New year, new goals?
Using OKRs for your personal life.
Happy New Year! Or not, if you are reading this after January.
Too much food? Feeling stuck? want to paint again? Or maybe you want to accomplish any of these 115 popular goals? Not sure how to do what you said you would do “again” this year? You are not the only one.
Today I was talking to one of my closest friend about our goals for the new year. As always we have long and crazy lists of things we wish we put more effort into. While she was telling me about her ideal future self, I realized that the way we were formulating our goals would frustrate us starting in week one. So what could we do better this year that would help us start and maintain our target? Measure What Matters by John Doerr ! My boss suggested this book to me some time ago, and since then my mind had shifted into a performance-oriented and goal-achievement way of thinking. So why not use some Google key management tools to organize our lives? The more I think and learn about performance at work, the more I get this idea of applying OKRs on a personal level, and now is the moment. Here is what I have learned so far, maybe it can help you achieve your goals in a few months or even before then.
So what is an OKR?
OBJECTIVE: Clear idea of what you want to achieve and when you want to achieve it. What is the most important thing you want to achieve in the next one, three or six months? Focus on objectives that can make a real difference. They should be qualitative and specific.
KEY RESULTS: It is how we get to the objective. It has to be measurable (bring some numbers) and at the end of the the time period you should be able to answer “Yes, I did this,” or “No, I failed.”
Setting up OKRs should help you have a more tangible and achievable goal.
OKR Examples
Objective: Feel better about myself by losing 10 kg by April
Key Results:
- Run for 20 mins twice a week
- Prepare at least 3 healthy meals a day
- 1 cheat day per week only
Objective: Improving my professional skills by improving my French skills by the end of May
Key Results:
- Listen to a Podcast 2 times a week for at least 30 minutes
- Create a Golden List to learn at least 20 new words per week
- Learn 1 new song with lyrics per week
The best thing about an OKR is that once spend a month or two working toward achieving it, you can evaluate your behavior. Ask yourself if there is anything you can improve, if anything is blocking you. Is there anything you want to change? Have you found out the goal really isn’t for you? Or maybe you already achieved it and you should set a new, more audacious one. These questions will give you the chance to do a goal retrospective. It gives you the valuable opportunity to actually understand if those targets are something you want to continue working on or if they were instead just an impulse you had.
Last tips!
- Limit yourself to 3–5 objectives. Less is more. Choose your objectives well.
- Make OKRs challenging but not impossible.
- Avoid low value objectives, this should bring you joy.
- Dare to fail.
- Keep track of your accomplishments even if they are small. Smalls steps make huge improvements. One day at a time.
- Read Measure What Matters by John Doerr and/or Radical Focus By Christina R Wodtke
- Google Calendar (If you have it) has a nice feature called “Goals” — of course . This will help you set up goals and find time for them automatically. If you haven’t tried it, go for it.
- Watch this OKRs Video if you want something more visual ;)
We tend to dream about our future selves overcoming all constraints and becoming this magical person from one day to another without realising that this changes take time, effort and consistency. We fail to take realistic steps towards the change we want to make. Life is not just a recipe we can adjust easily. However, when we are able to measure our performance and improve on the go, goals become less scary and more doable. That will help us change fast enough to get the results we want to get. The more I read about performance, the more I understand why through a year most of us fail with those New Year’s resolutions. We don’t have clear steps to achieve it. We do somehow know where to start, but without a plan it’s hard to know the right direction.
I know how it feel to lose motivation because goals are too broad or not measurable, so I am giving this approach a chance and I hope you might too. Bring it on 2019!
Comments and feedback are always welcome :) . Connect with me on Twitter.
