From Overwhelmed to Organized: A Step-by-Step Guide to Crushing Your Learning Goals

For years, I’ve been collecting good books about innovative ways to approach product management, software development, or company culture. I’ve got lists of blog posts I want to go read and podcasts I want to listen to. I’ve got multiple Coursera courses I’ve registered for but haven’t finished. I have great intentions to read, listen, and learn from all of these, and yet most of them sit untouched for long periods. Does that sound familiar? Are you the same way? This year, I’ve decided I will make a dent in my learning goals, and I invite you to join me!

Plan

As a Delivery Lead, one of the fundamental concepts in my world is breaking down work: helping clients turn big lofty dreams into actionable plans. We can apply that same concept here!

1. Think about what kind of professional growth you’d like to have over the next 6-12 months. (If that feels too daunting, think about where you’d like to improve in the next three months! Smaller timeframes can be easier to wrap your mind around.)
2. Take a look at all the learning resources you already have access to! Which ones will help you grow in the direction you want? Make a list of them, no more than ten for now. (If you make your list too long, you run the risk of feeling overwhelmed by how long it is if you make slow progress.)
3. Prioritize that list! Which ones will help you grow fastest, soonest? Do any of them build on each other? Are any of them easier to digest or more challenging to learn? (Order your list in such a way that you give yourself a mental break between the challenging ones!)

Begin

Now that you’ve got a prioritized list of what you’d like to learn, we’re back to the hard part: actually doing it. Perhaps you’re feeling motivated by the sheer delight of meeting your professional growth goal; if so, that’s great! But for most of us, that’s not always enough. Here are a couple of strategies to make steady progress:

• No matter what kind of learning resource it is, you can always do a “timebox”: schedule a dedicated block of time on your calendar to read, listen or absorb. For example: one hour every Sunday morning, or two 30-minute blocks on Tuesday & Thursday. Adapt this to whatever routinely fits into your schedule!
• If it’s a learning resource that has natural sections (book chapters, podcast episodes, course lessons, etc), you can target finishing one section a week. You don’t have to do more than that if you don’t want to, and you don’t have to do it all at once! Even if you just make progress on a little bit per day, you’re still on track to crush your goals.

Bonus points if you reflect on what you learned each week with a friend or journal about it! It’ll make it that much more meaningful, rather than just doing it to say it’s done.

My List

If you’re someone who benefits from examples, I’m happy to share mine!

Intentions for Growth

When I reflected on how I wanted to grow in the next 6-12 months, I realized I have a combination of professional and personal growth goals to help me grow as a human, as a Delivery Lead, and as a consultant. My goals are:

• Continue recovering from a series of personal losses I experienced in 2024
• Explore how to grow my professional confidence (imposter syndrome is a real challenge for me)
• Consider new ways to approach my personal finances

Learning resources

I decided I wanted to focus on reading the books on my bookshelf! I picked books that I thought would solidify my human foundation and set me up for success professionally.

• The Grief Recovery Handbook, by Russell Friedman and John W. James
• How to Keep House While Drowning, by KC Davis
• Gravitas, by Lisa Sun
• You Need a Budget, by Jesse Mecham
• The Gifts of Imperfection, by Brené Brown
• Set Boundaries, Find Peace, by Nedra Glover Tawwab
• Tiny Habits, by BJ Fogg
• The Financial Diet, by Chelsea Fagan
• How Women Rise, by Sally Helgesen and Marshall Goldsmith
• First, Break All the Rules, by Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman

Prioritizing My Learning

I put books that felt most important to my human foundation earlier on the list because I believe that’ll help me make more consistent progress later on. To keep myself motivated, I peeked at the first chapter of each book and identified which ones would be more challenging for me to process, and made sure I alternated those books with ones that were easier to read.

Progress Plan

I decided to aim to finish one chapter per week. That’s because I often have small pockets of time between other activities where I can easily pick up the book and then put it down again.

Good luck!

I’m eight weeks in, and I’ve finished 2.75 books so far! I’ve discovered that I find books that are practical or more tactical to be easier reads than those that are abstract. Sometimes I’ve “cheated” by starting the next book on my list and reading a few chapters from that book before I go back to the more challenging read … but it’s still progress on my learning goals, so I’m going to call that a win.

If you decide to give this a try, I’d love to hear about how you’re planning to grow this year. It just might give me more learning resources to add to my own list!