OKR’s — A Guide to Achieve Your Personal Goals

Rahul Nigam
The Aspiring Product Manager
5 min readAug 28, 2020
Image credits: Tushar Narula

At a given point in time, we all have several goals in life. Some want to learn a new language, some want to learn to play guitar or someone like me who wants to do both and many other things. We all build interest to learn something new but with time, we feel separated from the goal we dreamed of achieving. We question ourselves with “Am I on the right track?”, “When will I completely learn it?”, or “Am I doing it right?”.

Recently, I was in the same dilemma when one of my friends asked me about my progress on my goal of a healthy lifestyle. One of the objectives for my healthy lifestyle goal was to run 5 km in 25 mins. I am sure for many of the readers it is child’s play. Before I started, I learned about different ways to improve my running posture and eating habits. After a few weeks, I made a lot of improvements but was not sure about the progress I was making. I had a goal and I dared to work towards my goal, but was it enough?

Setting an ambition is an easy task but an important first step, but figuring out how to achieve the goal is a bit tricky. This brings me to the concept of OKR’s.

What is OKR’s?

OKR’s or “Objective Key Results” is a collaborative goal-setting technique, to help measure and achieve those ambitious goals. It can help you to get outside of your comfort zone to work on the ambitions you set for yourself.

The best way to use OKR’s is to set goals that are beyond the threshold of what seems to be impossible AKA “Stretch Goals”. These goals sometimes feel to be impossible to achieve but that’s what makes you competitive. But here is the catch, success means achieving at least 70% of the objectives you plan. While if you achieve 100% of your objectives, feel free to call yourself an overachiever.

So now we know what OKR’s mean and what it does. Now let’s answer how to do it.

Step 1: Find your most ambitious goals in Life

Step 2: Break down your goal into multiple objectives (preferably 3–5 Objectives)

Step 3: For each objective write down the key results you want to achieve.

Step 4: Start working on each objective and make sure to check back every 2–4 weeks to mark the progress.

Step 5: Collaborate

Step 1: Defining your goal

Photo by Wynand van Poortvliet on Unsplash

To start, take a step back and look for the things you enjoy doing. Things you have been procrastinating for so long that now those dreams look unachievable. Key points to look for while defining your goal:

  1. Set goals that motivate you.
  2. Set SMART goals. (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound)

Step 2: Designing Objectives

Once you define your goal, the next step is to break down the goal into multiple objectives, preferably 3–5 points. These objectives should be your “Whats” of the set goal. It should be a tangible and unambiguous one-liner with a crisp and clear objective. If it doesn’t fit in a line, you are probably doing it incorrectly.

While writing the objectives make sure to keep the expressions that convey the endpoint. One of the examples that I could think of is fitness.

Objective: In 90 Days, I want to improve my running time to 25 mins for the first 5 km.

Photo by Jenny Hill on Unsplash

Step 3: Establish Key Results for each objective

Once you have designed your objectives it's time to establish 3–4 Key results for each objective. The key results express a measurable milestone. Make sure to add a due date to each key result and make monthly/quarterly measurable milestones. The key results should always contribute some way to your main objective so that you don’t deviate from your goal.

These milestones will act as small rewards which will keep you motivated about your progress in achieving your main goal. Based on the above objective my key results will be:

  1. Complete 20 runs every month.
  2. Increase the distance of running by 2 km every week.
  3. consume 100 gm of protein per day.
  4. Increase 1 km speed by 10 seconds every week.

Step 4: Make sure to check in your updates every 2–4 weeks

This is one of the hardest parts, “To keep the check on your progress”. It is very necessary to keep an eye on your work based on what your objectives are. Nobody is perfect and no one can write the OKR’s in one go. It is okay to modify your objective and key results based on your performance, but make sure to not change them very frequently.

Step 5: Collaborate

Photo by Tyler Nix on Unsplash

Collaboration or goal sharing is one of the main aspects of OKR’s. Sharing with peers, mentors and your well-wishers always creates a positive environment. It keeps the motivation high throughout the journey. Also, you can look out for people with similar goals and have a healthy competition in completing the task in time.

By now you might have got a fair idea about OKR’s and tips on how to create a perfect OKR for your goals and ambitions. OKR’s are a very interesting way to keep your goals in check and also provide motivation on every successful completion of the milestones.

If you are looking for some help or OKR templates to boost your journey to implement OKR’s then do reach out to me on Linkedin or Twitter. Looking forward to hearing from you all about how OKRs have helped you in your journey. Until next time, Peace!

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