[fleb]

This sounds like burnout to me. I am in my mid-40s and used to have spells like this, but no more. I needed some kind of large change, back then, to get myself sorted out, but this could be pretty destructive because if I waited too long, the change I'd need wouldn't really be conducive to staying on whatever project I was on.

The key to not having to deal with this problem anymore, for me, was starting to proactively switch things around to break the routine of consecutive work-weeks. One of my tricks was to do some kind of mini-vacation every 6-8 weeks, go somewhere new, leave work behind for 3-4 days. Even smaller things like regular social events can work wonders - anything that breaks the weekly routine.

Back when I'd get myself into burnout periods the most effective way to recover enthusiasm was to pick up a new skill, work-related or not. I was in my mid-30s in the late aughts and not entirely sure I wanted to keep coding - so I signed myself up for an 18 month "executive MBA" program to find out if I might want to do something else, and instead came out of that with a whole new outlook on how and why to write code.

Then around 5 years later I started writing code on the side, for myself, to gradually improve over the long term, and this can be absolutely therapeutic.

Try to switch things around a little bit, do something new, see if that helps?

[rightbyte]

Getting fed up with all the stupid technology grind is not necessarily burnout though. One could call it wisdom or experience too.

[jseban]

Yeah always switching tools basically resets your experience to zero, so you have to do the same mistakes over and over, no wonder it's hard to stay motivated. And the "senior" jobs have zero power, so you can't stop people from making mistakes, and trying to "influence" just makes the experience even more exhausting and frustrating when people have no reason to listen to you.

I wish there was real senior roles you could grow into where your experience is actually valued, and you would gain certain power to make decisions, but then the argument is that you can't hire juniors anymore because they think it's too uncool to have a boss.

It's really rigged for shorter careers.

[sinenomine]

> I wish there was real senior roles you could grow into where your experience is actually valued, and you would gain certain power to make decisions

In my experience, the only way of getting some decision power is moving into management. Even team lead roles don't count and don't give you any ownership over the product direction.

In big tech engineers are generally trusted more, but still product ownership is dedicated to management.

[trevormcneal]

the whole tech thing is changing fast, ageism is a true thing, in a scenario where most of the previous knowledge can be ignored, being a senior with 5 years of experience, 10 or 20 doesn't change much. Given that young people usually simp for the companies much more due to being naive, they have a huge preference in the hiring process.

Tech is removing the root of the knowledge, migrating from understanding the solution, to quick copy&paste from some places.

[helge9210]

Half life of knowledge in our profession is more or less a year and a half.

This means 5 years of experience is the maximum you can accumulate.

Maybe years are not a good metric for experience.

[k8si]

There's a huge difference between understanding tools/libraries/frameworks/programming languages/APIs etc vs understanding how to build a system on top of any of these things that scales well, is maintainable, is easy to collaborate with others on, that can be extended quickly, that doesn't cost that much time/money to build in the first place, etc.

Yes the former changes every 1-5 years. Doing the latter well is much harder, no single tool can solve these problems, and I think years of experience really does help.

[dasil003]

> Half life of knowledge in our profession is more or less a year and a half.

Only if you define your profession as knowing the latest front-end frameworks. In terms of concrete technical knowledge that half-life lengthens as you go down the stack. But beyond knowledge of existing tools and frameworks, there is also the understanding of systems and how they interact with the real world. This is what you need to understand to really give yourself a life-long career. It can still be hard tech (distributed systems, scalability, etc), or it can be a little softer (UX, maintainability, collaboration, etc), but these skills will give you the ability to dwarf the actual business impact of the 25 year-old who has maximized knowledge of the latest tools.

[evilbob93]

... and?

I agree that years aren't necessarily a good metric for experience, although I have decades in IT - started when I was 19 and retirement is a real thing I have to consider.

Years do give you some experience that isn't translatable to the resume: after a while, you've seen through most of the tricks that management likes to try but which the younger colleagues haven't learned. Having older folks around can spoil the surprise.

My personal theory of the roots of ageism has this as a pillar.

[peteradio]

What kind of management tricks might someone be missing who hasn't been around too long?

[rightbyte]

Do you mean as in you forget or that new ways to do stuff are reinvented?

[helge9210]

The latter.

