Goals and Personal Accountability
I was watching a show over memorial day weekend on the National Geographic channel about recruits training to become Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputies. These people go through what appears to be a fairly intense eighteen weeks of physical training, classroom work and weapons training. They didn’t really go over the barriers to entry as far as applying goes, but from the looks of it, they were not too stringent. One thing that was interesting were the varying levels of dedication that each recruit had toward the end goal of graduating and becoming an actual Deputy.
Highly Motivated, Truly Dedicated
The recruits had a motto that they shouted during various exercises. They were “highly motivated” and “truly dedicated”. I liked the sound of that, it means a lot if you actually believe in it. This got me thinking, how motivated and dedicated am I with my projects?
I’d like to think that I’m highly motivated and truly dedicated to completing some task or tasks related to bringing life to a project, but for the most part I’m not sure that I am. It was easy to sit there and scoff at the people who didn’t put 100% into their efforts and had “failed” but in a moment of honest personal accountability I realized that I wasn’t much different.
My 50 / 30 / 20 Rule
Going forward I plan on trying to spend my time based on the following breakdown. 50% is spent on tasks directly related to completing my project (coding, writing, solving). 30% is spent on tasks in-directly related to completing my task (reading, learning, trying) and 20% is not related to completing my project (web, e-mail, feed reader).
I took an hour of time over the weekend and tried this out and I found that I was closer to 30/30/30 spending about the same amount of time working directly on my project as I did goofing around on the internet, not exactly motivated and dedicated. I was able to keep myself accountable for the time I had “wasted” not actually working, and it helped to put things in perspective.
How much longer are you going to let that stack of projects sit and collect dust? You owe it to yourself to spend a little more time being accountable for your lack of success.
