
Personal OKRs for Success - mkfeuhrer
https://mohitkhare.me/blog/personal-okrs/
======
snidane
I'd posit this quantitative approach is harmful not only to one's personal
life - turning yourself into a robot, forgetting that life is more akin to a
dance than a project with a budget and a deadline. Something that you do to
enjoy even though it has no apparent goal.

Analogy taken from Alan Watts -
[https://youtu.be/rBpaUICxEhk](https://youtu.be/rBpaUICxEhk)

I'd also posit that quantitative approach to business is also harmful. This
path is taken by companies under stress of scaling - trying to find out a self
organizing simple structure. The end result always turns out to be a siloed
mess run by micromanagers and people "cheating" the system to satisfy some set
of arbitrary metrics and the organization turning into a social laboratory
full of instances of Goodhart's law and Cobra Effects.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect)

I have yet to seen a successful implementation of it. Usually a Lean and
System Thinking common sense look at the organization is sufficient to run a
successful team or a company, but only so few are interested when quantitative
(micromanaging) approach is so popular and sexy.

Lean and Functional Programming:
[https://youtu.be/5s55LA2Renc](https://youtu.be/5s55LA2Renc)

~~~
PaulHoule
Some things work quantitatively, some don't. I like using quantities for
athletic training.

If I was training for a marathon I would set numerical goals for how much I
would run a week coming into it. If I am recovering from an injury that's even
more the case.

Lately my son and I have been learning a martial arts form that has about 80
steps in it. There is a lot new about it for us: I've never done a two-person
form or a weapons form before, and he's never trained in a form at all. You
learn this kind of thing by breaking it up into pieces: so we have a burndown
chart on the wall for it, which I think is a good motivation.

~~~
dilyevsky
Quantitative approach aka “noob gains” stops working fairly quickly even with
athletic training

~~~
adenverd
"Noob gains" doesn't have anything to do with setting goals or quantitatively
measuring progress. It refers to the speed at which unadapted athletes are
able to progress (e.g. add weight to the bar, run farther) each workout when
they first start training, compared to athletes who have been training longer,
are more adapted, and progress slower.

Most professional and highly adapted athletes are extremely quantitative about
their training programs, much more so at the advanced stages than in the early
stages. They just progress much slower because it takes more training for
their bodies to continue adapting.

------
duopixel
Basecamp first launched when I was in college, and being completely unfamiliar
with any project management workflow I thought: "this would be great for
managing myself" so I set milestones and wrote entries for myself and project
managed my life for a brief period.

It makes life as boring as work.

These methods are meant for teams working towards a common objective, where
anything extraneous to the OKRs is considered a distraction. This has its
shortcomings (I've met way too many project managers who seem to be so
absorbed by metrics they fail to see what is right in front of their noses).
It's most definitely useful is this context, but not in life.

Consider: the author has set himself to read 20 books per year. Suppose this
is double of his standard. What he will do to fulfill his OKR? He's not going
to choose a difficult read such as Ulysses, or an existential crisis inducing
book such as Crime and Punishment, he will go for what is more superficial and
easier to read, because his goal is not to be transformed by what he reads,
his goal is to read 20 books.

The crucial layer of meaning is lost when we project-manage ourselves. Life is
more akin to a poem than it is to a project.

~~~
leetrout
Our values determine our metrics.

~~~
duopixel
Our true values (as human beings, not organizational values) are not
measurable. I may want to become closer to my family, so I schedule more time
with them. Spending time with them makes it more likely, but it may also go in
the opposite direction through conflict.

In paper you have accomplished your OKR, but in practice you are further away
from your true goal.

~~~
imustbeevil
That, again, is a result of measuring the wrong thing. The measurement should
be "relationship strength" or "spouse/child happiness" not "time spent".

The problem that most of us seem to have is that we're only tracking easy
things to measure. Everything valuable is difficult to measure.

