3. Self Management: Set Yourself for Success & Own Your Career from Today

Define your Framework, Setup yourself, and Start Executing Today. Try the WonderLead toolkit, free for subscribers!

Hi! 🙋🏻‍♀️ How have you been? Did you start being more self-aware since last post?
It would be great to hear your self-awareness Leadership Breakthroughs Stories!
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What You'll Learn:

💡 The importance of self-management in owning your career and life.
💡 A practical framework for self-management.
💡 How to start practicing self-management today.
💡 Free productivity tools for Wonder Leaders, direct download for all subscribers.

Tasks for the Week:

☑️ Keep practicing self-awareness.
☑️ Incorporate a self-management framework for owning your career and life.
☑️ Plan and review daily your activities and habits.
☑️ Try the WonderLead Toolkit with your self-management framework.

Start Self Managing your Career and Life

(7 minutes read)

In my career, I struggled immensely with work-life balance due to my tendency towards ownership, perfectionism, and saying “yes”. Although I constantly worked on improving my effectiveness at work, I found myself in a constant state of rushing and hustle, with decreased quality. It wasn't until I introduced emotional intelligence (EI) into my productivity framework that I gained the self-control I needed to say "no" - for myself and my team. Now, I'd rather face the discomfort of setting boundaries than the resentment of not working on the highest priorities.

"Choose discomfort over resentment." My mantra reminds me that I'm making a choice that's critical for my well-being—even if it's not easy. — Brené Brown

This year, during my maternity leave, I spent the first month watching Netflix while my baby was sleeping over me. Then I realized I could use those moments to continue growing in my career. So I decided to manage my life like I do when launching a new product! First, I set up Obsidian, a note-taking app, to track my habits, feelings, and career goals, all in one app — and with a single hand! Then, I assessed my strengths and values, and defined SMART goals with the milestones and user stories to achieve them. Suddenly, everything I did had a clear purpose, and I found myself saying "no" more often to stay focused on my priorities. However, I realized that I didn’t want to do the journey alone, so I created this free Substack, WonderLead in Tech.

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Discover, own and thrive as a leader in your career with WonderLead insights and community!

What is Self-Management?

Self-management is a core component of emotional intelligence, according to Daniel Goleman's model of EI. It has six key competencies: self-control, trustworthiness, conscientiousness, adaptability, achievement orientation, and initiative. The competencies involve managing disruptive emotions, upholding integrity, taking responsibility, adapting to change, striving for excellence, and seizing opportunities. Lacking strong self-management skills puts us at risk of burnout, getting stuck, and lack of fulfillment in our careers, constantly firefighting rather than focusing on priorities.

The WonderLead Framework

To help you start owning your career and life, here you have an overview of the framework I came up with based on my learning and 17+ years of experience working in consulting, startups and Big Tech. If you are missing something important, please comment. I will test it and keep this post updated so that the framework will be better and owned by all of us.

1. Manage your Career and Life: To be strategic, evaluate each activity you engage in as you do in a project. If it’s not a top priority and aligns with your goals, add it as a task or story. If not, remove it from your "inbox" to reduce noise and increase focus time. If you identify a new goal you want to focus on, consider reevaluating your goals, values, and priorities.

2. Daily Check-ins: To stay focused, each day realistically choose your top 1-3 priority tasks to complete. Depending on how you feel, start with small tasks to gain momentum or take the most challenging ones first.

3. Regular Reviews and Plannings: To keep your why, do weekly and monthly reviews to assess your progress in your career and life. Based on these reviews, make adjustments as needed, and plan what comes next. Take note of your emotions.

4. Calendarize: To meet your promises, add your milestones/epics, stories, and habits to your calendar. Ensure realistic deadlines and consider risks and other priorities.

5. Journaling: To be self-aware, think about the day, write what happened, and what you felt. Record emotional triggers, identify assumptions, and reframe negative thoughts. Track the habits done to use them as KPI metrics in your reviews.

6. Practice Gratitude: To stay positive, express gratitude by saying thanks to someone at least once a day. List up to 10 things you are grateful for at the end of the day. You can enumerate them in your journal or out loud any time.

7. Take Care of Yourself: To be healthy, be empathetic and do well-being activities consistently. Every day, do exercise, walk, meditate, and connect with the people you value. Keep life-work balance, for yourself and the people who follows you.

