A how-to guide to achieving your goals
A practical perspective on personal objectives and key results
Most people would agree that setting and achieving personal goals is a positive experience. Goals help us stay the course and keep us motivated. They focus our attention on the things that matter and will bring the most value into our lives. They help us improve performance in the long run and develop.
Ultimately, they make us feel productive and happy.
Indeed, it is a good day when we achieve our goals, and it is a sad day when we don’t. Even more than that, just remember when someone blocked you from achieving your goals. I bet you were enraged.
Given the importance of goal achievement, it is surprising that many people struggle to achieve their goals!
Using a proper goal setting system will fix the issue, allowing people to hit their goals every time.
I have used the personal Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) framework to successfully hit and exceed my personal goals for two years now. I have shared this framework with some of my friends to help them achieve their goals.
Now, I’d like to share it with all of you to help you lead a happier life through consistent goal achievement.
In this post, I will focus on four elements:
- Where do personal OKRs come from?
- Defining OKRs
- Setting your personal OKRs
- Following through on your personal OKRs
1. Where do personal OKRs come from?
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) originally come to us from Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel. He introduced the system in his thesis on High Output Management, explicitly thinking about how to create the shared goal system within organizations to drive success. According to Grove, there are two primary questions that such a system needs to be effective:
- Where do I want to go?
- How will I know that I am there?
These two questions are the foundation of Objectives and Key Results, respectively.
John Doerr, who learned the method from Grove, popularized the OKR system in his book “Measure what matters” and introduced it to Google.
Google and many other organizations use the OKR system today to drive their organizational success and alignment.
After carefully studying, evaluating, and introducing the OKR system in my own company, Top Hat, I found myself using the system to set my personal goals for the year. The personal OKR system helped me achieve and exceed my goals.
Thus, the personal OKRs were born, focused on application to an individual in the pursuit of happiness.
2. Defining OKRs
As you may know by now, I am a stickler for definitions.
Therefore, I’d like to take a moment explaining what OKRs are and why they matter.
Objectives are essentially goals or outcomes and answer the question, “Where do we want to go?” They provide direction of where you want to be, painting the picture of what is possible. Good objectives are inspirational and ambitious. They are easy to communicate and have a time horizon. Most importantly, they are in your control, regardless of circumstances.
Key Results are metrics and measures and answer the question, “How will I know I am there?” They have a starting point and a finish line. This means that you can measure and quantify them to see how you are progressing over time. Setting difficult to achieve metrics is essential, as this is what will lead you to exceed your goals.
The Objectives and Key Results methodology, therefore, is a personal accountability system defining the vision of where you want to go and how you will get there. If you were to achieve all your key results, you would be sure that you have reached your vision. The system is just that simple.
3. Setting your personal OKRs
Now that you understand the system, here is how I suggest you set your own goals as objectives and key results.
- Define a time frame. Before you begin, think about the time frame that you would like to use to achieve your goal. I align my OKR setting with a calendar year, starting on January 1st and finishing by December 31st. Using this timeframe allows me to see how things have changed in my personal life in a meaningful way over the year. I recommend aligning the start and finish time with a big event (e.g., birthdays, year-end) to remember the target date vividly. Hence, if you were to start today, consider putting December 31st as the end date to align your OKRs to the year. As you now see, I recommend setting annual goals — they are not too far off, and you will have plenty of time to achieve them.
- Start with your objectives. I like to start with objectives as they define the picture of where I want to end up over the year. These objectives will serve a focusing function, directing the energy towards the goal. The best practice here is to ensure that you set between two and four objectives total — otherwise, you risk having too many goals, diluting your focus. As such, start with a long list and pick the stuff that truly matters. Remember, the objectives should inspire you and speak to your personal goals — these are the things that will make you happy. This year, I set three objectives: to self-expand (all about trying new things), to be my best self (all about improving well-being), and to improve my knowledge (all about learning and development).
- Define and your key results with objectives. For each objective, think about how you will measure your success and pick 2–3 key metrics. These metrics will be measurable and time-bound, having a clear outcome. Importantly, you must make sure that when you hit the key results that you will know that you have achieved your objective. To test this, use this sentence with your objectives and key results to evaluate if you got them right: I will achieve my [objective] as measured by [key result 1], [key result 2], and [key result 3]. If the sentence reads well and makes sense, you got your personal OKRs. Finally, don’t make them too easy — if the goals are too easy, you are “sandbagging” and are not moving closer to your happiness.
Let’s take my objective to self-expand, set for the year, as an example. The two key results that I have set for myself are trying wine from 24 new wineries (about 2 per month) and take a sailing class. When testing the two results in a sentence, I get:
I will achieve my self-expansion as measured by me trying wine from 24 new wineries and taking one sailing class this year.
With this, I can see what I need to get done to be successful at self-expanding or trying something new this year.
One final piece of advice on setting your OKRs is to spend the time on really thinking about the things that matter to you. You might want to go for something that other people care about, but if those things don’t bring you happiness, they should not be your personal goals. Focus on the things that will make you happy.
4. Following through on your OKRs
Finally, to achieve more goals, you must align all of your energy to them. A rigorous measurement system is critical to the needed focus as it will help you track your progress, self-reflect, and pivot as needed.
If you don’t have a system that you use, you can start with this spreadsheet and use it for tracking. I have built this spreadsheet to make sure that I have a simple way of checking where I am with my goals.
I check this spreadsheet every month, at the end of the month, entering my numbers and assessing how far I am from my targets. At that time, I also think through what else I can do to achieve each goal. Therefore, the spreadsheet can be used as a natural project charter that drives a personal feedback loop.
Indeed, tracking is an exciting process as it makes you reflect on things that matter to you. In other words, after tracking the OKRs for a while, you will quickly realize what you care about and what makes you excited and happy.
I found that reading books (read 12 books) was one of the goals that got me especially delighted and decided to double down on this goal this year, setting more aggressive targets and working daily to achieve and exceed them.
I believe that this last piece is critical to goal success.
The reason why people fail to reach their goals is that people don’t feel accountable for them. The personal OKR system is a tool to help set the right goals and to drive their progress and reflection on achieving them.
Set your goals to lead a happy life and use the OKR system to achieve them every time.
Conclusions and Takeaways
In summary, although virtually every person in the world has set some goals, many people still struggle to achieve these goals for personal betterment. The personal OKR system described here is an easy way to:
- Define your goals and the vision for your best life
- Structure these goals around the key results that will measure success
- Track the goals consistently to achieve them every single time
I think one thing that I encourage the readers to take from this article is that achieving goals is much easier when one clearly defines and structures these goals. The goals without structure are simply wishes. The goals with the structure are missions. The personal OKR system turns wishes into missions.
