Having set my intention for the year as “health”, Q1 2025 felt a bit like whatever the atheist, gender neutral equivalent is of the saying “Man plans, and God laughs”. I had a good start to January – all set with my intentions and my Trello board – only to get very sick in February (the worst time of year at work to get sick, the annual review cycle). Then, mid-February, my friend Martin died. After all of that, I was physically and emotionally decimated. At the end of March, I feel like I’m only just starting feel human again.
I like the idea of doing a quarterly review of my annual theme, as a way to reset, re-evaluate, figure out what I want to change and celebrate what I did actually accomplish. For all Q1 was pretty rough, I did move many things along.
One part of the word “health” is the core habits that keep me grounded. In Q1 I:
Clocked just over 1K peloton minutes (2/3 of my goal, because spinning with a chest infection is inadvisable).
Read 10 novels
Finished 2 non-fiction books: Traction, and Backlash.
A night at Castlemartyr for a special dinner event with Ballymaloe Cookery school
A weekend in Kinsale
A couple of nights in Manchester
A week in Iceland for work
When I’m stressed I tend to stay with things that are familiar, so one of the things I’m paying attention to is how many new experiences I have, aiming for at least one each month.
Crafting: my friends and I tried pottery painting, crocheting, and pottery making.
Restaurants: We went to a new pizza place in Cork (GoodHood), and an exciting fine dining restaurant in Kinsale (Rare).
Experiences: I saw the Turner Prize collection in London, and visited the Sky Lagoon and Fly Over Iceland in Reykjavik.
Places: Madeira!
Part of health for me is definitely keeping the life debt under control, this is always the first thing to give when life is not going well! However, I did move some things along:
We replaced the water tank and the dishwasher. The building projects might be finished but home ownership never ends! But seriously, it’s been nice to upgrade our quality of life with these things where possible, and we’re fortunate to be in a position to do it.
I switched my business bank account which was an ORDEAL but has been a vast improvement.
I got the first round of Botox in my jaw (for the teeth grinding, argh).
Professional growth is also important – I always want to feel like I’m learning, growing, and giving back.
I completed the (updated) PQ program. It was interesting to do it again after 4 years or so, and a good refresher.
Looking forward to Q2 I have more adventures planned, including an elaborate birthday party! I have a talk to prep and give in May, and some projects to work on, and more life debt to pay down. But really at the core, I want to keep reading, writing, working out, and trying new things.
I hope your Q1 was what you hoped for, but if not, that’s okay. April 1 is the start of Q2! A good time to reset, and have another go.
New Year’s resolutions are terrible because we are not a different person on January 1 (or 2) than we are in the last days of December, or November or June. They are also terrible because we over-estimate what we can do in a day, and under-estimate what we can do in a year.
Today is the last day of January. Maybe all your “resolutions” have already collapsed. That’s okay, you have time: try setting an intention for 2022 instead.
What is the one goal? The one thing you want to be different at the end of the year?
Hope for many things, but choose the one thing that is most important to you, that will make the most difference to you.
When we start the year with a list, we break it as soon as life gets in the way. When we start the year with an intention we can keep coming back to it again and again – and find that even if the specific goal was accomplished, there is still more depth to uncover. Or we can just pat ourselves on the back; that’s fine.
First, ask why this thing is important to you? What will it give you? What will be possible once it is done that is not today?
Then ask, what is most likely to get in your way? Make a list.
How big are those things? Maybe one of them needs to be the intention for the year; you have more groundwork to lay for the original intention you came up with. That is okay. You have time.
Next, ask who will support you? Who will you share this intention with? How can they help you come back to it? How can they support you practically? We need practical help as well as emotional support to achieve big things.
Now, ask what are you willing to say no to? What do you like, or want to do, but are willing to make less important than this intention? What are you willing to continue as-is, imperfect but adequate, in order to create space for your One Most Important Thing?
Finally, you’re ready to determine your next steps. Every big goal can be broken down, or if not, maybe the first step is figuring out how to break it down and where to begin.
This is part 1 of a series of blog posts based on a talk I prepared called Successfully Derailed Product. It’s about the ways in which we define and talk about “success” influence what – and how – we build.