As an example I can think of:

- jQuery, Backbone/Knockout, React progression

- C++03, C++11

- Qt Widgets, Qt Quick

- SQL to NoSQL and back again

- Windows NT, 2000, Server

On the other hand, AWS Lambda seems like CGI/FastCGI all over again, but with proper automation, so I have at least one data point on 20 year cycles (to confirm we need someone who is in profession for at least 40 years).

[7speter]

> I wish there was real senior roles you could grow into where your experience is actually valued, and you would gain certain power to make decisions, but then the argument is that you can't hire juniors anymore because they think it's too uncool to have a boss.

Uhh... who are these junior people who don't like having a boss? I read the first part of this sentence and wondered why wouldn't a lower level colleague not want a senior helping them avoid potholes in the road...

[jseban]

> why wouldn't a lower level colleague not want a senior helping them avoid potholes in the road

Because they become much more influential in a shorter time, if they make a coup d'Etat by paving a completely new road, now they are the new road master. The old potholes are gone so they don't have to worry about those, and the new potholes are still unknown and yet to be discovered.

[1270018080]

Is that not what architects do? Seniors with decision making authority?

[trevormcneal]

Notice the fast decline in the last 20 years? Even active X was less crappy than the most well-polished actual react project, and active X was crap. Even java applets did more and in an easier way than modern frameworks and JS shit.

One simple page, with login, logout, some search, and navigation nowadays require a few plugins, router, state management, lib for requests, lib to handle cookies, lib for JWT, etc...

[germs12]

Rails does 95% of this out of the box. Companies need to understand how much their poor technology decisions cost them...

[myth_drannon]

It's the developers not companies that make this decision. Out of boredom or trying to get promotion. I'm just so tired of seeing something that could have been one static html page but was built with NextJS+lambdas+terraform and a hundred more buzzwords.

[iamben]

Seeing the same trend in web/ecommerce development. The brand needs a simple site with a little bit of dynamic sprinkled through it. The agency chooses to build a full SPA with all the bells and whistles. In doing so they neglect/break basically everything else - SEO, connected martech, analytics, etc etc. Sure, some bits are a little 'faster', but then there's all sort of UX issues with parts that update too slowly and goodness knows what else. And all at a cost dramatically greater than necessary.

I'm sure some agencies do a fantastic job (those that think about the bigger 'more than just dev' picture). But on 95% of the sites I'm seeing right now the downsides far outweigh the benefits and it feels like dev for the sake of dev.

[klibertp]

> In doing so they neglect/break basically everything else - SEO, connected martech, analytics, etc etc.

This is exactly how it looked like when Flash was a popular choice for making web interfaces. We've fought a long, hard battle to finally get back to indexable, interoperable, standards-based HTML, CSS, and JS. It was fine for a while, then Angular happened. Fast-forward a decade and we're right back when we started. Amazing.

[scruple]

> It's the developers not companies that make this decision.

I don't see developers making these decisions anymore, not in large web-based tech companies.

My experience has been that management controls a lot of these decisions and/or steers them in the direction that they want them to go. And the more power a manager holds over a team or department, the more influence they can exert to get their way.

As an example, I'm hearing from a colleague in another department that they're being told by an engineering SVP that all new backend services are to be written in NodeJS. These are .NET developers. How does this guy who is 3 layers above these engineers intend to enforce this "rule?" The implication is you can do this or get fired, I guess, so it's happening regardless of how stupid it is. This was all explained to me when I noticed that I had gotten 3 "so long and thanks for all the fish" emails from long-timers in that department.

[rufugee]

As someone who recently returned to Rails after 7 years of searching for a better option, I totally agree. For the types of problems I solve (not FAANG problems), Rails is the by far the most productive option. Not perfect, mind you, but better than anything else I've run across.

[codegeek]

Or Django. Or Laravel.

[hattori31]

> Rails does 95% of this out of the box

This is always my thoughts when I start a project with something else .

[leetrout]

I feel like I am one of the few that switched from angular to react in 2014 and while enjoying how "simple" it was started noticing how much people liked building complexity in it.

Now I have used react at a few different sized companies, taught it to some students and completely stopped using it for personal projects. It just seems like too much added complexity for almost every situation and people just see everything as a SPA now.

[ishjoh]

I'm a full stack engineer that does lots of react in my day job. I now use jquery in all my side projects because I want to get them done instead of spending lots of time getting the project setup.

