A couple of years ago I worked for a company where Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) were used as a framework to track objectives and key results (well, duh!). As I researched and learned more about the framework, I asked myself “companies keep track of business because it helps improve visibility of what is going on and thus increase their chance of success. Is it possible to use OKRs for personal growth?” Sure, you could argue keeping track of money is certainly easier than keeping track of happiness/health, but a quick search for OKRs for personal growth allowed me to realize I wasn’t alone in this camp. I have now being using OKRs as a framework for personal growth for three years, and it is by far the most important tool I use to align my goals with my day-to-day actions.
In this short blog post, I’ll share my experience with OKRs during the past three years. I hope it can help you to learn from my mistakes and consider systematically tracking progress towards your goals if not already doing it.
Initially, I used OKRs as a framework to hold myself accountable for professional continuous learning. I work as a software developer, and as such, I like to keep myself up-to-date with new trends/technologies as well as study well established software concepts. As I gained more confidence and got used to measuring my actions, I started to create objectives and key results related to health, music, reading, and other areas of life I wanted to become better at. Only once I started to measure my progress towards these goals I was able to realize that I wasn’t doing what I actually wanted to do (pretty dumb, right?). How was I supposed to become a better jazz guitar player if I didn’t put enough hours of practice? How was I going to ever increase my squat if I wasn’t actually training? This was a weird but important realization for me. OKRs gave me the visibility I needed to better understand my actions and evaluate how these were related to my goals.
It didn’t take long to learn motivation is overrated. While effective when present, consistency and discipline are far more powerful tools. OKRs taught me that a structured path and consistency were the most important tools to achieve success. This is basically what schools and other institutions do for us. We delegate to these institutions the creation and evaluation of a curriculum that will allows us to gain the required knowledge to become a professional in some area. Only issue though, is that once we are done with these institutions, it is up to us to create a “curriculum” and evaluate whether we are making progress towards our personal and professional goals.
Using OKRs as a framework to track my personal growth eventually led me to realize I wanted to do too many things. I was simply unable to fit in my schedule the tasks that needed to be done in order to make progress towards the goals I had set for myself. This led me to learn more about another important topic: prioritization. I had to prioritize and carefully choose what goals were of utmost importance to me and only then execute. Interestingly enough, this exercise made me realize I had many goals which I actually didn’t care that much about, and thus required less/no attention.
One of my favorite things about OKRs is that these enforce creating SMART goals. As I said in the introduction, it is difficult to measure goals such as how happy/healthy we are, but we can measure actions that make us happier/healthier. In my case, these actions go anywhere from traveling, training, writing or simply reading a book in my leisure time. The best part is that consistently doing these actions leads to create habits that have compounding effect in my life and those around me. Using OKRs has helped me to create and sustain habits that aid me to consistently grow as a person and professional.
Conclusion
Measuring how my day-to-day actions relate to my personal goals has been a complete game changer. OKRs is the one framework that has allowed me to do so consistently for the past three years.
How do you hold yourself accountable for your personal growth? Leave a comment below if you do, I would love to read more about others’ approach to personal growth!