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Acting on the advice / feedback I receive

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Mid-Level Software Engineer at Taro Community10 months ago

I often see advice online / receive feedback from so many different sources. That could be during manager 1:1, peer feedback, reading content on LinkedIn, etc. While I resonate with it, I often find it hard to track all the feedback / advice I receive and holding myself accountable to act on it or change my behavior. This is especially hard when the advice is not immediately actionable (i.e. situation based).

So my question is, how can I consolidate the learnings from all of these sources and make sure I act on it (or at the very least, remember it when a situation arises)?

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Discussion

(3 comments)
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    Thoughtful Tarodactyl
    Taro Community
    10 months ago
    1. Figure out all the different sources of advice and group them. Then order them in terms of hierarchy of importance. The advice from your manager is surely more important than the advice from a linkedin article. There is limited time so it is important to focus on the more important advice
    2. I would keep a notes app shortcut on the phone and anytime you find something that resonates with you, try to make note of it under the group

    The important thing - the 80/20 law. There is finite time and infinite amount of advice. Focus on the 20% of advice that gives you the 80% of impact and then go from there. This top 20% should be the higher tiers of advice you get from point 1. Focus on working on developing behaviors to incorporate this feedback before you can worry about incorporating all other feedback from less impactful sources

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    Tech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
    10 months ago

    Just write it all down! Humans have terrible memories, so whenever you're feeling overwhelmed with information, persist it somewhere.

    I also like Thoughtful Tarodactyl's point about prioritizing properly. For the most part, you can just stack rank the feedback based on the importance of the person behind it like so:

    1. Manager (obviously the most important)
    2. Teammates
    3. Other people in your company
    4. All other sources (like LinkedIn)

    Magnitude of the feedback is another vector. Let's say you have the following 2 pieces of feedback:

    1. Your code is extremely messy and hard to review
    2. It would be nice if you could speak up in meetings more

    #1 is far and away the more important of the 2, so you would obviously work on it first.

    Here's a good thread on how to optimize your work flow when you have trouble remembering things as well: "Tips for someone with poor working memory?"

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    Eng @ Taro
    10 months ago

    Having a 1:1 doc with your manager and peers is key. At the end of the meeting, summarize the action items to make sure you are both on the same page of what needs to be done. Determine what is urgent from those action items and prioritize it among your other work and let the other person know where it fits.

    This is especially hard when the advice is not immediately actionable (i.e. situation based).

    Can you operationalize the situational based advice in some way? I do try to set monthly goals at work. If you can operationalize the advice, you can set a work goal to "do so-and-so behavior 10 times this month" and hold yourself accountable to that.