Nothing beats adding a script tag in the footer and being done with project setup.

[conradfr]

That's why I like Vue. It's mix of the two with a synchronized ecosystem for the core libs and a simple API.

Vue 3 kinda tanked all that though.

[tpetry]

Can you describe the vue 3 part more? As an outsider it just looks for me they just added another api with a different style, so people can choose what they like.

[conradfr]

The official router and store were not ready when they released Vue 3, even kind of still not, and the store is moving to a new lib.

Also there's now two competing APIs. The new one that they want you to use, and the old one that people like better.

Also a lot of time your objects are actually proxies, which I'm sure there's good reason for but that's kind of annoying (personal opinion).

[FractalHQ]

What do you think of Svelte? I haven’t used Vue since I discovered Svelte but I’m always curious about peoples perspectives and try to keep my finger on the pulse. The new Nuxt looks pretty awesome! Love the api design. I’m hoping Sveltekit steals a few ideas from it before 1.0.

[brimble]

I looked at it the other day after the discussion thread about JS frameworks, but bounced when I saw ".svelte" files.

I accept (demand, really) TypeScript but I've become allergic to any attempt to add much more on top of JS than that. I can just see the next poor bastard coming along in a short year or two and going "oh god, WTF is a '.svelte' file? What did my piece of shit predecessor fall for?"

I'm looking into Vue today. Possibly I'll settle on something even simpler.

React's certainly out, and thank god the mood is finally shifting enough that I can abandon it without harming my career (much). Slow, janky, and god they've made some weird choices with it in the last few years. It was always a bit heavy, but it felt like it had some degree of elegance to it before that—if only in parts of the API itself, not the implementation.

[EDIT] Oh good lord, '.vue'. Don't any of these just use normal-ass code? Sigh.

[conradfr]

Seems interesting but quite young. When I looked it up it there was discussion about Sapper vs Sveltekit etc and quite frankly I can't stand that kind of thing anymore, it just leads to confusion, a lot of Googling and SO, partial or wrong docs etc and in the end a LOT of lost time and energy.

And I say that as someone who is currently refactoring a Vue 3 app from JS/VueX to TypeScript/Pinia ... oh the irony.

[slipwalker]

that's why i started using Svelte[1] on my personal projects... simplicity ( and the godsend cross-compatibility between browsers/desktop/mobile )

[1] https://svelte.dev/

[giantg2]

I'd like to see it that way for my own situation. But I have no alternatives for making decent money. It's not wise to be a slacker without a contingency plan. I'm just dumb.

[balaji1]

Another level of wisdom is to realize this is a form of job security. Put in the 8 hours, whatever the grind.

If that's good enough for you. Else there seems to be suggestions in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31285969 lol

[jweir]

We switched to using Elm for our front end. One of the complaints about Elm is doesn't get upgrades very often (like years in between).

This has been a feature for us – we don't need to be upgrading or fixing for upgrades or learning new "things". We focus on building with what we have and know and it works.

[samstave]

The things I was doing in my 20s made me feel as though I was changing the world, and I had an impressive project list.

In my 40s, I can hardly stand certain aspects of the tech space... and keeping motivation is all about things I can make, but not make for others.

Find something that sparks your imagination. Skill atrophy is my main thing. Mitigating skill atrophy on legacy skillsets, sub-sets of skills you have used for 20 years, but have no passion for any longer is tough as HELL -- and it makes me feel I can't learn... but the fact is I fail to learn anything I dont have a spark of passion about.

And I am not talking that romantic passion that some billionaire founder is taking about -- I am talking about *enough* passion that your ADHD can be quelled, and that small distractional things dont have undue heavy draw against your attention (passion)

[Cthulhu_]

I do think this is true - if you don't see the advantages of learning a new tool then you won't feel motivation or energy to do so - but I can also understand that it has to be done because of career reasons.

I mean if you were all in on e.g. Backbone.js or Dojo ten+ years ago, you're kinda running behind now and it'll get harder and harder to find a gratifying job.

I can see it happening for Vue vs React as well.

