Personal OKRs for Success

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

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/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

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.

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.

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...

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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 - 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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

@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.

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.)

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

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.