Roadmap strategy to guide life goals

From time to time people ask me how I organize myself. How I keep myself focused on my goals. Honestly, I have tried many ways throughout the years, for example, monthly task lists, physical white board hanging on the wall to remind me of my own goals, monthly check-ins with myself 😅, and so on… but in 2021 I decided to go for a Roadmap of what I wanted to achieve for this year.

But before I start explaining how I did that, let me make one thing clear: My life or your life is obviously not a product, so please don’t go down this road. Abstract a few things and concepts and think about the outcome you want to get from it.

The why

By the end of 2020, I felt that I ended the year and I hadn’t got very far with my ambitions (Yes, ambitions! We need to normalize wanting better things to us, that’s perfectly acceptable and healthy). But that was fine that my 2020 was not a very good year, I believe it was hard for everyone with the whole covid sh*tuation.

So, on a wondering moment about that year, something clicked inside of me. I’ve been working with product development for more than 8 years and most of the time we had a Roadmap to guide us through the way and keep us focused. So why couldn’t I apply the same “methodology” to myself?

Roadmap

The definition of the roadmap from a product development perspective is:

“A roadmap is a strategic plan that defines a goal or desired outcome and includes the major steps or milestones needed to reach it.”
Reference: productplan.com/learn/roadmap-basics/

So basically you have defined goals and following them, actionable items to make these goals come true. Usually, in product development, we have an agreement between UX, Tech & Business to define these goals. In this situation, I am the CEO of my own life 😅 so no need to agree with anyone (which makes things easier).

I started by brainstorming and defining goals that I wanted to achieve by the end of 2021. Since I care a lot about work and life balance, I split my roadmap into these 2 areas: Professional and Personal. You can define yours by your preference and what is important to you.

With my goals defined, I had to create actionable items to achieve these goals, and I’ll leave two examples here of how you can approach it:

Professional Life Area:

• Macro goal:
  - Improve my research skills when it comes to interviewing people
• Actionable items:
  - Read Book “X” about the topic
  - Complete course “X” from Interaction Design Foundation
  - Apply learnings into “#number” interviews in my day-to-day work

Personal Life Area

• Macro goal:
  - Improve my book reading frequency
• Actionable items:
  - Create a reading schedule/habit
  - Read book “x” in January
  - Read book “y” in February

Just like it's done in product development, it’s super important that you define a timeframe for your goals, and here try to be realistic as possible, taking into consideration how long each of the actionable items will take you and possible blockers you will find along the way.

Coming up with realistic timeframes helps you keep yourself on track and don’t get frustrated when some of your goals turn out to last longer than you planned because of random events (We are talking about life here, anything can happen).

Learnings

1) Be flexible. There’s no other way to say this. Not everything will happen accordingly to your planning. Out of my experience, I was able to shift a few goals to happen way earlier than I planned, but also had to deal with postponing other goals to next year or approaching it in another way, and for that, I have another example:

One of my goals was to complete 3 modules of intensive german courses during the year. But I had one constraint that I wanted to do in presence courses, and not online ones. Unfortunately, I couldn’t do it, because the school I wanted to sign up for was just offering online classes during covid times. So I changed the actionable items of this goal to have private classes (1:1) with a private teacher on a non-intensive basis because it was cheaper, and I would have a similar outcome without going through the hassle of a group of people online trying to learn german (it would just not work for me). Be honest with yourself and know what works for you.

2) Find a visual way to keep eye on your planning. There are a thousand tools out there that you can use to create your roadmap, but there’s also pen and paper. I used Miro to do it, but you can use Figma, Notion, Excel, etc. Find what works for you, but find a way to from time to time come back to the board, and check your progress. If necessary, create some agenda events to remind you.

3) Commit to your goals. Having everything planned and written down is awesome, but if you do not comprise with what you need to do to reach your goals they will not happen magically and you will be overwhelmed with a frustration feeling eventually. Put the effort you believe your goals deserve and count this in when time framing them.

4) Make peace with yourself. You probably won’t be able to achieve everything. Your life roadmap is just a guide to help you accomplish things you want or move your career/life in the direction you want to. But along the way, you will probably want to change directions here and there or even completely, and this is fine, you will just need to take a break and restructure yourself and planning.

5) You are not a machine. I believe this is the most valuable learning. Every living thing in this world has a cycle, and we are no different. Like seasons that have their fruitful periods but also their retracted months to recover, we also have periods of our lives where we produce more and other moments where we need to take a break and wait for the next fruitful cycle. Respect that cycle and work accordingly to it.

Conclusion

It’s been one year since I started doing this planning and I can only say that I really enjoyed the process and I’m already preparing for my next year's goals. In general, it helped me to keep my eyes on the horizon, but also know the effort it takes me to get there and how valuable the award is once I’m there.

If you have any ideas to enhance this process, or you simply want to chat about it, please do not hesitate to get in touch. I would love to hear from you :)