Goal setting for productive engineers

Struggling to stay motivated with long term engineering goals? This guide shows how SMART goals and tiny experiments together create progress that actually sticks.

Career stories are sold as a clean path. Pick a big goal, climb, and collect the promotion. Real engineering work does not work that way. You get incidents, shifting roadmaps, priority flips, and too much stuff you did not ask for. You could fight this chaos or design around it.

I have been setting yearly goals for more thna 5 years. Some were very big, like write a book or get promoted. The pattern was always the same: Strong start, then work chaos, then life chaos, and the goal quietly died. The problem is not only that I didn’t achieve my goals. The problem is that each failure made the next goal harder to believe in. That loss of trust hurts.

I understood it better when I learned about hyperbolic discounting. The further in the future rewards are, the more they lose to other distractions. That explained why a two year goal died the moment you receive a Slack message or another request. “You still have 2 years to work on it, it can wait”.

I needed a way to work with my brain, not agai…