Goal setting for productive engineers

Traditional yearly goal-setting often fails for engineers due to work chaos, shifting priorities, and incidents that derail long-term plans. The motivation equation explains why big goals collapse: high delay and low expectancy kill motivation. Two approaches work better: top-down SMART goals for stable environments, and bottom-up tiny experiments for ambiguous situations. Successful engineers switch between modes and tune expectancy, value, impulsiveness, and delay to maintain momentum.