Credit: ToRange
There used to be a joke at a company I worked for that went “how many test frameworks do we have” and the answer was “how many SET5s do we have?” It was “funny” because an SET was a software engineer in test, and to get promoted to Level 5 they would have… written a test framework.
How often have you have seen those kind of things? Where the things that get incentivised for individual success turn out to be a joke at scale? Because clearly when it comes to testing frameworks, more is not better. It’s pretty orthogonal to the goals of testing – which are generally around continually shipping with confidence.
This isn’t to say that promotion processes are inherently bad, or that individuals shouldn’t desire and work towards professional advancement. Just that the processes and goals that we define profoundly affect our organisations, the environment it creates for people who work there, and the things we are able to ship as a result. Your processes define your culture, and your organisational dysfunctions show up in what you ship and when you ship it.
This isn’t to say that goals are bad. Goals are good… it’s well documented that we make more progress when we know what we’re aiming for. But if we set the wrong goals, or we set goals that aren’t compatible, then what? And when we agree on the goals we should be setting… are they supported or sabotaged by our processes?
Let’s talk about what “success” even is. Take a moment, and think about some goal in your life. What is it? (Leave it in the comments or tweet at me).
Do you have something in mind? Now I want you to think about where it came from.
Hard part over: how do you measure it and how do you report on it?
Example 1: I have a goal of increasing the monthly actives in the app. My boss gave it to me. I measure progress on it using analytics and report on it every two weeks.
Example 2: I have a goal of clarifying the “vision” for my team. I got this from my team in various ways – surveys / direct feedback about this being something people want. I measure it quantifiably using surveys, and less quantifiably from the kind of questions that get asked in our monthly townhalls or in the regular skip 1:1s I have with everyone on the team. I report on it quarterly – in that we have a document outlining the longer term plan for the team, and this is how often it gets updated.
There’s a framework by Gretchen Rubin on how people respond to expectations, called the Four Tendencies. She describes it in Better than Before (Amazon) and goes into more depth in The Four Tendencies (Amazon). Essentially, there are four ways in which people respond to expectations.
Obligers respond to expectations from other people. They struggle meeting their own expectations.
Upholders respond to all expectations – including those they define themselves.
Questioners question all expectations, and respond only to expectations they think make sense.
So how does this relate to goals? Well obligers probably got their goals from other people, upholders might be making great progress on things they don’t actually want, questioners are trying to ignore things they can’t make sense of, and rebels are opting out of the very thought.
Meanwhile, obligers often feel unappreciated because they’re so busy putting other people ahead of themselves they can’t get their own stuff done. Upholders don’t understand why people don’t just do what they are asked or say they will do without complaining or asking so many questions. Questioners are annoyed by all the arbitrary things that other people want (and also, ironically, by being questioned) and rebels just want to be free to do whatever they feel like and resent all the interference.
All these things are playing out around us. But a lot of the time we don’t have a way to articulate it so we don’t talk about it.
Currently, I manage five managers, and we started talking about it towards the end of last year, in part because reading the book I realised that I was not great at managing obligers. I’m a questioner, and I was completely mystified by the behaviour of taking on arbitrary things and then resenting them. So you know, an obliger gets overwhelmed, and my response is along the lines of “why are you doing that anyway”, which, you know, they don’t find helpful… and then they feel resentful and I feel confused. It’s great working with obligers because they are so nice and helpful. But because of that it’s very easy for people to inadvertently create expectations and take advantage of them. Meanwhile upholders can lack empathy for people who aren’t as effective. This gave us a shared language to talk about how we are creating and responding to expectations with each other.
On a more organisational or social level, there’s an idea called Campbell’s law.
“The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”
Bit abstract, right? A good example of teaching to test. Standardized testing can work for measuring attainment, but once students are taught to pass the test, both the teaching and the test lose value.
You can think about this in terms of promotion processes. You define a system which makes sense, but then people work to the system, and both the work and the system become less useful.
Another place you can see this is the tension around shipping culture and something that might be called a “quality culture”. When you define a process to incentivise shipping, shipping becomes the goal and what is actually shipped tends to become secondary – and not very good. Then in a “quality culture” the quality is the most important thing, and so nothing gets shipped at all…
…But if it does ship, it will be perfect.
