Have you ever been excited about setting a new development goal, only to later realise it’s been two months and you haven’t done a thing with it?
A few common problems tend to stop us from making progress on our development goals:
Too vague – there’s no clear goal, just “get better at this”
Not a priority – it’s not worth getting behind on your BAU to make progress
Not a habit – it relies on you actively making a choice to work on it
Today, we’re going to look at addressing these with a simple, 15-minute weekly exercise. While it won’t be enough to help you level up all on its own, it can transform learning into a habit and bring about more clarity.
🗓️ Make it a weekly habit.
Every week, answer 3 highly-targeted reflection questions that are about your learning goals. This should only take you a maximum of 15 minutes, so you can definitely find the time!
One of the best ways to introduce a new habit is to stack it. If you’re in the habit of doing an End-of-Week Reflection, this will happen at the same time. (If you’re using Notion, you can make this really low-friction by just modifying your default template.)
If you don’t do a weekly reflection yet, try this: add a 30-minute block into your calendar for every Friday at 4:30pm to prepare for the next week, and then use that time to reflect, look at your calendar for next week, and make any notes that you want to refer to on Monday.
🤔 Coming up with the right questions.
Since you only get 3 questions, we've got to make them count! Let’s go through some examples of questions that map to clear learning goals.
📚 Learning goal | 💭 Reflection question |
|---|---|
Get better at prioritising my own work | What did I prioritise this week? What did I de-prioritise? |
Develop hypothesis-driven thinking | What assumptions did I validate or invalidate this week? |
Improve understanding of our customers | What did I learn about our customers this week? |
Get better at giving feedback to others | What feedback did I hold back on giving this week? Why? |
Connect design work to business goals | What business goals did my work impact this week? |
Build stronger product intuition | How did I balance using data vs intuition this week? |
Your questions, to be most effective, need to be targeted enough to make you really think – you shouldn’t be able to just type out a paragraph immediately.
🤩 How reflection questions can accelerate your learning and development
You may have figured out by now that answering these questions alone won’t be enough to develop your skills – but they can help to build clarity and force a weekly focus on your goal areas.
If you struggle to answer a question because you didn’t do any work on it this week, that’s a great signal of what you need to work on. For example, say you end the week on the question, “what assumptions did I validate or invalidate this week?,” and you realise you didn’t even have a list of assumptions. That’s your new starting point: now you can create a list of assumptions that you can figure out how to validate.
Let’s get down to business!
And that’s your new weekly habit! It shouldn’t be taking you more than 15 minutes, and it’s a nice way to end the week by reflecting on your progress.
Don’t be afraid to modify your questions once you find out they’re not working for you any more. If you’re going to make this a weekly ritual, it needs to serve you!
