Personal OKRs for Success

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...

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.

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.

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!”

> 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 problem with this I see is the KR itself, not Objective. In 2019 I choose similar Objective which pushed me towards finishing books I didn't enjoy or valuable, so I decided to set the KR as number of pages read or just 30 minutes a day.