Leave it to an engineer to automate self improvement by building a complicated system instead of just spending that time doing the improvement. Just how I like it.
Setting up personal OKR (objectives and key-results)
81–90 of 97 posts
Re: Setting up personal OKR (objectives and key-results)
#82OKR is probably one of the worst fads to happen to project management and software engineering. Just set normal realistic goals and plans, or even just a general direction. Don't use numbers where it doesn't make sense -- not everything needs to be a piece of data -- not everything has a completion percentage. Hope it goes away soon, along with "Agile", "Extreme Programming" and "Open Office Layout"
I completely agree. At work they never work out because there are inevitably so many detours. OKRs do nothing but reveal that management know nothing about the environment they're managing. Unfortunately, when the fad does pass, you know some other nonsense fad is going to arrive on the scene. If only people would stop with fadding.
Re: Setting up personal OKR (objectives and key-results)
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
My cool-headed long-term-thinking self wants to "eat well, go for a run", but my saturday morning self just wants to sleep in and have a donut. Some of us need some form of accountability structure to help our rational selves prevail over our self-sabotaging hedonist selves.
Habit forming works better. That’s why you don’t need a teeth brushing OKR. Or a dog walking OKR. Check out tiny habits. I find performance metrics tiresome these days, especially at work. As a programmer you are doing creative and fairly reactive work, yet you are trying to please some performance metric written 2 months ago for the quarter, which with new information is BS so now you need to negotiate to ignore the…
I don't think those things are opposites. I don't exactly do personal OKRs, but I'm definitely working towards goals. To hit some of those goals, I build habits. And to build those habits, I carefully track how well I'm doing on that.
E.g., I had a goal of being more fit. I wanted a habit of daily exercise, so I set a target of 10k steps/day. My current streak is 33 days, but I'd say the habit is still forming. I'm going to shoot for 2 months and see how strong the habit feels then.
I do agree that bad metrics are terrible, though. My sympathies!
Re: Setting up personal OKR (objectives and key-results)
#84First off, I like the exercise. I think it’s healthy as a form of journaling and more people should be introspective in this way. But I’d like to ask what problem is this trying to solve? In a large org, the OKRs are driving alignment and accountability. But for an individual, i think the bigger challenge is motivation, discipline, dedication, commitment. So what I mean is, I don’t think individuals have a problem kn…
I think the common element in both cases is building clarity and focus.
I don't do an OKR process, but I have congruent ways of limiting how much personal change I'm tackling at once. If I try to a bunch of vague and broad things, I don't succeed. If I pick some clear, specific, time-bound actions, I do much better.
And I think it's fine that OKRs leave out the hills. In setting them, we think about the hills and possible routes. When we're working toward them, we develop a lot of understanding of where we are and our current specifics. If that in the moment demands creating more explicit or formal, that's fine. The OKRs are just there to create the context.
Re: Setting up personal OKR (objectives and key-results)
#85OKR is probably one of the worst fads to happen to project management and software engineering. Just set normal realistic goals and plans, or even just a general direction. Don't use numbers where it doesn't make sense -- not everything needs to be a piece of data -- not everything has a completion percentage. Hope it goes away soon, along with "Agile", "Extreme Programming" and "Open Office Layout"
All of those things have worked fine for me. I suspect it depends on how you use them.
Re: Setting up personal OKR (objectives and key-results)
#86Wow, just wow. Someone contributed to OKR getting a wife. I am blown away. I will never quantize some parts of my life. Work is work. Learning is learning. There are a lot of methodologies for GTD, but in my experience balancing order with improvised chaos is healthy practice :) PS. Joke aside there is a proven correlation between high achievement and habit of tracking and measuring a goal. I am not sure about OKR bu…
the main benefits of OKRs might be transparency and alignment, not having a quantifiable goals. I am dating without much success for more than one and a half years now, and I have yet to meet someone who might be open to build something together. I regularly spend money on platforms like tinder, veggly, okcupid with a hope that despite corona, it might contribute to such a development. Still I did not put much effort…
Thanks for the ideas, my post was intended as an example why personal OKRs might be helpful -to align existing efforts, become aware of them and invest time with more care and purpose.
I am not looking for dating advice here, nor assumptions about my supposed views on women or my other activities in that area. There is a pandemic going on and my former social life outside is frozen, there were positive and inspiring encounters through dating apps and I even met a few friends there over the years. I am glad that more opportunities to meet new people online are slowly emerging (or more people discover them) such as zoom/gathertown meetups, discord groups etc, even as they can't replace dancing.
Re: Setting up personal OKR (objectives and key-results)
#87This may be an unpopular opinion on HN, but I just don't get it. The whole notion of setting personal goals, working out tasks and sub tasks and strategies and charts - like, you deal with all that stuff in your work life. Give it a rest. Be with your family. Look at a sunset. Read a book or two. Paint or play the piano. Eat well, go for a run. Do things that are good for you and other people. Spend less time on your…
You do you.
We've all got different drives and inner monologues, heterogenous backgrounds, unique perspectives, goals.
It's what makes the human experiment wildly successful. We're all living life as we see it.
Re: Setting up personal OKR (objectives and key-results)
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Habit forming works better. That’s why you don’t need a teeth brushing OKR. Or a dog walking OKR. Check out tiny habits. I find performance metrics tiresome these days, especially at work. As a programmer you are doing creative and fairly reactive work, yet you are trying to please some performance metric written 2 months ago for the quarter, which with new information is BS so now you need to negotiate to ignore the…
I don't think those things are opposites. I don't exactly do personal OKRs, but I'm definitely working towards goals. To hit some of those goals, I build habits. And to build those habits, I carefully track how well I'm doing on that. E.g., I had a goal of being more fit. I wanted a habit of daily exercise, so I set a target of 10k steps/day. My current streak is 33 days, but I'd say the habit is still forming. I'm g…
Be careful with streaks. There’s another thread on today (about phone addiction) that goes into more depth how streaks can be harmful, but as an anecdote, I had a 500+ day streak on my Apple Watch fitness rings until the watch developed a fault intra day and I didn’t notice til the end of the day, breaking the streak. There’s no way to reset that, or show me new streak information. So I gave up entirely. The pandemic didn’t start for another 3-4 months, by which time I’d given up already.
Re: Setting up personal OKR (objectives and key-results)
#89This may be an unpopular opinion on HN, but I just don't get it. The whole notion of setting personal goals, working out tasks and sub tasks and strategies and charts - like, you deal with all that stuff in your work life. Give it a rest. Be with your family. Look at a sunset. Read a book or two. Paint or play the piano. Eat well, go for a run. Do things that are good for you and other people. Spend less time on your…
“Work Life Balance” is missing and item—Career. I don’t think it should be that hard to find the right balance between all three, and you should especially try to have career bleed into work more than life. But if you have any aspirations of getting promoted to a high level and making lots of money (I’m not saying you should have those aspirations), then it’s very likely you’ll need devote at least some of your free time to gaining skills and knowledge that will help you grow in your career.
Re: Setting up personal OKR (objectives and key-results)
#90This may be an unpopular opinion on HN, but I just don't get it. The whole notion of setting personal goals, working out tasks and sub tasks and strategies and charts - like, you deal with all that stuff in your work life. Give it a rest. Be with your family. Look at a sunset. Read a book or two. Paint or play the piano. Eat well, go for a run. Do things that are good for you and other people. Spend less time on your…
Why did you assume that people are not enjoying life ? It is not a either or thing. You can relax and enjoy life with your families in nature and also spend some remaining time to reflect and strategize for a better future.