As a full time product and team lead, start up founder, friend and family member, my life requires extreme focus, close to perfect deliveries, and quality time with the people that matter. In order to achieve this, I’ve developer a lightweight system and framework to ensure I have the time, and energy to actually be present and efficient.
I have an inherent animosity towards rigid methodologies. They often fail to reflect real-world applications unless the entire business, including its decision-making and budgeting processes, aligns with that specific methodology. Often introducing methodologies turns into buraucracy and an extreme headache.
Any organization that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure - Melvin Edward Conway
This has informed my approach to creating my own anti-methodology or meta-methodology based on many different methodologies and proven real world approaches, rather than theory. It is not a just a team or product leading framework but an all encompassing approach to your day-to-day life, with practical advice, from meeting structure to ways to decrease stress and avoid burnout.
Everything I do is goal driven, focused on doing little instead of doing a lot decently. It is derrived from books such as the effective executive [1], and the hedgehog concept from Good to Great by Jim Collins [2].
The goals are designed to stay focused on what will matter in the long term, not just work related, but mainly the prerequisites for reaching the professional goals and having rich life as outlined by Ramit Sethis book I will teach you to be rich.
These are your 10 year goals, adjusted on a yearly basis. They inform any and all activities you prioritize. They should be weighted towards the personal rather than professional, professional goals should support the longer term ones. All the other systems are built around reaching these goals.
My current long term goals: