're hoping to get through because of some other time constraint that you can't predict. So, there is some gray area here. But very often, we set goals that are outcome-oriented, especially goals that are longer-term. If I had to guess, your day goals that you have set are not outcome-oriented. Instead, they are what I'm going to recommend that you try to do for the week as well, which is a process goal. This is the thing that you have direct agency and control over. So, if you look at your week-long goals versus your day-long goals, most of the time, your day goals are going to reflect, a process goal. You're going to work for three hours straight. You're going to focus for all three hours. You have direct control or nearly direct control over that. But your longer-term goals are, you want to succeed in this particular project or you want to get a promotion. Those are outcome goals. And while it's good that we have aspirations, we have desires for certain outcomes, those outcomes are not on their own instructive. In fact, those outcome goals can actually be a little bit debilitating. We may be able to make more fluid decisions with outcome goals. We can change our strategy. But it's not directly instructive on its own. And so, we may find ourselves frustrated because we haven't chosen how we're going to actually approach that particular goal in the first place. Okay. A process-oriented goal is directly instructive to what we should be doing. So my ask for you, your homework for next week, is to take, if you have an outcome-oriented goal, to take that outcome-oriented goal and convert it to a process-oriented goal. Instead of focusing on something that you don't have direct control over, focus on something that you do have agency and control over. And if you don't have any goals for next week, now is the golden opportunity for you to set one. Make sure it follows that SMART recommendation. It should be specific. It should be measurable, attainable. It should be reasonable. And it should be time-bound. So hopefully for the next week. But it should also be process-oriented. You have direct control over that goal. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. I hope that you are inspired by this episode. I hope that you start to develop goals that are more instructive rather than goals that are simply reformulated versions of resulting for decision-making or aspirations that trick us into believing that we have more control over our situation than we really do. Instead, focus on those process-oriented goals. If you focus on the process, and if you refine that process, based on your outcomes, I'm not saying to not think about it. I should be clear. I'm not saying not to think about or to care about your outcomes. Of course, you can care about your outcomes. You can have aspirations. You can set what you might call targets for those outcomes. Don't create goals out of them. If you were to use a sports analogy, imagine that you have a goal that's on a different court. And you're saying, well, that's my goal. You don't even have access to that goal. There's nothing that you can do directly to control attaining that goal. So make sure your goals are attainable. And you can use the SMART framework as kind of like a subcategory of attainable. Attainable should also mean that you have agency over it. Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this discussion, please join our DeveloperTee Discord community. It's there for you to learn more, to engage with the community of other software engineers, and non-discorders. And software engineers who talk about and think about these kinds of things on a regular basis. That's developertee.com slash discord. developertee.com slash discord. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea.