Focus on goals

In a recent episode of the Hanselminutes podcast Scott Hanselman as part of a community call for LiveCoders.dev describes how he manages to be so consistently active on his blog, social media, and the web in general. To summarize, it all boils down to him being extremely goal-focused:

If it’s not helping me to _, […] it’s out. Every single thing in your life needs to be measured against that goal.

This also includes his motivation for having a blog:

I’ve been blogging all these year’s and I’ve been doing it for myself! I did it so that I could Google myself later.

That’s pretty much the same reason for me but without the whole googling point. One of my goals in life is to learn as much as possible. When I write a blog post this process helps me to focus on a specific topic, to make up my mind around it. Another goal of mine is to minimize duplicated work. Whenever I learn something that might be relevant for work, I can then use post I’ve wrote for myself to also answer questions by co-workers. So, having a blog and also writing regularly on it helps with not with one but two goals!

In general, most of Scott’s tips can be summarized with something like “if you do something, do it in a mindful way”. If you’re struggling with keeping all the things you’d like to do in your life into some kind plan, listen to this episode. There is lots of great advice and observations in there!