Reading a book is _worthless_. The purpose of reading a book is to gain
something (learn something, read faster, practice public speaking, etc.).
That's what we should be tracking.

~~~
mkfeuhrer
Agreeing on this! I usually use notes section in KRs to track how I improved
after completing this KR. This helps in deciding the way ahead.

Also, this doesn't really apply to emotional relationships for me. Personal
OKRs are basically for self improvement which helps me in reaching something I
aim for future.

------
cseleborg
At almost 40, I've come to realize that work gives me plenty enough
opportunities to track and measure performance as it is. But there's also that
part of life that's not work, and I've found that merely _being_ , as opposed
to performing, is quite valuable in itself! It's hard to enjoy the moment with
my kids, my spouse and my friends when I constantly think of my todos and
objectives. I feel by now that the goal is to learn to balance between times
of performance and times of non-performance, even multiple times a day.

~~~
harryf
As a 46 year old I second this! Trying to run your personal life with OKRs
sounds like a great way to beat yourself up. Also your spouse won’t be
impressed when you tell her “My goal was to spend 46 minutes really listening
to you this week and I actually achieved 52 minutes!”

~~~
rahimnathwani
You can base your KR on her satisfaction (as reported on an end-of-quarter
survey) rather than on your level of activity.

Try to measure the outcomes rather than the activities :)

~~~
beardedwizard
This guy gets it.

------
Cactus2018
Reminds me of this Team Blind post

> My wife and I are competing our annual reviews of each other. One of the
> challenges I’m facing this year is we didn’t agree on OKRs and I have a lot
> of qualitative feedback but don’t like how the KPIs look. I’m worried her
> annual review of me will be similar. We both aligned that we’d max out
> 401ks, move for promotions and end a car lease. But her career moved faster
> and we don’t have joint accounts so I failed to enter a savings goal. I’m
> going to suggest she didn’t save enough to see if I can get insight. Also
> the household itself did well this year we deceased our order in rate by 15%
> while moving to a good mix of organics and non frozen items +20%.

[https://www.teamblind.com/post/My-wife-and-I-write-each-
othe...](https://www.teamblind.com/post/My-wife-and-I-write-each-other-annual-
reviews-Need-advice-eEzsioRp)

------
Can_Not
Thankfully my company has forgotten about their OKRs initiative. Trying to
figure out 10-15 _useful_ personal metrics was stressful and a waste of time.
And they rightfully would get bulldozed over and ignored by our actual need to
implement new change requests/features.

Not to mention all the "guides" seem to be dedicated to companies that are B2C
or already heavily use the word "engagement" or depend on ad clicks or only
make sense for the sales/marketing team.

------
tenaciousDaniel
We began using OKRs at my job a few quarters ago and it's been amazing. Though
there are two very important points to make here, that I don't think the OP
included:

1\. Contrary to the article, I would say that OKR's need not be binary
(complete or incomplete). We use a 0-1 scale but we consider >=0.7 to be
considered "done enough". The reason we do this is to encourage our teams to
strive for ambitious yet realistic goals.

2\. Essential to the idea of OKRs is the distinction between outcomes and
outputs. An output is the _actual work_ you're going to do, whereas the
_outcome_ is the resulting change/effect you want to have. A KR should track
the outcome, not the output. When devs first start out using OKRs, they write
in KRs like "decrease lines of code by 25%". This is actually an output. An
outcome would be "customer spends 50% less time waiting for page load".
Reducing the lines of code would contribute to that outcome, but so would many
other things. Those are outputs.

Here's a great book on the subject:

[https://www.amazon.com/Outcomes-Over-Output-customer-
behavio...](https://www.amazon.com/Outcomes-Over-Output-customer-behavior-
ebook/dp/B07QJ1Y8Y5)

------
deeblering4
Obsessing over productivity in your personal life seems like a mistake to me.

Sure, it’s good to get things done. But its also important to remember that we
are human beings. Quite literally animals living on a rock that is flying
through space.

Not every minute of our life needs to be tracked and judged and stressed over.
It’s perfectly heathy to just do nothing sometimes. It is ok to have an
unproductive day, or week, or period in your life.

------
gdubs
I agree with the other comments that life should have a flow element to it,
and that you can accidentally suck the joy out of it with too much structure.

On the other hand, some people have too little structure, and are miserable
because of it. I realized this when I had kids: structure didn’t make them
miserable; in fact, it gave them a sort of calm, and reassurance, and clear
expectations.

