Tracking Improvements

We all want to make improvements to ourselves. It is a long process that takes a lot of work and continuous effort towards our goals. Recently, I have been asking myself a few questions about my goals and the progress that I am making towards them.

The first question is, what are my goals? This is a question that I never have really asked before. I always knew that I wasn't going to be a truck driver like my dad, but beyond that I was always flying by the seat of my pants. It seemed to work out relatively well at first. I graduated high school and went to college. I can't even tell you how many different courses I took in college to find what I "wanted to be when I grew up." I decided finance. Well, I didn't love finance so I changed careers and now am a Software Engineer in Test. I like this job for the most part, but what is my end goal?

 I would say I want to become a full developer, this raises another question on is this a good long term goal for me? Great, I have an end goal for now. But what is the time frame for this goal? 1 year, 5 years, 10 years (better not be the later two). To reach this goal I have been setting intermediate goals. Here are a few of the goals I have been thinking of lately:

• Build API
• Build App
• Deliver App to App stores
• Speak at a conference

Great news! I have already completed the first one. I know that each of those goals have steps I need to take in order to reach them, I just need to figure them out. Not only do I need to figure the steps I need to take, but I also need to keep track of what I am doing to achieve these goals.

I recently saw part of how a person I look up to keeps track of his goals and self improvements. I look up to him as I believe he is very organized and able to keep up on everything, from sports (both U of U and BYU!) to family, and technology to his work. I can't even keep straight who the quarter back is for the U of U, how can I be expected to remember so many other things. I need to find a process that works for me that allows me to keep track of my daily activities, my goals (need to look at more and come up with a long term plan), the stuff I read, and other activities I feel will help me reach my goals.

The plan I saw was a checklist of sorts that had many different categories. I saw it and decided to try something similar in OneNote. I created different tabs, 5 year goal (nothing here yet), 1 year goal (becoming a dev and the ones you see above), monthly goals (did this for one month then forgot all about it), and daily goals. My daily goals are simple, like read a tech blog and learn some code. Really generic and I know in order to reach my long term goal of becoming a full dev I need to get more specific goals. That then shows my lack of what I don't know. What are the daily goals that will help me reach my long term goals? 

I have recently been teaching myself Xamarin.Forms using a course through Udemy and other online resources. I posted about my learning of MVVM the other day. Let's be honest, the MVVM "challenge" has been really hard. It is refactoring some code that I wrote early in the course. This let me to think that I don't know the basics as well as I maybe should. I had trouble separating out the responsibilities and seeing what each ViewModel would need in order to work correctly (it still isn't working, the app dies when I try to save and then won't start up again until I delete the SQLite Database that was created). I also took more then a few hints from the answers to find that in some parts I was doing well and had a good start and others I was totally wrong. 

I here that everyone uses Google to help with their work. But what goals do I need each day to reach my end goals and how do I keep track of them. There are some days where I am really good at keeping track of the daily goals. Other days, like Tuesday, I totally forget to even look at my goals and many of them don't get done. Questions arise such as how often should I look at the longer term goals and adjust them? I think this will be an iterative process. Find something that doesn't work and move to the next method. Keep trying, just like code, right? One day I will find something that works.

"Success is not a good teacher, failure makes you humble." - Shah Rukh Khan