[foobazzy]

> most effective way to recover enthusiasm was to pick up a new skill, work-related or not. I was in my mid-30s in the late aughts and not entirely sure I wanted to keep coding - so I signed myself up for an 18 month "executive MBA" program to find out if I might want to do something else

This might sound tangential, but I am at this exact stage in my life. I am in my early 30s and have signed up for the executive MBA program. I will be looking to start my term in Sept. Any tips/suggestions/warnings that you can share?

[solatic]

Not OP, but in my early thirties finishing an MBA now.

Here's how I sum it up. Pure CS is about determining what's theoretically possible, then software engineering is "applied CS", about taking what's theoretically possible and making it in the real world, which includes a mature understanding of costs (both upfront to build v1 and long-term maintenance). Thus an MBA is "applied software engineering." It's not sufficient to understand the costs of the engineering we build, because it doesn't matter if it costs $2,000 or $2,000,000 if we don't have the money for it. We also need to understand how to make it actually self-sufficient, by ensuring that it brings in enough revenue to cover the costs. $2,000,000 in costs, let alone $2,000 in costs, may be too much for a college student to afford out of pocket, but if you can show that you can earn it back and more, then you will find investors - be they angel or VC investors for a new venture, or your company's Finance division for a new project in a Fortune 500 company.

Ultimately the skills you get are about convincing people to fund what you want to build, for different definitions of "fund", whether it's literally cash, or persuading people to invest blood-sweat-tears equity by joining you, or just getting work to allow you to put time into it. Instead of working on what others want you to work on, you will learn to persuade The Powers That Be that your work should be funded. The main caveat: working on the MBA may change your mind about what's worth working on.

[fleb]

Tips, suggestions, warnings - very subjectively and at random...

- The "hard" stuff (with numbers in it...) didn't really grab me at all, I originally studied math and was somewhat disappointed in much of that part of this kind of MBA program, my hunch is that a regular full-time MBA would have been better for this, more immersion, this was all a little in the one, out the other for me because there wasn't much time to practice.

- But, the "soft" stuff on the other hand, was a goldmine, all the personal development, organizational psychology, negotiations, etc. This alone was worth the tuition.

- The best part was gaining a far better understanding and tolerance of why and how pretty much everything we work with in software is more or less "broken", it's actually not broken, it's as good as allowed by budget and organizational circumstance, and if something is to be improved, well, then that background has to allow for that improvement or else the improvement is just a pipe dream.

And you meet interesting people who will do interesting things in the community where you live, assuming you stay put, which I didn't, so I can't say much about that.

[dehrmann]

What do you want to do after your MBA?

[emmes]

That's why I decided against the MBA. I was in this stage of life in my early-mid 30s, and asked for some advice from other engineer-with-MBAs. All of the ones who had done things of value with their MBA were no longer engineers.

What's your endgame?

Do you want to be a CEO some day? A product manager? Business development? Work in something other than software? An MBA will teach you useful things and help you get your foot in the door.

Do you want to be a CTO? Do you see yourself creating software down the road? None of the MBA things explicitly help you, and executive MBAs are very expensive to do "just for fun". If you want to go back to school, go get a masters in CS if you don't have one yet.

[incomingpain]

>The key to not having to deal with this problem anymore, for me, was starting to proactively switch things around to break the routine of consecutive work-weeks. One of my tricks was to do some kind of mini-vacation every 6-8 weeks, go somewhere new, leave work behind for 3-4 days. Even smaller things like regular social events can work wonders - anything that breaks the weekly routine.

I wonder if the VW ID Buzz California Camper van will be great for this. Take it for a drive to wherever. Go fishing, whatever. No need to rent a hotel or anything like that. Just hit the road and enjoy.

[flemhans]

I'm doing these mini vacations so often now that they feel routine.

What's next? :P

[fleb]

Buy an old house and start renovating?

[sinenomine]

Burnout has become such a catch-all term as to be effectively meaningless by now.

In our professional lives, we are used to set quantified KPIs in a SMART way, and I wonder, why is it that our expectations are so comparatively low in our personal lives?

[lobocinza]

Measuring for the sake of measuring isn't useful. Burnout may have become a catch-all term but it isn't meaningless, it means that the person is currently fatigued and action is required. It matters that the root cause is identified, it could be a health issue, an environmental issue or more probably a combination of factors. The KPIs you set as I see are arbitrarily chosen, not sure what you are measuring or why and can't even say that the goals are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-sensitive).

