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.
Personal OKRs for Success
11–20 of 46 posts
Re: Personal OKRs for Success
#12Look 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.
Re: Personal OKRs for Success
#13Basecamp 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…
Our values determine our metrics.
Our true values (as human beings, not organizational values) are not measurable. I may want to become closer to my family, so I schedule more time with them. Spending time with them makes it more likely, but it may also go in the opposite direction through conflict.
In paper you have accomplished your OKR, but in practice you are further away from your true goal.
Re: Personal OKRs for Success
#14I'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
Re: Personal OKRs for Success
#15@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.
Re: Personal OKRs for Success
#16Basecamp 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…
The whole concept is to have a defined plan, it is absolutely ok to not achieve KRs, what matters is you have motivation in working towards it. You have the ability to actually track it.
If you don't set a goal, you might just procastinate over it.
> 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.
- It is okay to read 10 books or X number of pages. Now, you actually started reading right! One's aim should not be to complete the KR for the sake of completion, but rather pushing yourself to do more, slowly improvements will be visible.
Re: Personal OKRs for Success
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our values determine our metrics.
Our true values (as human beings, not organizational values) are not measurable. I may want to become closer to my family, so I schedule more time with them. Spending time with them makes it more likely, but it may also go in the opposite direction through conflict. In paper you have accomplished your OKR, but in practice you are further away from your true goal.
That, again, is a result of measuring the wrong thing. The measurement should be "relationship strength" or "spouse/child happiness" not "time spent".
The problem that most of us seem to have is that we're only tracking easy things to measure. Everything valuable is difficult to measure.
Reading a book is worthless. The purpose of reading a book is to gain something (learn something, read faster, practice public speaking, etc.). That's what we should be tracking.
Re: Personal OKRs for Success
#18Basecamp 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…
Agreed - life needs a "go with the flow" element to it.
Re: Personal OKRs for Success
#19Basecamp 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…
Agreed. The last thing people need is to apply corporate ideology to their real lives.
I do keep a list of books I’ve read because I like seeing it grow, but there’s not really a goal besides “read books” and I’m not giving myself an annual performance review.
Re: Personal OKRs for Success
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our true values (as human beings, not organizational values) are not measurable. I may want to become closer to my family, so I schedule more time with them. Spending time with them makes it more likely, but it may also go in the opposite direction through conflict. In paper you have accomplished your OKR, but in practice you are further away from your true goal.
That, again, is a result of measuring the wrong thing. The measurement should be "relationship strength" or "spouse/child happiness" not "time spent". The problem that most of us seem to have is that we're only tracking easy things to measure. Everything valuable is difficult to measure. Reading a book is worthless . The purpose of reading a book is to gain something (learn something, read faster, practice public spe…
Agreeing on this! I usually use notes section in KRs to track how I improved after completing this KR. This helps in deciding the way ahead.
Also, this doesn't really apply to emotional relationships for me. Personal OKRs are basically for self improvement which helps me in reaching something I aim for future.