There’s a balance. The “key” part of OKR is important — find the most
impactful, highest leverage thing to measure, and focus on that. If you’re a
student, that could mean getting a good grade in a course that’s very
important to you. Too many goals can be as stressful as too few.

When I was younger I was perhaps too far on the unstructured side. There were
creative benefits of that, but the detriment was ratholing on things that
ultimately weren’t very impactful.

Ultimately, you have to keep yourself in check. It’s important to have open
ended, exploratory time with no clear purpose. It can also be helpful to have
some clear, _key_ results as an anchor.

------
aftergibson
I rarely wish my personal life was more like work. If you have longer term
ambitions approach it as a form of play, not obligation, you'll probably be
more likely stick to it.

------
throwaway5752
Anyone that's done larger scale project management knows that it doesn't fall
into agile or waterfall. You may use waterfall for the larger plan, and agile
to track individual projects in that plan. Like when people talk about tactics
vs strategy.

I think this use of personal OKRs might work for some people and might be a
great tool for focus. This feels like a technique to manage individual
projects, in that analogy.

However, I think it would be very easy to find yourself over-quantifying your
life and find yourself feeling adrift even though you're succeeding on the
numbers.

One thing that is very powerful about the regret minimization framework
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlgkfOr_GLY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlgkfOr_GLY)
\- Bezos, famously) is that if forcing you to think about _what you want to
accomplish with your life_ and _what makes you truly satisfied_. If you know
those, then quantifying your progress towards those goals makes sense. If you
don't, then it's probably premature to have OKRs. OKRs measure progress
towards a larger goal. Don't forget the lesson of The Hitchhiker's Guide, and
make sure that you are working towards good goals first.

------
nkrisc
Maybe this works for some people, but to me it looks like a great way to make
life as soulless as work. It also looks like it falls into the same trap of
objectives set to lead to preconceived key results. From the blog's example,
it looks like they wanted to read more and create some open source projects so
you find an objective that fits those key results, not the other way around. I
say this because reading 20 books and creating 2 open source projects are very
narrow ways of "boosting knowledge." There are lots of ways to boost
knowledge, and there are many different kinds of knowledge. Volunteering in a
soup kitchen, as a tired example, is a great way to boost your knowledge of
the world outside of your bubble and how other people live. Creating 2 open
source projects is a great way to thicken the walls of your bubble. Here's a
KR I'd suggest instead to boost knowledge: find a way to do outdoor manual
labor twice a week, whatever it is. That will boost your knowledge of
something, certainly.

But to each their own, whatever makes you happy. I just know this would make
me miserable. These key results look like a way to make your personal life
just more training for your work life.

------
Hates_
Two points that I would change when doing OKRs:

KRs should not be binary. They should be stretch goals. If you're hitting 100%
on your key results you need to be setting your sights higher.

KRs should be things you can "influence" and not things you "do". It's the
difference between "Get 100 subscribers to my newsletter" and "Write 100 blog
posts". Or to use the example in the post, the difference between "Earn a X%
return on my investments" vs "Read 3 books on investing". When you create key
results around things you do, you run the risk of spending your time focusing
on things that do not move the needle on your objectives. Last thing you want
is to reach the end of the quarter and find your efforts have not had a
tangible benefit. This is the classic "Outcomes" vs "Output".

------
lifeisstillgood
Look the point of education is that people who have travelled the road before
you tell you what milestones you should meet - an education syllabus is the
distilled "you ought to" of hundreds or thousands of people's lives.

But your actual life is a series of explorations - sure push yourself, but
more important than anything is time to build relationships. especially with
your kids if you have them.

------
m0zg
On a more tactical level here's what I do: every week I write what I've done
in the past week, and what I plan to do next week. I do not stick too closely
to my plan for next week, but do try to do whatever I planned, and more, with
the goal of maintaining high usable throughput rather than adhering to the
plan per se. I do not use any management tools, and I do not "track progress"
in any way. Work is broken down in chunks that take at most a day.

I do this both for my own work, and when consulting for clients (separate
lists). For clients the retrospective part is very easy to do, since I track
my time there.

This has two major effects:

1\. You sort of already know what to do when otherwise there'd be an urge to
procractinate because you "don't know what to do".