[Dudeman112]

>In our professional lives, we are used to set quantified KPIs in a SMART way

In your opinion do you think that's been working well for the industry?

[sinenomine]

I don't find KPIs terribly useful in the software development at the level of an IC (which is btw my own level), unless we talk about performance & latency of large services where it is very useful and helps save millions. Software IC is special because motivation-wise it is almost self-sustaining, which is evident from massive open-source participation and pet projects.

On the contrary, at larger scale (starting from middle management and all the way to the top), I have an educated opinion that structured measurement of KPIs and clearly defined goals is what differentiates "tech" companies from all the rest - which is to say, tech-companies are known for their powerful growth.

It's really obvious in the hindsight: managers are usually pretty disillusioned types and will avoid doing hard work unless properly incentivized, thus fine-grained unforgeable growth-adjacent KPIs are really at the heart of the tech-company's success. Overall corporation's fast growth is a direct consequence of the synergy of KPI growth across the org-chart.

[dhzhzjsbevs]

I like to define burnout as expending effort without makng perceived progress.

If you can phrase explain your problem in those turns there is a good chance it is burnout.

If not, it might be depression or something else.

In answer to your question though, speak for yourself. My personal goals are far more ambitious than my work ones.

[ttoinou]

Any example of a smart KPI ?

[sinenomine]

Some examples of directly measurable KPIs:

1. Mood diary

2. Time spent on social media, negative

3. Hours of sleep

4. Steps walked, number of repetitions in exercise, calories burnt

5. Psychometric tests (help measure mental clarity) https://openpsychometrics.org/

6. N-back: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0220...

7. Active vocabulary test to measure available crystallized intelligence

8. Biomarkers, for example the simple Levine PhenoAge clock: https://michaellustgarten.com/2019/09/09/quantifying-biologi...

You don't gave to measure every one of these, of course. In my experience they are more or less correlated: good lifestyle interventions improve many measures at once.

SMART goals regarding these KPIs are pretty obvious.

[adriand]

I have a strong dislike of the modern focus on personal measurement and metrics. It implies a sort of mechanistic existence. It’s also often connected to a focus on productivity optimization, which given that the OP may be suffering from burnout, seems like it might be the wrong direction.

My advice to OP: whether it’s burnout or not (and it does sound like it), you aren’t liking what you’re doing right now, so if you can, stop doing it for a while. Summer is coming. Can you take a sabbatical? If not, can you quit? If you are able to regain your energy and enthusiasm you will surely be extremely employable, so your overall risk seems low.

Use the time to nourish your body and your spirit. Get off the internet and into the outdoors. Don’t measure your steps or your sleep duration, instead, reflect on how you feel. Lay back in the grass and watch the stars and ponder your place in this vast universe.

I wish you good luck and if you are able to start this journey, I’m excited for you.

[taylorius]

If I could upvote your comment twice, I would. Measurement has become the be all and end all, and it's useful of course. But it's easy to make the mistake that you've captured the whole of something on your graph, or spreadsheet, and usually that is far from the case. The spirit of a thing is not easily captured.

[ipaddr]

I'll give him one on your behalf.

[celdon25]

> I have a strong dislike of the modern focus on personal measurement and metrics. It implies a sort of mechanistic existence. It’s also often connected to a focus on productivity optimization, which given that the OP may be suffering from burnout, seems like it might be the wrong direction.

Those things actually help reduce burnout, in my experience. An hour of sleep can make a big difference.

[nonameiguess]

These can also be SMART KPIs.

Compare "take at least two weeks of vacation, where vacation is defined as not checking any email or voicemail and engaging in purely arbitrary activities not directed by an external authority, within the next six months" to "you need a sabbatical."

Heck, even your own wording is already edging toward SMART. Staying off the Internet and not measuring steps or sleep duration are quantifiable goals. Binary, but still quantifiable.

[sinenomine]

I too would like if my life were nice by default, but it is not. When faced with a hard problem we have to resort to hard measurements of progress, because otherwise we tend to go in circles in high-dimensional parameter space.

Otherwise taking a sabbatical is a nice decent feel-good advice.

> If you are able to regain your energy and enthusiasm you will surely be extremely employable, so your overall risk seems low.

And that's a big if.

[junon]

I'd upvote this multiple times if it were possible.

[lobocinza]

So what are your goals?

