Smart Time Management and Productivity Guide via Weekly Reviews.

#productivity #career #discuss #devtips

Greetings to all readers and writers at dev.to!

I am so happy to join the tech community here and start with the non-dev post (what the irony!).

As we all know being a competent software developer or engineer means continuously learning throughout your career. It’s great! That makes this profession exciting and allows to escape everyday routine at work. In fact, it’s not a job anymore - it’s a lifestyle 👩‍💻👨‍💻

Sometimes, it gets more difficult to evaluate your progress in personal and in professional lives. We understand, we are learning on a daily basis and finding out more and more open questions. In the end, in my case, I feel that there are still a bunch of things which I actually don’t know and this number increases exponentially.

To not panic and convince myself that I continue to improve myself in the right direction and see the results, I decided to follow some tricks and gladly will share them with you:

1. Plan any activity in a specific time frame

We don’t like routine and usually want to learn multiple things at the same time. Besides that, there is always a lack of time.

Here is the planning with time dimensions.

Depending on your short-term or long-term goals try to measure how many hours you need to reach them. Then divide and put these hours into your days/weeks/years.

For example, the goal is to learn Spanish.

Regarding the Language Difficulty Ranking, if your language is closely related to English, it’s necessary to spend 23-24 weeks (575-600 hours) to conquer the language. Just count how many hours you can give on that per week and see how much time it would take to achieve this goal.

2. Spending less time is better than nothing

The most challenging stage of any project or goal is not to give up immediately after beginning on the first week. Traditionally, it happens if we expect the most from ourselves and set high expectations in the short term.

I have followed this wrong way for years. As a result, I have given up lots of things and switched to others which also have been given up soon or later.

It was a tremendous mistake in my life. Don’t repeat my failures.

If you focus on specific goals, make efforts to accomplish them even though you can spend only a few minutes per day. Perhaps, you would dive into them more in-depth and would not even notice how you start spending more and more time on that.

3. Reward yourself for each accomplishment

Whether the weekly plan was completed successfully or you had a challenging week, reward yourself in the way that you would best enjoy: take some days off to relax, go on a vacation, present yourself something, spend time with your family or friends together, etc.

When rewarding yourself for a job well done, you might consider what you would be doing if you didn’t have to work each day. The more we pay ourselves for all of our success, the more success we will have.

I'm continually rewarding myself, and it’s powerful. I am literally training my mind to focus on the good in my life to transform the annoying way I am thinking into an entirely positive experience of my life.

4. See a big picture in the end

Before setting individual goals, consider defining your vision because the vision is your long-term picture that influences short-term decisions.

You need to know why are you doing what you are doing to stay motivated and keep moving along within.

Indeed, the big picture - yours truly dream - will prevent you from giving up while you are sticking with the specific problem or thinking that you don’t have enough time, power or resources for reaching that.

In this case, a weekly report will show the real data that should consist of the list of completed and uncompleted weekly planned items. And based on these results, you can start planning your next week.

Because dreams stay dreams without deeds.

5. Track your weekly progress by days

I know it can sound unreal and even weird. At first, I also didn’t take tracking of progress seriously. I didn’t want to waste my time even thinking about tracking. I already thought I knew everything about my progress.

Then I started feeling that the more I learn, the less I know. I started worrying and stressing about that.

To analyze my concerns, I decided to create a weekly review of all my achievements, and clarify the picture of my growth in different directions.

So, the result surprised me!

Summing up weekly successes and failures, I saw how many things I have done during the last week! Of course, nothing was perfect, but the end-result encouraged and motivated me to do even more things the next week.

That experience inspired me to create a new series “What I learned…” on my YouTube channel. There on Mondays, I am going to release a new video describing my weekly results for the previous week.

I think this kind of entertainment can encourage you to start with planning your current working week, so then you will be able, resume all your accomplishments and see how many new things you have learned and eager to learn even more.

Thank you for reading!

Any questions? Leave your comment below to start fantastic discussions!

Check out my frontend blog, come to say hi 👋 on Twitter, or maybe you want to transition from frontend to fullstack engineer, then watch my “frontend2fullstack” series here.

Plan your best!

Cover Photo by Estée Janssens on Unsplash