One of my favorite parts of athletics is the speed at which you receive feedback. The last pitch was either a strike or a ball. You hit it or you missed. Even in training, you can immediately see whether you caught the last pass or hit your lifting target. There is also the slightly slower feedback of muscle soreness after athletic activity. This tells you that you “did something.”
This fast feedback is harder to come by in knowledge work, but is often chased. Feedback on a research manuscript can take months after the work is submitted to a journal. For tenure-track faculty, one giant piece of feedback is delivered once (with, of course, some guiding feedback delivered more regularly).
In cases like this, generating short-term feedback that is relevant to your long-term goals is key. It’s tricky, though. You want to avoid setting and hitting short-term goals for their own sake. Consider the following two immediately measurable goals:
- Likes on my most recent social media post.
- Time spent in deep work for a specific research project.
Both are measurable. Both will give you immediate feedback. But only one will move you closer to that long-term goal.