2\. You see your actual productivity, which, if you actually sit down and
work, tends to be substantial, but doesn't _feel_ substantial. To me it always
feels like I haven't done much, until I write down what I have actually done.

------
puranjay
I used to be a little obsessed over maximizing my own personal metrics. I'd
track the number of hours I'd worked, the number of days I'd hit the gym, and
even the number of hours I'd spent on hobbies.

Then I got burned out and took a 3 month sabbatical in November last year. And
just when I hit the desk again in February, the pandemic stuck. All those
elaborate plans and spreadsheets - out of the window.

All this has made me realize that's it's futile to try and optimize existence.
It actively kills creativity and joy. And things completely outside your
control will toy with your elaborate plans anyway.

------
sukilot
It's impressive that "OKRs" (inspired by Google in the modern business
culture) are so worshipped despite being a management truncheon that helped
Google go from being universally loved to being largely despised (killing
products that don't meet short term growth KRs, Google+ optimizing for
Engagement KRs, generally running the business to hit vanity metrics instead
instead of building a quality product and having faith in users to adopt it
and customers to pay for it.)

------
pandatigox
@duopixel mentioned that life is more akin to a poem, and I agree with that.
OKRs for personal management seem amazing on the surface, but they can be too
focused on optimising for goals. I would suggest adopting a mindset like
"First Things First" (from Stephen Covey, author of 7 Habits of Highly
Effective People) and incorporating OKRs into that instead. I think it would
give more flexibility in identifying what your values are in life, and
attempting to achieve goals within those values.

------
tiku
Does something like this exist that integrates with Google calendar? To keep
track of monthly or life goals?

------
PaulHoule
OKRs leave a terrible taste in my mouth from experience.

I saw them used at a struggling startup, where it seemed we had just one real
goal (e.g. "find product-market fit") rather than a large number of
objectives. We were already zig-zagging a lot, and we just didn't need the
distraction of creating and maintaining OKRs, never mind yet another tool to
create confusion about what was essential and what was not.

My first thought when I heard about it was the book "The Goal" where the
protagonist's friend immediately says that a business in crisis has one goal:
quantitative methods are important to find and remove the bottlenecks for that
goal. (In that a startup hasn't established a profitable business at first, it
shares quite a bit with a failing car factory or restaurant.)

Going back to Pareto, social scientists have established that you really can't
find a total ordering for the world's utility function. A world where
everything else is the same and I am $1 richer is a better world (partial
ordering), but you can't compare that objectively to a world where you got $1
and I didn't.

This connects to a group of results (such as the Arrow Impossibility Theorem)
that show that social science is limited in the way that mathematics is
limited by Godel's theorem, the halting problem, etc. There is no voting
system, economic system, etc. which provably produces "just" or "correct"
results and in institution design we are stuck with limiting the damage that
can be done by bad people.

A world where I hit 10 out of 10 OKRs is better than any in which I fail OKRs,
in the real world that I hit 5 out of 10 it is hard to compare that to other 5
out of 10 outcomes that I could have had if I had made different choices.

There are some jobs that you can break down into pieces, say a supermarket
cashier, the store has a model of what makes a good cashier, they have control
charts at the front or in the break room for each of them on two metrics, one
of which is the scan time (tied to the profitability of the business), another
is the % of times you hit the "No Sale" button to open the cash drawer between
customers, stop the scan clock, and cheat on the first metric.

That's profitable thinking because somebody thought it up a long time ago and
the store manager knows it and the checkout manager who trained you knows it,
and I thought it was fun when as a teen I could try but never beat certain
middle-aged women who reminded me of my mother.

To expect every person to make a quantitative model of their work and have
their manager review it, etc. is ridiculous. Many people don't think that way
but do great at their jobs. People who have PhD's in quantitative thinking can
also go into the weeds (e.g. either their first response is what I gave you
above, they will pick one thing to maximize, present a Pareto Frontier of
choices that is somebody elses problem, or just will go in circles until they
get lucky, or learn the first answer the hard way.)

If they can pass as a neurotypical they'll get control of their systematizing
urge and bullshit it the same way the sales person and art director do and get
back to doing work done.