8. Discover: To keep your strengths, stay curious and learn from your discoveries. Document what you learnt at the moment if it takes less than 2 minutes. Write them as tips or templates. Review and practice them regularly. Learn as well from feedback asked early on.

9. Celebrate Successes: To keep you motivated, be part of a community. Share your insights, motivations, and achievements with others. Celebrate your own and others’ wins, no matter how small. You can use our Chat to celebrate or ask for the help that will make you succeed!

10. Build Habits: To make this happen, write your habits as small and specific as possible with the formula “Instead of … I will do …” or “After … I will do …”. Schedule them for each type of day and, keep your schedule updated. Start with the habits that will support this framework. For instance, schedule at least i) 5 mins every morning to choose your priority tasks of the day, ii) 15 mins every night for journaling and being grateful, iii) 15 mins at the end of the week to review your career and life goals, iv) block at least 2h everyday of focus time and 30mins for unknowns, and iv) 20 mins of exercise and 2 blocks of 15 mins of meditation everyday.

Remember, this is a journey of continuous improvement. Embrace the process and adapt it to your needs, celebrate your wins with us, and don't be discouraged by setbacks. Together, we'll navigate this journey, empowering you to own your career and thrive as exceptional leaders.

Share your productivity tricks with us. What big impact did they have in your life?
Or are you missing anything in this framework? We want to learn from you.

How do I practice self-management?

I know, at a glance the framework seems unachievable for busy leaders. However, the discipline of building your career will give you the freedom to become the leader you want to be. Your commitment will release you from the distractions that are taking away your goals.

1. Setup yourself to execute the framework effectively. You can download the framework toolkit below and use it.

2. Be mindful. Focus on the things that actually matter for you. Enjoy the path without getting obsessed about its end. Remember to not try too hard and get more by doing less to keep the experience positive, because when trying too hard, the benefits get diminished or even inverted.

3. Start executing and owning your career NOW. You don’t need perfect goals defined from the first day. We will create them in the next post. Instead, start with tasks of 1-15 mins every day to gain momentum and confidence with the framework. Preparation tasks are already part of your path, include them in your plan.

4. Experiment with the WonderLead framework or a variant of it.
   You can adapt it to incorporate your practices or well-known techniques that already work for you, such as Pomodoro or Getting Things Done (GTD). Embrace failures, review them, and adapt the framework to your needs. Make it yours.

Setup the WonderLead Framework Toolkit — Free for Subscribers

develAGORA offers a set of tools based on the WonderLead framework to support this newsletter and community. Their tools will be updated with the new content and available at the same time new posts get published in the Own Your Career section. And they will be free for us! More tools will be free through the referral system. Having shared tools allows our community to be truly effective and scale!

Get your Free tools now:

1. Automated WonderLead Framework in an Obsidian preconfigured Vault. Apply the framework at any place, even offline, within any of your devices, and with less effort than in a physical planner thanks to the automation of your plan and relationships between your notes.

2. Digital WonderLead Planner for those who prefer a more analog approach. You can print all the sheets you need and create your personalized planner. Putting it in a place that will remind you to use it will help you with your new framework habits. Alternatively, you can use apps that allow writing in PDF such as Goodnotes.

My Recommendations

Books

1. Atomic Habits — James Clear

2. Getting Things Done — David Allen

3. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People — Stephen R Covey
   Discovered while writing this post, I added it to my TO READ list.

Other Substacks about Self-Management

1. On Planning and Winning the Week — By Michał Poczwardowski 

2. Perfectionism - one of the biggest productivity killers in the engineering industry — By Gregor Ojstersek and Jordan Cutler

3. Eliminate Distractions — By Ethan Evans

4. Unlearning the Lessons That No Longer Serve Us — By Deb Liu

Do you have any thought that you would like to share? Send them to me and I will add your blurb into Leadership Breakthroughs Stories. Additionally, I am looking for guest posts from different tech role writers to help more people discover their path. Join here!

Thank you 🧚🏻‍♀️ for your commitment to personal and professional growth.
I'm excited to start this journey with you! Click 💖, Chat or Share so more people join.

🌻This post is dedicated to @ibesora and my colleague Oleg. Both showed interest in my productivity framework, and their curiosity gave me courage to write this post.

This post opinions are my own, and may not reflect the opinions of the company I work for.