Build habits to help you succeed this year
Issue 12: Reflect regularly to help demonstrate impact, and hit your goals.
It’s the end of January, and there’s a good chance you’re probably in the midst of, or thinking about annual performance reviews. While this article and linked resources are written through the lens of designers, the advice is broadly applicable to anyone working in tech. (There are more design articles coming soon, just had to get this one out while it was fresh in my mind).
A common pattern I see is people putting an intense amount of effort and thought for 2-3 weeks leading up to a review, getting peer feedback and some areas to focus on, and then promptly forgetting these things because they have a lot of work to do. You then realize a month before the next performance review that you’ve not done anything to address these focus areas, and spend a month furiously trying to show impact, but you can only remember projects from the last 6 weeks, and realize your metrics aren’t where they need to be to tell convincing impact stories.
Hopefully it’s not just me. If this does sound familiar, know that it doesn’t need to be like this, and it’s easier to address than you think, if you start building habits now, at the start of the year.
Building habits is hard, so I’ve ordered these suggestions to help ease you into it. Things that need to be done once, or thought about occasionally at the start, and more frequent habits to work up to at the end.
Revamp your 1:1 schedule
1:1 meetings with your manager (or reports) can very easily become quite “status-updatey” if you and your manager don’t put active effort to make them something more useful. The best 1:1’s are more like coaching sessions, maybe not about a particular project, but talking through how you’re feeling about things, your context, career, skills and approaches to problems, mindset, etc.
Your manager may or may not be good at this, or they might be well-intentioned, but have 50 other things they’re trying to juggle. That’s OK, no one’s perfect.
My suggestion is to take one of your weekly 1:1’s per month, and throw it in the bin. Replace it with a recurring meeting once per month to talk with your manager about your career, skills to improve, feedback, and actions. Give the meeting a clear and differentiated name. Set them up for the entire year.
Crucially, pair these with a recurring time-slot you’ve blocked off for yourself to prepare for this meeting a day or two before. Go over any goals you set the previous month, feedback from reviews, and use it reflect, and to collect wins to celebrate, and challenges to talk through. Suggest to your manager that they do the same for you, so you both come prepared.
Setting up these recurring meetings is easy, quick, and you only need to do it once for the whole year. Do it now. Come back to this article when you’re done. I’ll wait…
If you’re a manager reading this, try to stagger these with your reports, one or two per week, so you don’t end up sinking an entire day each month prepping for these. I do Friday mornings first thing. Also, do the same thing for yourself. (Maybe write a newsletter post about it to hold yourself publicly accountable. Just a thought.)
Set goals
If you don’t know where you want to get, or what you want to or need to improve, it’ll be hard to make progress, and even harder to measure any progress you do make. Set aside some time to put aside other work, and think through what you’d like to have achieved by the end of the year.
Don’t kill yourself trying to craft perfect goals. “Done is better than perfect” applies here. These are your personal development goals, and the only person you are accountable to is yourself (unless you’re in a stack-rank organization that culls people that don’t show progression or something, in which case get the hell out of there).
For a year, I’d say start with anywhere from 1-3 goals, depending on their size and complexity. It’s fine to just have 1 goal! You can always add more later if you feel you have the capacity. Setting 5 goals and achieving none of them doesn’t feel good to anyone.
I can point you to frameworks such as SMART goals, and while it’s a good idea to practice setting those types of goals (as the rigor required is great for teams and stakeholders), the main thing is to make sure you know if and when you’ve achieved your goal.
For more inspiration and ideas on goal-setting as a designer, check out these articles on the subject:
Personal development goals every designer should set by Mimi
Goal Setting and OKRs for Designers by Betterworks
Start a brag doc, or work log
In a previous article I mentioned some of the benefits of keeping a brag doc. There’s no better habit I’ve found that makes the process of reflecting on your work and impact as easy. It’s a short, quick recap of what you’ve been working on week by week. They’re good as communication tools with your manager, and even better as a substitute for long-term memory.
Each week, just get in the habit of writing a list of stuff that happened that week. Projects you worked on, feedback you received, wins, challenges, links. It’ll be messy and without much structure, but it’ll build up month by month, and you can use this to remind yourself of things while prepping for those monthly meetings you’ve set up. If you find it hard to remember what you’ve done during the week, do it at the end of each day instead.
Maybe once a quarter, you roll these things up, identify the most impactful one or two, and write a paragraph or three about them. Doesn’t need to be big or fancy, just try to tell the story of what the work was, why it was important, and what the result of that work ultimately was.
These can be used as updates for your manager week by week, to save time and focus your 1:1s on more useful things. Some can be fleshed out into case studies in your portfolio. Some could end up as a 5 min lightning talk internally at your company. They could just be evidence in a performance review, or a way to celebrate a win on Slack.
Most importantly, you’ll be building the muscle of actively reflecting on things you’ve done, thinking about their impact, and telling stories.
And never fear, if all this sounds like a lot of work, there are always other options.
Help spread the word
By far the most consistent driver of growth for this newsletter has been Substack recommendations. Even with my small subscriber base, I’ve generated 250+ subscriptions for other publications over the last 3 months. I think part of this is because of some fairly deceptive patterns in Substack’s approach, which I might write about at some stage. But regardless, if you’ve also got an industry-relevant Substack, any recommendations would be hugely appreciated! Thanks.
Elsewhere
Danny Sapio tweeted out a good thread with 10 ways to improve dropdowns (Select boxes) in your UI designs. Some great tips here, and relevant to a future Design System Breakdown issue ;)
Luis Ouriach of Figma & 8px Magazine writes an epic 6,000+ word article on best practices for structuring teams, projects, files and layer names in Figma. Definitely going to be referring back to this one as we continue to iterate on this at Onfido.
Molly Hellmuth of the UI Prep Newsletter wrote a great thread about 7 things learned the hard way updating their design system in 2023.