

Goal Setting vs. Time Boxing: Why One Sucks - bane
http://www.davidjlin.com/2013/12/goal-setting-vs-timeboxing-one-sucks/

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TrainedMonkey
Goal setting: write a good comment.

Time boxing: write comment in 5 minutes (3 minutes for research/thinking up a
comment, 2 minutes for writing).

I would argue that neither approach is optimal. Making up good goals is super
hard. Pure time boxing, while great for managing time, is not that great at
getting things done.

However, consider this mixed approach:

1\. Write out a broad goal and start with an hour of exploratory testing. Come
up with some short goals with deadlines.

2\. Work on short term goals, time box them if necessary.

3\. Take some time to review accomplished goals and time it took. With that
information, review how accomplished short term goals helped you along the way
of a broad goal. Adjust timelines accordingly.

4\. Rinse and repeat.

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charlieflowers
Ever since I was first exposed to the idea of setting goals as a kid, there
was a voice in the back of my head telling me something was missing. I didn't
understand what it was back then.

But basically, it pretends you have perfect, god-like knowledge. You don't
really know whether you want that Project Manager more than anything or not.
You don't know for sure, up front, what it will take, and you also might wind
up finding out that you're not happy in that new Project Manager job.

Goal setting says, "Screw all that uncertainty. Let's pretend we _know_ we
want the job, that it will be worth more than it costs, and let's go all out
for it."

That is a process of willfully adopting an irrational stance. More precisely,
it calls for you to irrationally increase your level of confidence.

Still -- it is often a very effective thing to do. It transforms you from a
parked car to a guided missile, and it makes it possible to bring about great
changes in a short period of time. It's something like a blitz attack in which
you burn the ships.

It's really not something to do lightly. We probably _way_ overuse it. But
sometimes it's a very powerful thing to do.

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varelse
100% agree but I'll add one more idea. Goal-setting in a discipline where
you're a novice is likely to end in disaster. Goal-setting in an area where
you are an expert is when this approach really works.

Unfortunately, much of the industry actively discourages the emergence of real
expertise as that makes an employee indispensable. Instead they prefer 1,000
generalists who can do an OK job in any area. I blame Google for starting this
meme (and witness the quality of their applications as a testament to what
this does to software).

And which is ironic because all their moonshots require the very same narrow
expertise they actively discourage from emerging in their own employees. And
so they end up constantly hiring domain experts and buying companies with
domain expertise rather than cultivate the careers of their 1 in 1000
applicants that have made the cut. Sigh...

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abalone
That's timeboxing? He defines timeboxing has having an alternative plan if you
fail to meet your goal. ("..think of goal setting but with 2 additional
branches after having reached or failed at reaching the goal.") That doesn't
sound like timeboxing to me.

Timeboxing is, you do what you can within a fixed time limit. So you're more
inclined to rigorously prioritize, stay close to a shippable state and reduce
scope if you're running out of time.

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adrianoconnor
I think, but I'm not completely certain, that what he's trying to say is that
your plan changes based on whether you hit the goal in the timebox or not.
Which I guess is kind of true -- you can't really plan beyond the timebox
until you know what happened inside the timebox.

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jeffdavis
This seems more like playing with the definition of words more than anything
else. I never understood goal to mean "work tirelessly on one approach to
reaching your goal until you achieve it or die trying".

Part of the reason to set a goal is to see if your path is working. Want to
get 1000 sign ups by the end of the month? If it's the 15th and you have 50
sign ups, you can see that the campaign might need reworking.

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ganz
One problem with time boxing is that it isn't the actual terminal goal - when
trying to be self-motivate, there would be an extra level of abstraction
between effort and reward, as you'd now be self-motivating to timebox, rather
than to do anything inherently useful.

Besides, it fails the "too good to be true" heuristic. If it actually
persistently improved productivity in a meaningful manner, you'd expect it to
have been better adopted widely by now.

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HelloMcFly
There is literally no motivational mechanism with as much research to support
its efficacy on behavior as there is for goal-setting. The SMART criteria is
fine I guess, but it's missing one thing: make your goal behavioral. Further,
if your goal is distal (e.g., lose 15 pounds), then supplement it with
proximal (e.g., eat salad for lunch three times this week) goals.

Goals work. Goal-setting works.

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postitnotecode
I don't totally follow his methodology for "time-boxing", it seems like goal-
setting with a time for evaluation and course-correction, which is something
all goals should involve anyway.

Time-boxing as I've heard and used it before is a working style, similar to a
scrum sprint, where you have a set of goals and a limited set of time, so you
force yourself and team to prioritize what fits. The team then constantly re-
evaluates what fits and takes a hard realistic look at the goals that have to
be done at the end of the time-box vs. those that can be changed/cut.

