Personal OKRs for Success

> the author has set himself to read 20 books per year. Suppose this is double of his standard.

That would be an obvious misstep. Both in terms of objective setting and in measurable key results. This blog post misses part of the value of OKRs: they teach us to set high level objectives and repeatedly decompose them. Here, objectives are instead just categories that provide no focus. It's like that antipattern where managers ask their directs for projects then try to combine them into OKRs. What, pray-tell, does launching an open source project have to do with boosting knowledge? And like, why 20 books instead of 10? And why specify quantity rather than quality or subject? Does reading a book mean you've boosted knowledge if you barely remember anything you read?

A better OKR setup would likely be something like (a bit modified to suit my own circumstances):

   Objective: Boost Knowledge
   Key result: learn more about statistics

etc

Which is decomposed into:

    Objective: Learn more about statistics
    Key Result: Work through the Freedman, Pisani and Purves Statistics textbook
    Key Result: Create a hundred Anki cards on statistics
    Key Result: Make the front page of HN with a stats blog post

And even those can be subdivided

    Objective: Make the front page of HN with a stats blog post
    Key Result: Generate ten blog post ideas
    Key Result: Research and analyze five blog post ideas
    Key Result: Publish and promote all five blog post ideas

But you're absolutely right that meaning can be lost. Moving passion projects into a todo list misses the 'passion' part entirely, and is best reserved for the drudge parts of life necessary to enable the sublime. By all means, set OKRs for retirement, taxes, and career development.

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.

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.

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.

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