---
title: OKRs as a Framework for Personal Growth
description: Applying OKRs as a personal growth framework to track and achieve meaningful objectives.
pubDate: 2019-08-11T00:00:00.000Z
tags: productivity, career
---

A couple of years ago I worked for a company where [Objectives and
Key Results](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OKR) (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](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=okrs+for+personal+growth&ia=web) 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria) 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Habit) 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!