Credit: Pixabay
(As an aside, this is why I like to talk about shipping as a habit rather than as the goal itself. I think this is something where release cycles help, because it can force shipping on a cadence rather than shipping specific things).
One way to phrase Campbell’s law is that we work on the definition of the thing. And the result is that definition is probably nonsense.
I find all this pretty fascinating, but what does it all mean? How do these things connect? Well when we define systems, we create incentives – or expectations. Individuals take these expectations and it influences their goals (even if they’re rebels – just in the opposite way).
Essentially – defining systems is fraught with risk of derailment, because teams are not made up of rational actors, but rather: people.
This came about because at the end of 2016 I realised I had (nearly) met the goals I set for myself, but I hadn’t really enjoyed the process. I stripped things back and tried something different.
My guideline for this year was once again six talks. I did a video talk for Design+Exclusion called “The Not So Secret Feminist Agenda”, co-presented at WCEU with two colleagues, ran a workshop on public speaking and co-hosted Try!Swift NYC for the second year running. Aside from that I prepared one talk “YOLO Releases Considered Harmful” [blog series it’s based on] which I gave four times (plus once at a friend’s workplace). One of these was a keynote (checking off the goal I missed in 2016). Again, I hit three continents: Europe, North America, and Asia.
“Give a talk I’m proud of” is not a great goal. It’s not specific, so it’s hard to say whether it’s been achieved – especially as when I’ve given a talk multiple times I often find myself starting to hate it, convinced that it adds nothing of value. But I was really proud of this year’s talk, and I got some great feedback on it. I think partly I ended on a high with it – Try!Swift Bangalore was the last event I gave it at, and was my favourite of this year. I spread out the time I spent preparing it, which I think made it better – the weekly blog post series leading up to giving it for the first time really helped. I also had Virginia Poltrackillustrate it with adorable raccoons which was great. My slides gave me personally a lot of joy, and I got really great comments about them too.
Try something new – another goal, terrible in it’s vagueness. But actually I tried a lot of new things this year:
I ran a workshop solo.
I tried a very different slide style and a new person making them.
I did a video presentation on a more “diversity” topic.
I was on TV!
I changed my way of preparing – breaking down my talk and writing blogposts over a ~6 week period.
I co-presented.
And – I went back to something that I knew worked, and had a session with speaker coach Denise which put me on the right track at the start of the year.
The other thing that changed this year is that I used public speaking in my job more. I gave a short (~7 minute) presentation to the whole company remotely. I was on call for a ~6 hour live Q&A session at the all company meetup (and yes – I answered questions).
Finally – I got better at saying no. Early in the year I agreed to an event and ended up regretting it. Whilst some good came out of it (you can always make the best of things) it was an expensive mistake (I ended up having to book my own accommodation at the last minute) and reminded me to trust my instincts and my criteria and not agree to “be nice”.
So… 2018?
Speak at a WordCamp (I will have to start submitting again 😱)
At the end of the year, my coach had me make a list of 40 goals for 2017. They range from the very professional to the very personal. From the serious to the purely for fun. Of course, I broke them into sections and put them in a spreadsheet. At the start of each month I do a “commitment journal”, where I think about what I hope the next month will bring. As part of that I’ve taken to going through the list and updating it. Marking the completed ones green, the in progress ones orange, and the at risk ones red.
As of the last update, 10 goals have been marked green. 13 are orange. 6 are red. But to look at it that way misses the point – I’ve been finding it a powerful and interesting exercise to return each month to the things that I found important at the start of the year – even if many of them would not make the list if I wrote it again today. Even if it doesn’t capture many things that I have achieved – because I had no idea they were coming.
I’ve generally been much more into the process than the goal. I think it’s easy to have some big ideas, but if you can’t break things down and somewhat enjoy what it will take to get there it will never happen. So this is the kind of thing that I would find pointless without someone else being involved in some way. I wouldn’t make the list for myself, I wouldn’t do the monthly journal without someone to send it to. But it’s surprising to me how often I return to it the following month and how much of what I wrote down has actually happened.
