2017 Objective 3, Key Result 1

A Satisfying OKR

If you’re like me, and you’ve made New Year’s Resolutions in the past, you may have experienced the bitter disappointment of it failing. Whether it be something that you said you were going to stop doing regularly, or start doing regularly, for me it’s been an emotional minefield.

I’ve failed to stop playing World of Warcraft, failed to start doing yoga regularly, running, being more social, being more successful at dating: all of these things have gone on my New Year’s Resolution at some point or another.

It wasn’t until I borrowed something from my professional life that I was able to finally make some sort of progress: I set up a New Year’s OKR.

There were three goals in my life at that point at the end of 2016: I wanted to be more social, I wanted to be more fit, and I wanted to be more creative.

Each of those goals, in of themselves, are really fuzzy. I could say I felt more social, but unless I had some form of metrics how would I know? With being fit, there are also all sorts of different ways that that could work. And creativity, as well—that can be an incredibly subjective.

Translating goals into objectives

First, I found proxies for those goals: specific activities I could do that could help advance those. For each of these activities, they were things that some third party could objectively say happened or didn’t happen.

1. Being social: host events with friends
2. Being fit: body fat percentage
3. Being creative: a costume I’d wanted to create for Halloween

For each of these objectives, then the key results were made even more specific:

1. Host one event per month with at least two other participants either at my place or some venue.
2. Achieve a 12% body fat percentage at least once.
3. Design and sew from scratch the clothing for Chirrut Îmwe from Rogue One.

Partial success

For each of them, note that it wasn’t a traditional “pass/fail” that resolutions tend to be: each of them I could claim some sort of “partial credit” if I made any movement towards completing them. So here were the results:

1. I missed July, August, and December, so hit 75% of the goal.
2. I took a baseline and it came in at around 22% …and never got around to remeasuring it nor making any visible progress. So 0% of the goal.
3. I completed two skirts and a pair of pants out of about 8 pieces: so 20%?

A lesson for personal OKRs

None of the places I’ve worked for have applied OKRs to individuals: it’s been usually set for teams. However, I find that having personal goals are a great way to be have self-introspection points and understand how one is doing towards those, and translating each of these from conceptual to concrete to partially measurable is a very important process for creating satisfying personal goals and personal accountability.