What motivates you at work?

The ingredients for Olivier salad (a Russian holiday staple), holiday gifts to buy, tasks with looming deadlines, places to visit, people to see and congratulate, goals for the new year, and a year-end recap.

New Year’s and Christmas are wonderful times to focus on others — and, just as importantly, not to forget yourself. For me, this is a time to reflect on what I want and where I am in life.

Back in late 2021, Maxim — one of the most impressive and level-headed engineers I know — sent me a link to Stratoplan, a Russian school for tech managers. I took one of its courses and it was enormously useful, but that’s not the point right now. I want to share one exercise from it that stuck with me.

We spend an enormous amount of time at work, and you don’t want it going to waste. This exercise helps you identify the factors that motivate you most and answer the question of whether your current job can actually meet those needs.

The course ended long ago, but I still come back to this exercise regularly. I spent a bit of time turning it into a convenient spreadsheet, and I’m sharing it with you.

The exercise takes 5 minutes to complete and a full week to come to terms with the results. So now is exactly the right time to make a copy and add it to your New Year’s to-do list.