Have I got more done because of these processes? Probably not. But I have a better record of what that looked like, and I feel a better sense of progress – and that’s something.
Not really. I opened a day of Write|Speak|Code, and gave a general session at 360iDev. A goal to carry through to 2017.
What Did I Talk About?
I gave three talks this year.
Applied Humaning for Technical Interviews.OSCON and RubyConfCo. This is a talk about being a better interviewer – it stars my favourite raccoon. I talk about getting yourself in the right mindset to interview, how to project warmth, bias – how it effects people’s experiences and our feedback. Finally I touch on how we can try and help our teams interview better, too.
How to be Invisible. Try!Swift Tokyo and 360iDev. A talk about how the best user experience is sometimes no user experience at all, and the difference between building tools and digital crack. I see this as the third in the series, after Distractedly Intimate (my 2014 mobile design talk) and Mobile is a Systems Problem (2015) [notes].
Some Things I’ve Learned About Color. Self.Conference and Write|Speak|Code. The talk with the most viral tweets. A talk that will never be recorded and notes I will never blog. It’s about the five causes of burnout that are not overwork, how these relate to the experience of under-indexed folk in tech, and how side projects can help. I talk about leaving tech, and finding my way back. It features this amazing video my friend Sumana created.
These were very different. Some Things I’ve Learned About Color is probably the most powerful talk I’ve given – the one that people reacted most intensely to. It’s also the most overtly “diversity” talk I’ve given, since I mostly try and treat inclusion as a foundation rather than give talks about “diversity”. Applied Humaning is the most practical, I gather that people found it useful. I don’t think I really got How to be Invisible right, but I think those ideas are important and I’ll have to figure out how to do something with them that people will be more receptive to.
Podcasts
I recorded three podcasts this year! A good way to practise extemporaneous speaking. Also: super fun!
There were some highlights this year. I really enjoyed my first time MCing. We were paid for the workshops, which was exciting – it’s hard to get paid to speak.
But, there were a number of lowlights.
Having to negotiate security at an event. This was really traumatic, and not dealt with well initially – although later someone else stepped up and handled it really well. There’s now some kind of harassment policy named after me, which is… well maybe one day something will be named after me that isn’t depressing.
I was so sick at one conference that I had to 1) push my talk back a day (I am forever grateful to the speaker who swapped with me!) 2) in the middle, I played a video and since I could barely stand up had the idea to kneel on the floor and kind of lie in the podium. This seemed like a brilliant idea until I realised I would need to stand up again. Not my most poised moment.
Another speaker dropped out at the last minute, so after MC-ing an event I flew all night, and then went and spoke at another event a few hours after I got off the plane. I was happy to help the organisers out of a tough spot, but wow that was brutal.
Some anonymised talk feedback that I can still quote pieces of, but here’s a gem, “the speaker kept talking about useless things like feelings”. Perhaps I should talk about useful things, like “vim or emacs”.
2017?
When I look back at this year’s speaking, I realise that I didn’t find much joy in speaking this year. I did it. I did my best at it, in a couple of difficult situations. My talks were in general well received and appreciated.
But I didn’t really enjoy it. When I walked off the stage after my last talk in Medellín, I determined that I wouldn’t give another one until mid-2017.
As a result, my 2017 speaking goals are aimed at enjoying it again. They are:
Give a talk I’m proud of.
Try something new.
This builds on my baseline constraints for speaking, which are the same as our considerations for including CfPs in Technically Speaking – there must be a code of conduct, and a provision for travel costs. When I can get my job to cover travel, I ask to have them listed as a sponsor and look for them to support speaker or attendee diversity with the money they save on my flights etc.
These goals are vague, perhaps not really goals at all. But sometimes we make progress with concrete actions, and sometimes we can make a more creative leap by chasing something more ephemeral instead. One of the ways I’ve levelled up my speaking is by having someone else create my decks for me – she did all my decks this year. I also worked with a speaker coach a lot in 2014 – this was invaluable. In 2017 I hope I’ll find another such thing. I just don’t know what it is, yet.
A year in, 2000 subscribers is in sight, we started getting sponsors for each issue (we’re currently booked out a month in advance), which is great because it turns this from passion-project to sustainable. We’re starting to experiment with branding – our stickers were a hit, and we launched an anniversary tshirt (available until November 24).
