Achieving great things is not always working long hours and pushing yourself hard. It's about choosing the high ROI tasks that will impact our dream goals. It arrives us to a question, how do we break down bigger goals and make sure what we work on every day will take us one step closer.

To my surprise, the #100daysofcode challenge build a foundational system that I need to work on every day towards my goal. On top of this system, I decided to build my first product - 100daysof.codes. Next, I started to list down, list of skills that I need to improve on to reach the end goal.

Divide goals into batches

The first thing we might all tempt to do is start right away. I can realize the need to work on skills that I need to improve - Learning React in-depth, optimizing development time, learning firebase. But mostly, the realization happens when I hit the situation. I decided to split my #100daysofcode challenge routine for learning and separate time for product development. Slowly, I can outline my learning & development tasks, and easy to work.

Working in small batches

In the book Lean startup, there was an interesting part I could recall. A father and two daughters got into an argument when they need to stuff newsletters into envelopes. There are 100 enveloped, needs to be addressed, stamped, filled with a letter, and sealed. Father's point is, it needs to processed one envelope at a time. Both the daughters argued at first all 100 envelopes need to be filled and then sealed separately. When they challenged and started to work on it, the father won the challenge.

Our intuition doesn't take into account the time needed for intermediate switching and the cost of failure scenarios. We convince ourselves that we can complete it in a single take. But when we work in small batches, the learning is instant and we act on it our mistakes faster.

The answer I told myself for the right task

After I launched the product, how do I know what part of the task I worked on impacted, and what part not? I realized the importance of thinking backward while planning. Some of the daily tasks have not much impact and some contributed. The efficiency is not working in terms of hours and it is about minimizing the not so impactful task. It's not always about right, it's about learning faster from our mistakes.

Action Items

1. We have provided you a spreadsheet template here. Make a copy and list down every task you think of to work on that goal and try to answer each question below.
2. How impactful this will be to your end goal?
3. Skills need to acquire?
4. Consider you have failed to complete this task and think of listing down the reasons. It might be helpful to forecast and analyze possible failure scenarios.
5. How much time you estimate for completion?

Maintain this sheet every time you work on a task. It might be helpful when you need to analyze for an opportunity to improve yourself in the future.

Thought for the day

This article is written by Rams and co-authored by Karthikeyan.

This article was written as part of day 04 of the #14daysbreakloop challenge. This article was originally published in blog.100daysof.codes