Setting Personal Goals Using The Google/Intel Way
A straightforward method to skip all the fluff
How do giant organizations such as Google, Intel, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation achieve their massive targets year on year, with seemingly endless appetites for growth?
They might be behemoths when it comes to size, but their underlying system for goal-setting is incredibly straightforward: They use an OKR framework to track objectives and outcomes.
OKR stands for Objective and key results.
The idea is simple. You state what you want to achieve (objective), then list out how you’ll go about achieving it (key results).
You’d think that these huge companies might have complex, sophisticated goal-setting processes, but that’s is how these wildly successful organizations develop and execute their deliverables — straight to the point, only measuring what matters.
This concept can be attributed to Andy Grove, aka the father of OKRs when he first introduced it in Intel, where author John Doerr was working at then. OKRs has since been widely used by many other companies, including:
- Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
- Adobe
- Bono’s ONE Campaign
- Nuna
And I do see its uses for personal goal setting as well.
What is OKR?
Again, the idea is to state what you want to achieve, then list out how you’ll go about achieving it.
The “WHAT” is your objective and the “HOWs” are your key results. Once all your key results are completed, the objective is simply achieved.
Every OKR should have a HOW and a WHY.
For example, an objective for yourself could be to set up an online portfolio for your freelance services. So, your key results (KRs) will be:
- Pick out 5 of your best works by [date] (0/1)
- Polish each of them to standard, and create a description for each of them by [date] (0/5)
- Buy a domain by [date] (0/1)
- Create the 1 pager website for web view and mobile view by [date] (0/2)
The numbers beside each KR track their progress. Your portfolio is done when you complete all of them!
So, you will have a list of objectives, each with their list of KRs. But how do you determine the list of objectives?
In a company, there is always a company mission. For example, Google wants to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. That will be their starting point for coming up with objectives.
What is your personal mission?
If that’s too big of a question right now, then just think of your personal mission for the next 3 months, since OKRs work well in a 3-month cycle. In the above example, the mission might be to start freelancing. So, the other objectives will be related to the different aspects of building a freelance hustle.
Or, you could want to lose some weight, so you could have 1 objective related to diet, another for exercise, and so on.
A healthy start would be to have 3 to 5 objectives per quarter, with 3 to 5 KRs each.
My Setup
I first started planning my OKRs in March, listing down all the tasks I want to complete by the end of this year. Then, I picked the ones that make the most impact or are the highest priorities for the next 3 months.
At first glance, my objectives for the year seem all over the place:
- Videography
- Writing
- Brainstorm and build an app
- Form a cover band
However, my mission this year was to learn new things and slow down my game dev/music projects, so I am dipping my feet into the first 3 areas.
As for the band, I was already in the midst of planning it before I decided to OKR my life, so I had no choice but to break 1 rule and have an objective that’s not aligned with my mission. Oh wells, a good reason to not give up fun!
And this is part of my OKRs on Google Sheets.
The 3rd column is the main objectives, and the 4th column lists the KRs. Beside it is the due date, and a countdown of how many days left till the deadline.
I created a bar to track each KRs’ progress because filling up green bars keep me motivated. Do whatever you need to help keep yourself going!
I didn’t want to measure my writing with subscribers or views etc, so I opted for the number of articles I publish. That makes sense in my case, but usually, we should aim for outcomes, not outputs (more on that later).
My Experience
In the beginning, I was really surprised at the rate I’m filling up those green bars in the beginning. I thought this OKR thing was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Then a few weeks passed, and it became a little dry. Suddenly, I wasn’t checking the boxes as frequent as before, and I started to panic.
But these worries were quickly pacified upon taking a closer look. I had instinctively finished the quick and easy things on the list, just to check away more boxes, so all I’m left with were the bigger, more complex stuff.
And those small tasks stopped distracting me when I’m in the midst of the complicated ones! I was able to keep going on the big tasks for a stretch since my list didn’t look intimidating anymore.
Of course, finishing the huge tasks gave me a great dose of fulfillment. Towards the end of the 3 months, I was already hyped up to plan the next 3 months, even though I hadn’t completed all of the tasks for the current quarter.
But that’s also because, at the back of my head, I knew that the tasks were NOT designed for me to finish. And that 80% I’ve managed the complete was already more than what I thought I could accomplish in 3 months!
I also had to figure out to migrate the system properly into a personal goal instead of an organizational one, and it helps that the book has so much in-depth information and tips to make life easier.
Tips and Variations
Less Is More.
It is better to focus on a few important objectives than trying to do everything within the time frame. What are the most direct, important tasks?
It Should Not Be Easy.
If you can clear 100% of your OKRs, it means you’ve set too low of a bar for yourself.
Google has 2 categories of OKRs: committed and aspirational (stretch) goals.
Committed goals are the ones to be achieved in full (100%), while aspirational goals reflect the higher risk, bigger picture goals. They are the ones that should push you out of your comfort zone. They are also known as stretch goals because they tend to stretch over a few quarters of OKR goal-setting.
Measure Outcomes, Not Outputs
At the end of each quarter, OKRs can be measured objectively from 0 to 100%. So, instead of “send 20 customized emails to prospective clients”, a better KR would be to “net 3 new customers”, or “net $X worth of projects”.
This would ensure that you will put in more research into each client, and craft better emails for them, thereby increasing your chances of success.
It is better to send 3 top-quality emails that all result in a sale, rather than rushing through 20 emails and get no sales.
Other Thoughts
OKR is a system to help organizations to achieve their goals. I’ve only covered how I think OKR can be applied to our personal lives in this article, but one worth mention is that in companies, OKRs are set by the employees.
This is probably the most important factor that allows OKR to work because it builds a sense of ownership and accountability into their objectives.
They will also be able to see how their objectives relate directly to the company as a whole since it was derived from the company’s mission.
The old story of JFK and the janitor illustrates this well: While touring the NASA facility, President John F. Kennedy introduced himself to a janitor who was mopping the floor and asked him what he did at NASA.
“I’m helping put a man on the moon!” — Janitor
Finally, I highly recommend this book to anyone in a leadership position, as it goes more in-depth on the intricacies packed creating and maintaining OKRs for everyone in the company.