I’m really proud of what we’ve done over the last year. The best thing is hearing from people – especially women – that it’s encouraged them to speak!
To celebrate, we asked our readers to join us in setting their public speaking goals for 2016. We won’t ask people to do anything we won’t do ourselves, so here are mine:
Six talks (currently 3 planned, 1 in negotiation).
Thanks to everyone who had me speak this year, and so much love to all the people who I got to hang out with again or meet for the first time. I’m really excited for what I’ll do as a speaker in 2016, and what Chiu-Ki and I will do together and with our community. I hope you’ll join us, if you haven’t already, and subscribe.
I’ve determined that 6am workout classes are the way to prioritize and fit in exercise. As a result, I’ve discovered that there’s something quite depressing about oversleeping and thinking “because I did not get up at 5:30 I am not going to fit in everything I want to do today”.
But on Monday I made it, and again this morning. And instead I thought – this is how committed I am to achieving everything I want to.
Crazy audacious goals, are, by their nature, hard to reach. The hardest part of a 6am workout is just making it out the door. Manage that, and the rest is pretty easy.
I’m trying a new strategy here. I have an option of two 6am classes on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. One is spin, which I adore, and have to leave at 5:45 for. The other is bootcamp, which is a little scarier, and I have to leave at 5:55 for. So I set my alarm for 5:30 and on Monday my feer of bootcamp propelled me out the door and up the road in time. This morning I was groggy after a later night than I should have had (Girl Geek dinner) and ended up at bootcamp.
Which wasn’t as bad as I feared. And whilst it’s likely that I still won’t achieve absolutely everything I want to today, I do feel that I made the best start I could.
What strategies do you employ for tricking yourself into things? And fitting everything in?
Mid- way through June, I paused, and wondered – why was I focusing on little things during a month of big things? I hope that end-of-May-Cate realized that this was something that June-Cate would need to stay sane. This month’s focus gave me permission to make time for small, unimportant (but important to me), things in order that I wouldn’t get buried by the big things.
The big things were – launch. I’ve been working on Google+, it’s very exciting to share what we’ve been creating with the world. Unfortunately, my visa didn’t arrive and so I couldn’t be in California with the rest of my team (a big thing, yes, but one I can do nothing about. I’m trying to stay calm and wait it out). I’ve now started working on a 20% project, which is really cool. The article that I’ve been working on went through several iterations and will be out soon. I gave an Ignite talk (this has been a vague but big-scary goal I’ve had for a while, it was good to stretch myself in this way). And my co-author refined and I edited my first journal paper. Since he’s done most of the work for it, he’s first author – but still, exciting! Towards the end of the month, two other big things came up – first is the panel Serena and I are working on, and second is a web-profile, which I’m going to keep quiet about until it’s out. But still – exciting! Not exciting but still big things – I actually got sick, as in, go to the doctor, give me antibiotics sick. I tend to get the same couple of things again and again in response to stress, and I don’t think I’ve ever needed an emergency doctors appointment before. That sucked.
Anyway, in the midst of all this I read a lot of books – especially novels. Made time for breakfast at my favorite cafe a couple of times a week. Went to the gym. Went out to things happening around town. Applied face-masks. Walked to uptown for dinner. Tried a couple of new restaurants. Got a pedicure. Didn’t travel – June was my first month without a trip in… I don’t know how long. Had a guilt-free day off. Basically, I tried to carve out as much unstructured free-time as possible. It’s been great.
July may have to be the opposite. There are a number of bureaucratic things that I’m not on top of – filing my taxes, claiming health-insurance coverage, etc. I also want to get out and explore more – to that end, I may need more structure. My boyfriend and I are going to plan things for the weekends and go and do them, first up is an aerial exploration thing, but we’d also like to go canoeing and stuff.
So July’s theme is Organization. I’m not particularly excited about this, but who does get excited about filing taxes? Some things just need to be done. Exploring is exciting, but it’s easy for this weekend not to be the right time to do whatever it is, the point is to plan and make it the right time.
How was your June? And what are you planning for July?
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