Shea Furey-King

When 2021 started, I wanted to learn. Learn as in go in depth into a subject matter, acquire a new skill, refine existing skills, reengage. After a year of changing every plan and spending an enormous amount of cognitive energy on worrying about loved ones, trying to stay healthy, and digesting dozens of news articles per week to understand what was going on in the world, I felt ready to learn again.

I knew I didn’t want to map out my goals the way I usually did with a table in a word doc, buckets, and specific targets. That method worked well in the past, but this year felt like a continuation of 2020, or was it? I couldn’t be certain. And while I truly wanted to take a course at a local college or another yearlong learning experience, I didn’t want to commit based on fluctuating energy levels. What if another unheard of thing happened? What if burn out caught up with me? What if I had to reinvent another way to get groceries or some other basic need? I wanted to be nimble. I also wanted to reach those goals! I decided for 2021 that I would pick a learning goal for each month. I would start small – time-bound learning goals of < 1 week – in order to get my brain able to think in that way again. Hopefully, little by little I could work up to more sustained projects.

January -> Asana Ambassador

January -> ScrumMaster

February & March -> LinkedIn

April & May -> Google Project Management Certification

May -> Writing

Wishlist

I bookmark many apps, tools, languages, tutorials, and other videos with hopes that I’ll get around to learning more about them. Once I finish a month’s goal, I review this list and add it as the new month’s goal.

• Twilio
• Vanilla JavaScript
• React
• TypeScript
• Jira – want to know how it’s structured
• Blogging – write posts on technical tools i’ve used the past year
• Slack bot -i’ve always wanted to build a little one!
• Finish reading a book – this is a weird one, but my reading game has diminished in the past year.
• Writing – I’ve done so little of it in the past year, but miss it. This post is a step in that direction!

I learned I had applied an agile framework to my personal goal-setting process during goal #2, ScrumMaster training & certification. Come December ’21, I might reassess and revert back to my old way of setting up the entire year in advance. For now, I am extremely happy with this adapted and flexible goal-setting plan.

Have you adjusted your personal goal-setting format for this year? Do you have a Bookmark tab filled with “To Learn” materials like I do?