Black Belt Productivity

As the plane that is my life starts ascending to the higher altitudes, I wanted to touch on my stops at 30,000 and 40,000 feet. I will only be discussing my professional side with this post since my personal side is, well, personal.

I sat down and really tried to come up with a number of goals for my job as Computer Services Manager at the City of Northport. I have only been in the job for 6 months now so I do not have a great feel for a lot of things yet. Chris in his comment said,

“A good way to create really motivating goals (and that’s one of the 2 main functions of setting one’s goals) I’ve found is to set an life-long end goal for each of these areas of responsibility.”

So, I tried that with some success. I came up with the following at 30,000 feet:

30,000 ft - 1- and 2-Year Goals [2006-2007]

Professional

• Document Management System in place [Backup, & Security Admins]
• New Mail Server in place, and Groupwise taken down [Network, & Security Admins]
• FULL Inventory of City’s IT Assets [Asset, & Security Admins]
• Helpdesk and/or Asset Manager in place [Asset Admin, Desktop Support]
• Wide Area Network between City Hall, Public Safety and Public Works building (possibly Fire Stations also) [Network, User, Backup, & Security Admins, Desktop Support]

The roles that these goals are for are in the italicized brackets. I have already begun work on most of these, so I feel pretty strongly that all of them are attainable by EOY 2008.

Goals outside of EOY 2008 are a little harder for me to define. I am working in the public sector with very limited funds so I will have to pick and choose wisely. Also, most of my 30,000 foot goals address the most pressing needs that our network has right now. So I have a short list at 40,000 foot:

40,000 ft - 3- to 5-Year Goals [2008-2013]

Professional

• Redesign City of Northport homepage [Site Maintainer]

This will be a pretty ambitious project and something that we are needing desperately, but not something that I can work on presently.

I feel a lot better now that I have some concrete goals on paper (or rather in Evernote). It is helping me define work better and helping me to create relevant projects for successful completion of my stated goals. I am going to keep the dates in place for 30k and 40k so that I don’t get a lot of overlap or confusion when I come up with a new goal in 2007 and it is a 2 year goal. It will go on the 40k list since it would be slated for completion in 2009, rather than on the 30k list since it is a 2-year goal.

Please talk about how goal setting has helped (or even hindered) your approach to work and getting things done in your life.

- Michael