This morning, I texted my friend that the following:
"I have been reading these articles about people who cut out TV and do all these great
things and I think "I don't watch TV, why am I not more productive?"
he articles I am referring to are these:
5 developer certifications and a software developer degree in one year https://medium.freecodecamp.com/how-i-got-a-second-degree-and-earned-5-developer-certifications-in-just-one-year-while-working-and-2b902ee291ab
Qualified for Olympic marathon trials and got a PhD in a year http://www.readingeagle.com/ap/article/i-gave-up-tv-then-qualified-for-olympic-marathon-trials-and-got-my-phd&template=mobileart
I then told my friend that I think the problem is that I have not set any goals. I then proceeded to list some things that I would love to accomplish. Those being:
- Run a marathon
- Learn to cook vegan dishes
- Get some programming certifications
- Build my software developer project portfolio
- Write that urban, African, sci-fi, romance novel I have been thinking about for years
She then proceeded to tell me about Design Thinking. She works at NPR, and shared a podcast they posted recently about how a woman used it to achieve her goals. So, I immediately proceeded to listen to the article and follow up my doing a Google search of "Design Thinking and Goal Setting". The following articles came up:
http://accelerator.smu.edu/news--events/how-to-use-design-thinking-to-achieve-your-goals
http://www.phillymag.com/be-well-philly/2017/03/06/design-thinking-goal-setting/
http://www.preting.com/2017/01/16/how-can-design-thinking-help-you-reach-your-goals/
https://daringtolivefully.com/design-thinking
In this post, I intend to walk you through (as I walk through) my attempt to use Design Thinking to tailor-fit my goals to my life. First I will list the tips from each article (under their headline) and then walk through the process set by step. It will probably become redundant after a while, but I believe it will help me (and hopefully you, the reader) master the thought process.
How to Use 'Design Thinking' to Achieve Your Goals
(the smu.edu article - no author was mentioned)
Premise: "By identifying the problem you're trying to overcome and articulating the deep-down reason for your goal, you open yourself up to more creative solutions—the kind you'll stick with for years rather than ditch before the end of the month."
Step 1. "Think into the future—six months or a year from now or whatever time frame you have in mind to hit your goal. Maybe you lost 10 pounds or you lowered your body fat percentage to a number you're proud of. "Bigger than those facts themselves, try to get yourself into that mindset of how that will affect other areas of your life," Singer says."
My process:
- I imagine that learning to cook vegan meals will help me to eat healthier and have more energy and get more work done. If I meal prep on Sundays (which is my goal), it will also free up my time so that I can just grab a meal and go when I need to. Meal prepping will also help me to keep track of how much I am eating and what my nutritional needs are from day to day further increasing my health measures. Biggest benefits: saving time, less mental resources spent making meal decisions, improved health, metrics
- I worry that training for a marathon might not be a good fit for me, because it will take up a lot of my time, and is a solo sport. I would like to do some sort of physical activity that leads me to interact with other people, helps me to maintain my health, lower body fat and doesn't take a lot of time daily to get maximum fitness impact. Maybe crossfit would be a better option in addition to joining a gym and taking classes at the gym.
- Because software developing is my career path, I believe that getting certifications and making a time investment in creating an extensive project portfolio is a great thing. I believe that the majority of my free time from day to day should be devoted to this.
- Writing this novel has been a goal of mine for quite some time. I'm just not sure how it fits into everything else. I know why I want to write it, and the benefit of writing it. I'm excited about the prospect of developing a new written language system for it. My issue is what part of my schedule will it fit into, and how much of my mental resources which should be devoted to software developing will this cut into. Due to the amount of mental effort it takes, I am not sure it will count as a recreational activity, and I am almost feel like it will be a drain on my mental resources due to the effects of "task-switching". I have thought about developing a blog specifically for this book. I think what I can do is break down the writing of this book into smaller and smaller chunks until the chunks are manageable enough that I can crush a chunk in a matter of minutes. Perhaps one chunk will be the process of chunking and then break that chunk up into what is being chunked...I think if the chunk is very small and manageable, slipping the chunk into my day would make things easier than if I just set a very general and abstract goal like "write for 15 minutes a day or an hour a day".
Step 2. Identify your "real" goal and why you care.
My process: I kind of think I instinctively did this in step one, and was able to come up with better goals which were:
- Practicing vegan cooking and meal prepping on Sundays
- Joining a gym and doing cross fit and taking gym classes regularly
- Chunking the process of writing my book into bite sized chunks that are super easy to work on
- Making software development related tasks my priority and giving certifications and projects the majority of my free time
I don't know if I did this process correctly, and now I feel energized to get started on these goals and add their processes to my calendar, but I will still skim the other articles briefly and write more notes if I come across anything new.
The phillymag article did not really contribute anything new. In fact, it was just a link to another article on this topic.
I didn't find the preting article very helpful.
How to Apply Design Thinking to Your Life
by Marelisa
(this article was on daringtolivefully.com)
Marelisa mentions 5 steps in Design Thinking (which I believe is based on a class at Stanford University and a book titled Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life. These steps are:
- Empathize - understand your end-user, their needs, why they do things, and what is meaningful to them
- Define - Identify the "real" problem (I think this is kind of like the process the other article seemed to focus on)
- Ideate - Come up with as many solutions as possible via brainstorming, mind mapping, doodling, etc.
- Prototype - Pick 3 to 5 ideas and quickly build simple prototypes that will allow you to test and fail cheaply
- Test - The goal of testing is not success, but feedback to refine and make adjustments in building a better prototype
- Iteration - Ideate, prototype and test are repeated until you meet the needs of the end user, and you can also go through the entire 5 step process as much as needed
She goes further to describe 3 ways to empathize:
- Keep a Good Time journal (keep track of what activities you currently participate in make you feel good, in a state of flow, etc.)
- Track your Energy (how each activity you do in a week makes you feel)
- Create 3 Odyssey Plans (3 paths you could take and how they would hypothetically play out)
I think these are also good measures to test your prototypes as well. This is a major takeaway for me. So, as I have come up with my plan above using the previous article, I believe I will use a "good time journal", an "energy tracker" and a weekly "odyssey plan" to assess my satisfaction level.
I think that not only identifying if I am enjoying and satisfied with the process in order to note how sustainable my processes for achieving my goals are, but also noting whether or not I am keeping up with it and what if any obstacles kept me from doing that particular part of the process in any particular day.
More about me:
Nwudo is about encouraging Africans to read, write and do business in their own languages.
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