Month: October 2018

I’m happy to be able to sit back down and write a little bit more about my strategy for achieving goals — whether they be writing books, learning to code, or just about anything else you can think of.

In my last post, I talked a lot about the value of setting small, easily obtainable goals. I also talked about the importance of setting your goals such that you are accomplishing them often enough during the week that they naturally lend themselves to the formation of a new, productive habit.

It’s worth mentioning in passing that I read some research somewhere relatively recently that said that the old ‘truth’ about doing something for a month being sufficient to form a habit wasn’t actually accurate. Some people, it turns out, form habits much more quickly than that; others take much longer than a month to hardwire in a new habit.

I don’t remember where I saw the research, or I would provide a link to the authors of the article, but one of the things that stuck out in association with all of that was the fact that something is in the habit until it starts to become extremely easy to do, so keep that in mind as your working on your small, daily, achievable goals. It may take you a lot longer than you think it should for working on your project (or your new skill) to become second nature, but if you stay at it long enough—something that’s a lot easier to do if your daily goals are reasonable—it will eventually become a habit and it won’t be so hard to continue making progress.

The other main aid to making progress that I want to talk about is almost certainly something that you’ve heard before, but you may not have ever put this particular strategy into practice, or if you did, it’s possible that you didn’t realize at the time how much it was contributing to your success.

I find that it is vital in almost all of the goals that I set to have an accountability partner, which is to say someone to whom I report my progress or lack thereof to on a regular basis. You may or may not need to tell this person that you are using them as an accountability partner—I find that oftentimes reporting back to the person can be done in a very organic matter—but it definitely needs to be someone who’s opinion of you matters enough that you aren’t going to want to have to tell them that you failed to achieve your daily goals for the week.

If you find that you’re not being consistent with reporting back, then there are a few things that you can change up which may help incentivize you to be more consistent. Firstly, if your use of them as an accountability partner has been very informal, then it probably would help to formalize that. I sometimes use my wife as an accountability partner for things that I want to accomplish, but which she doesn’t really care about. In those instances it’s generally worked to keep my reporting back to her fairly informal so that she doesn’t feel like I’m expecting a lot of effort from her following up on something that she doesn’t think is important, but I am a naturally goal-driven individual, so I tend not to need a lot of external motivation to work on things that I’ve put down as goals.

Maybe it should go without saying, but the less your accountability partner cares about the things that you’re trying to achieve, the less value they will be able to provide with regards to helping motivate you to accomplish your daily and weekly goals. In the extreme, worst-case scenario having someone who thinks that the things that you’re trying to accomplish are bad or distasteful would serve as an active disincentive to accomplishing your goal.

I’ve heard it said that a goal that isn’t written down is nothing more than a dream. I’m not sure that I completely agree with that, but writing down a goal does help make it more real for most people. There is undeniable value in that. Verbalizing my goal to someone I respect tends to have the same positive kind of benefit of solidifying what I’m going to go do. There may have been times where I didn’t write my goal down or tell anyone and still managed to successfully create the habit of regularly working towards that goal, but by far and away, my best results have come when I have clearly defined the goal to myself, or someone else, and tracked my progress towards that goal.

You doubtlessly all caught that I just slipped one more strategy in there at the end, but just in case someone didn’t, I think that tracking your progress toward your goal is hugely valuable. When I was writing books, tracking my progress was relatively easy because all I had to do was log how many words I wrote each day. It’s hard to overstate just how motivating it is to watch your word count climb into the thousands and tens of thousands of words over the course of days, weeks, and months, but there were many instances where knowing that I had made substantial progress up to that point and not wanting to break my streak of successfully achieving my daily and weekly goals was all that kept me moving forward on a particular book.

I don’t know what you’re logging system will look like for the goals that you set yourself. It’s very likely that you’ll have to be more creative than what I was required to do with my writing, but I can attest to the fact that putting in the effort of finding a way to log your progress is more than worth the investment.

With writing, my absolute favorite part of the experience would generally happen around the two thirds or three quarters of the way to completion mark. I generally went into each book with a rough idea of where I wanted things to go, and a set of characters that I thought were interesting, but somewhere towards the last part of the book it seemed like things almost took on a life of their own.

I would go from forcing myself to sit down and write and often quitting as soon as I hit my daily goal, to rushing to my computer every chance I got because I was so excited to see what was going to happen next and how my characters were going to get to the end of the story as it had evolved. It was always a very rewarding experience, and as much as I always wished that writing a book was like that from the very first word, it never was. It was always those daily and weekly habits that helped get me to the point where the writing experience became so rewarding.

I don’t know if you’ll have an exactly similar experience with whatever it is that you set out to do, but so far it seems that every worthwhile task I’ve undertaken has some flavor of that feeling of satisfaction that makes all, or at least most, of the sacrifice worthwhile.

Next year is going to arrive whether you want it to or not, and few of us can devote 12 hours a day to a passion or a new skill, but it’s amazing how even a small investment in time reaps large rewards if you maintain the effort for long enough.

This is becoming a bit of a trend, but now that I’ve got started talking about this subject I have had a few additional thoughts that I think are worth adding to the mix. Unfortunately, I’m once again over my word count for this post and the rest of what I want to say will have to wait until next week.

I’m afraid that I still have a long ways to go as a programmer—obviously—which means that there’s still a limit to the amount of valuable programming advice I can give anyone. However, I do have some broader life experience that might be helpful to anyone who’s starting out on the journey of trying to accomplish something new or pick up a new skill.

