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> Quarterly time retrospective. Every quarter I spend a few hours categorizing my calendar from the past three months to figure out how I’ve invested my time. This is useful for me to reflect on the major projects I’ve done, and also to get a sense of my general allocation of time. I then use this analysis to shuffle my goal time allocation for the next quarter.
This is the only resource I can find online about quarterly time retrospectives... perhaps my duckduckgo-fu is poor. I assume it isn't very complicated or difficult, but I'm the kind of person that appreciates some guidance when starting a new thing. So I would like to know
1. do you have any resources to learn more about this process?
2. would you mind sharing your process?
- [0]: https://www.amazon.com/Elegant-Puzzle-Systems-Engineering-Management/dp/1732265186
- [1]: https://lethain.com/time-management/
In my former career I was a manager of a program whose goal it was to "safely reduce the number of children in foster care from X to Y by 20zz". While there, it felt natural and easy for me to create programs and plans that would take years to come to fruition. Today it occurred to me that since switching careers to software, I don't think I've ever thought about anything further in the future than "finishing the current epic" (which usually takes weeks or months, definitely not years).
I think this is for two reasons 1) I've mostly been a junior and mid-level IC where my focus was on what was in front of me (and arguably I wasn't a top-notch software engineer, but that's another discussion) 2) I don't think I care about any company's goals, initiatives, whatever nearly as much as I cared about "safely reducing the number of children in foster care". That actually meant something. But "making more money for CURRENT_COMPANY by MAKING_THEIR_WIDGET_BETTER"... I just don't care other than the fact that "CURRENT_COMPANY does well" translates to me not having to find another job.
So I'm curious. Do you plan work goals, initiatives, etc that take 1+ years to come to fruition? Why or why not?
I do not want something synchronous where everyone reads the same book at the same time, such as https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/131006-tech-book-club.
Does such a thing exist?