1 - Wake up happy each day?

2 - Do not use social media?

3 - Sleep 8 hours per day?

4 - Walk 3000 steps per day?

5 - I fail to see how a personality test can measure mental clarity? Even if they aren't useless constructs. Thought "core self-evalutions" if taken regularly can be a good indicator of issue.

6 - Not sure what are you measuring. Work memory?

7 - "Available crystallized intelligence". Isn't this an oxymoron?

8 - Only if our bodies didn't show signs of aging.

[sinenomine]

My goals, as I have already said, are pretty obvious: find a good set of lifestyle changes (including exercise types and patterns, diet, sleep conditions, outdoor activities, supplements and drugs, but also including choice of country & city to live in), so these metrics are optimized in good direction, and I feel better. I tried less systemic approach and it didn't work for me. In my impression our genetic makeup tends to make us choose a complementary sort of environment, so it all (behavior, health, mood) comes to equilibrium and balances out - it's really hard to make consistent progress when you are inside such perverse equilibrium. Thus the need for heavy-handed hard measurement approach.

1. Mood diaries are more about trends and avoiding depressive episodes, it's better to rate your mood in the evening so your professional life is included in the rating. For example if your manager stresses you out on your job, you may not think about it in the moment, but it may show on your mood diary as a week-scale trend.

2. Completely avoiding social media is an unattainable goal, thus usage should be limited to 0.5-1.0 hr.

3. Yes, and sleep well, which is quite hard.

4. 3000 is too little, I'd aim to 5000-10000.

5. There are various tests, I'm specifically interested in IQ-test https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/FSIQ/ but it's more or less interchangeable with N-back. IQ is a scary number, but it's a good barometer for how good you really feel. A difference between "a good day" and a "bad day" is clearly seen on such test.

6. Working memory and attention, yes. These are degraded by lack of sleep & stress & aging.

7. Again, lack of sleep & stress & aging tends to degrade active vocabulary, in my case.

8. Of course we age, but this aging process is malleable: some interventions are shown to decrease (!) the value of various aging clocks. Yes, the aging clocks themselves are imperfect, but this decrease is often correlated with subjective & objective improvements on other axes.

If you accept fundamentally mechanistic view of nature, biology and ourselves, you might as well position yourself to reap the benefits.

[lobocinza]

> If you accept fundamentally mechanistic view of nature, biology and ourselves, you might as well position yourself to reap the benefits.

You're missing my point. What I deny is the usefulness of presented frameworks and tools. But it's fine if it's working for you and can work for others.

[doliveira]

I envy your energy to even spend time tracking all those things. Just reading and imagining keeping them as a routine sounds exhausting.

[sinenomine]

You can track only the most important ones. Biological age isn't something you need to track every day - more like every month, or every week if you are rich. Step-tracking & sleep tracking are given for free.

To be honest I don't have much energy either, unless I take stimulants. Which I don't do often due to reasons.

[jordanbeiber]

Take one full day every other week where you play around, learn and explore. If you have not been able to do this at least 5 times last quarter - why not? What can we do to allow for that to happen.

This is an example of an actual goal I have for members of my team - it is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic/Relevant and Time-bound. It's also tangential to the OP's topic here in a couple of ways.

Good things happen when you allow for slack, but we often put too much pressure on ourselves, and won't allow it.

I'm looking at it as a bit of "lucky lotto":

https://danlebrero.com/2021/06/30/cto-dairy-lucky-lotto-chao...

[groffee]

"Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely"

Basically just one of those meaningless buzz words that gets thrown around.

https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/ot...

[lobocinza]

It sure sounds smart, just isn't. Another example of a mechanistic approach in a field were humans are the major factor. Goals at best are arbitrary targets reached via consensus.

[sinenomine]

In my honest opinion one of the largest meta-problems ever amounts to decent mechanistic routes of helping each other being not taken in favor of more feel-good decent sounding verbal coping.

Virtue signaling should be banned.

[disembiggen]

it's an acronym, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. So if you're struggling to read books say, "Finish this book by the end of the month" is:

Specific: read the book Measurable: no ambiguity as to whether you've read it Achievable: a month is a reasonable amount of time to finish a book in Relevant: read a book to improve your reading habits Time-bound: it's not a project that'll hang over you for ages, you're done at the end of the month