Something I learned while I was writing my first couple of books was that sitting down to start writing for the day is hard nearly every single time, but the experience of writing is nearly always really, really rewarding once you actually get started. In fact, it’s so rewarding that I often find myself writing for much longer than I originally planned on when I set out to meet my goal for the day.

Most of you can probably already see where I’m going with this, but it’s worth saying anyway. Setting a series of daily goals and sticking with them week after week is the absolute best way to master something new or accomplish a really big task.

I suspect there is some variation from one person to the next, so you may find that what works for me isn’t quite the best thing that works for you, but I’m going to just go ahead and share my system for accomplishing things and hope that there’s something there you can draw from as you go about starting on your new goal.

It’s been my experience so far, that I have a real tendency to want to dive into something at the very start of a new project or a new goal with both feet. That generally means that I put a ton of time into whatever it is I’m working on for the first few days and then end up burning myself out because that level of effort isn’t sustainable.

I once heard willpower described as an afterburner, as something that could get you somewhere really quick, but which nobody could sustain for very long, and that has been my experience with a lot of new projects that I picked up before I fully appreciated the value of setting small, relatively easily obtainable goals and sticking to them as a way of accomplishing something much bigger.

I think the reason that small goals work so well for me is that it requires a lot less willpower to accomplish them on any given day. It was almost always very difficult to make myself sit down at the computer if I knew that I was signing up to five or six hours of writing on top of whatever else I had going on that day. Alternatively, telling myself that I was only going to write 250 words was something that was much less intimidating. That made it easier to do, which meant that I was more likely to sit down and hit that daily goal on a consistent basis.

I’m sure that there are some people out there who would say that it’s not worth even sitting down to write if you’re only going to rack up 250 words, and on the face of it they aren’t wrong about how long it takes to write a book if you only manage to get 250 words a day written.

If the average book is 80,000 words, and you only managed to write 250 words day, then you’re looking at 320 days to write a novel, and the average person seems to have a hard time planning for something that far in advance.

However, if you are consistent about your writing goal, then that means that you’ll be writing at least five or six days a week, so really you’re only a year or so away from having finished your first novel. Generally, unless something tragic and unforeseen happens, the next 365 days are going to pass by whether you are working on your book or not. The real question is what you’re going to have to show for the year once those 365 days are firmly in the rearview mirror. In my experience, creating a consistent habit via small, achievable goals is the best way to reach a writing goal, or just about any other goal you can think of.

Even better, the fact that most of us set goals for something that either we already enjoy but have a hard time getting to or something that we can learn to come to enjoy, means that more often than not you’ll continue working on your goal even after you hit your target accomplishment for the day, which always meant for me—at least when it came to writing—that I generally finished up my books much more quickly than I expected to when I set out with my initial, purposely small and achievable goal.

I think that is the bulk of where the magic is, but there are a few other pieces of advice that may help depending on your situation. For religious reasons, I try to avoid doing anything that could be considered work on Sundays, which means my default goal for things that could be considered work is generally six days a week. However, there are times—often when my life is getting particularly hectic and I have commitments that are hard to plan around—where I’ve found that I get a lot more done and am much more consistent with achieving my weekly goals by setting out to work on my side project four or five days a week.

The human mind is sometimes prone to focus on the wrong thing, which means that when I fail to hit one of my goals for a specific period of time, I’ve historically tend to obsess about the failure rather than being pleased with all of the days where I actually managed to make progress. By giving myself one or two days a week where I had permission to deal with all of the other stuff that life was throwing at me, I stopped setting myself up to miss one of the days that I was ‘supposed’ to be making progress and then going into a negative spiral that stopped me from picking things back up on the next day.

I have another trick or two that I really ought to share while I’m thinking about it, but I am far past the amount of time that I told myself I was going to work on this particular blog post, so the rest of my strategies around accomplishing goals will have to wait until next week.

Until then, good luck with your own code-writing endeavors.

If you’ve read my first two posts, you already know that I prefer reading to watching videos when it comes to learning stuff, so this may come as a surprise to you all, but I’ve made an instructional video.

As I’ve been working through various JavaScript tutorials, a recurring issue has been that stuff is sometimes being done in an order that didn’t initially make sense to me with my C++ background.

When I asked about the oddities I was seeing, I was told that the asynchronous nature of JavaScript was the cause of everything.

If there is one thing that more than 10 years of accounting has taught me, it is that more often than not it’s the stuff that you just think you understand that really trips you up in the biggest ways, so I set up to understand the asynchronous nature of JavaScript well enough that I would be less likely to have it come back to bite me later on.

As chance would happen, shortly after I started to get a decent handle on which parts of JavaScript were synchronous and which parts were asynchronous, we ended up needing some content for one of our weekly development lunches. Being generally willing to pitch in when the need arises, I offered to explain my findings to the development team.

When I shared what I’d learned with some of my co-workers, they were really positive–both about the quality of the information, and the way that I’d presented it. So much so, that they convinced me that I needed to turn my presentation into a video and upload it to YouTube.

It’s taken significantly longer than I was expecting to it, and there was a much bigger learning curve than I was prepared for on something that was just supposed to be a quick side project, but it’s done, and if you’ve ever wanted to have a better understanding of how JavaScript handles asynchronicity, this is the video for you.

Here’s Dean’s first JavaScript Video

Here’s the slides that I used to create the video

Here’s the transcript of the video

I would love to have you link all three of these items around to anyone that you think might benefit from the information–just please leave the links back to WritingCode.net in place so that I get credit for my efforts.