6 Steps to Reinvent Your Personal Growth with the OKR Framework
Secrets from Silicon Valley to help you grow exponentially
According to U.S. News & World Report, 80-percent of New Year’s resolutions fail, and most fail by the end of February. There are countless articles from reputable publishers like Business Insider and Forbes that have written about why new year resolutions fail. Some top theories around why they fail are:
- Lack of specificity
- Lack of determination
- Thinking more than doing
- Too much to work on at once
- Lack of tracking and accountability structure
What is OKR?
OKR (Objectives and Key Results) is a goal system originally developed by Andy Grove when he was the CEO of Intel and used by Google and many other tech companies. It is a simple tool to help us create, measure, and achieve goals.
Objectives are the what, which tell you where to go.
Key Results are the outcomes that take you to your objective. They measure your progress over-time and help to make your objectives more attainable.
They are further supported by Initiatives which are the concrete tasks or steps towards your key results.
Why is this different from typical goal-setting?
OKRs help break down big missions into actionable objectives and milestones. This framework applies a pyramid structure to leverage key techniques from the SMART goal-setting framework. The initiatives are specific and realistic. That combined with key results are measurable and time-bounded. The pyramid structure ensures tight connections between all components to make things relevant to the end objective. As a result, everything you work on will be hyper-focused to yield results.
Here are the steps to construct your OKRs:
1. Find your mission
One very well-known product building principle is that we should always start with problems, not solutions. You might have a hypothesis on what you want to do, but to better strengthen your inner motivation, you need to ask yourself why. What’s important to you? What kind of person do you want to be? What do you want to achieve in 10 years? In 5 years? Having a good understanding of these big directions helps you prioritize your objectives and focus on the right things at the right time.
For example, I value freedom in my life and the ability to never work just for money. As such, one mission I have like many others is to achieve financial freedom.
Some categories that you can consider when thinking about your mission are career, relationship/family/friends, money/wealth, health, creative exploration, and personal growth. You might have more than one mission, but having too many may make you lose focus.
2. Translate your mission into objectives
A mission like financial freedom can easily take a few years. To continuously make progress, it is important to formulate periodic objectives around your mission. I generally structure my objectives on an annual basis but you can pick a time frame that works for you. Generally, you don’t want more than 3 objectives at a time. A common pitfall is when people are trying to do too much at once.
3. Formulate key results to support your objectives
Key results are constructed to help you reach your objectives. Generally, an objective can be supported with 1–4 key results. They should be specific and time-bounded, realistic but still aspirational. For example, if your objective is to grow your wealth, then your key results could be “landing a job that pays $X”, “building a habit to read financial news” and “cutting expenses to below $X”.
4. Set scoring criteria for your key results
We human beings are very bad at estimating how much we can do in a given period. We often overestimate how much we can do in a year and underestimate how much we can do in 10 years. As such, although it’s motivating to have grand key results, we still want our progress to be recognized even if they are not at 100%. That is where scoring criteria comes in.
Scoring criteria is the rubric to help evaluate your completion towards your key results. Often, 0.5 is good progress but a partial completion. 0.7 is when the expectations are met. 1.0 is when you exceed your expectations.
5. Come up with initiatives for your key results
Initiatives are the tasks that help you achieve your key results. They should be highly specific and actionable. For example, if your key result is to increase your follower base by 30%, then your initiatives should include what you plan to do to reach that. Whether it’s posting every day or making videos every week, it should contain specific tasks you can perform to drive progress to your key results.
6. Track your progress and assess regularly
You have to revisit your progress on your initiatives frequently, usually every week. At a key result level, you can assess if you are on track on a monthly or quarterly cadence. When you are not, you might want to adjust your initiatives to better serve your objective. For example, come up with new initiatives towards your key results or adjust the frequency of your habit-based initiatives. I use a google sheet to track my OKR status based on the progress I make. You can find the template for this as linked or create your own format to track your progress.
6. Find ways to make yourself accountable
It is very difficult to achieve your objectives entirely by yourself. I have tried this before and found it hard to consistently follow all my initiatives because no one and nothing was keeping me accountable. Here are some ways that I’ve found to add external pressure for that accountability:
- Meet with a coach or buddy to keep yourself accountable — this has worked very well for me
- Have rewards for yourself when you succeed at your objective or set a punishment if you don’t reach your OKRs
- Make a bet with your friend that you will succeed at your OKRs
It will be an exciting journey…
After all, a change comes from within. The fact that you are reading about goal-setting is already a big step forward to start making progress. Hope you can enjoy a productive year towards your mission.
