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 phone. Be a nicer person.
None of this needs a chart or a strategy or a plan. It's just common sense humanity.
Don't worry if you "fail", it's the journey that counts. You don't need to be grade VIII on the piano or the best artist in your social circle - just enjoy doing whatever it is. Find stuff with flow. Live life. Don't spend your time measuring it.
Just my halfpence.
Today, between balancing life goals, family responsibilities, and professional obligations, I need organizational systems to hold it together. In another twenty years I don't think I'll need the same structures again.
For me, an organizational framework is the difference between reactive and pro-active. It need not be elaborate, but I need one to augment my own weakness and ensure that everything that needs doing gets done.
I can't speak for the author (and indeed, from his tone, I'm inclined to agree with you that perhaps he may need to let off the throttle a bit), but taking time to set non-work goals can lead to greater mindfulness about an activity, precisely because you've spent time considering it.
If I decide that "In Q1 2021, I will be biking precisely 3 out of 5 workdays a week to the office", this might not sound 'common sense humanity', but that fact does not then preclude me from enjoying the chill of the morning wind on my face once I'm on the bike. But if it helps me get on the bike in the first place, hey...it takes all sorts right?
“Bike 3 out of 5 days to the office” is a reflection of your goals as a human — fitness, enjoying the outdoors, whatever.
The problem is our natural inclination to be lazy and take the bus prevents us from accomplishing our desire to be healthier or enjoy the outdoors.
Having an explicit goal you measure the results of is a way to assess if you’re living the way you want to.
You’re captain here: no one is making you ride the bike — but if you want to ride your bike more, making that goal explicit and measured is a way to overcome your own internal conflicts preventing you from doing that.
Captain made a call and now we’re doing it.
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 metric.
I probably have metric fatigue.
For some folks. All sorts of different people in the world.
My wife needs a plan for every day. Not to the level of checklists and planning it out in software, but if she has an "open ended" day she doesn't do that well mentally and doesn't sleep well unless she has a mental model for the day coming up.
For me, I'm the opposite. I hate scheduled days, but I also know I need a bit of structure for myself otherwise it's easy for a long weekend to devolve into napping on the couch and posting to HN. My entire organization for this is just a simple TO-DO list where I toss a couple objectives of the day down in the AM while drinking my caffeine. It adds a tiny bit of order to an otherwise unordered personality and helps me move along my personal projects and social life.
Perhaps in the short time being more flexible and in the moment is better, while over time Marshall Goldsmiths maxim regarding goals not surrendered of “unrealized ambitions end up being frustrated yearnings for the soul” might hold.
Your solution sounds more European and likely better for overall satisfaction. However, if you for some reason did want to get to grade VIII on the piano and the ability to watch and notice the hues at sunset didn’t come with a mental cue to deep down legitimately let go of that (not to be Buddhist) inkling of desire, then you’re in trouble.
Throw in a Canadian quarter to your halfpence.
Saying something to the effect of goals are not there to be done in the future, they are there to orient your present.
I love this because if I have a goal of spending more time with my son then taking an after run is a bad idea.
They help guide your decisions which speaks to me.
Yes, but... Perhaps a little bit of organization and goals, but never too much, is still doable?
I do shopping lists. If we're entertaining, we do a plan to ensure we get the food and drink ready in time. That's about it.
There's a packing list for the beach, but we haven't used it in years and years: life's too short for being driven by an organising principle.
I think people have begun to fetishize their actual plan. It's an excuse to not do any of the real "hard" work, but rather plan to do it. The planning feels great because it really isn't all that difficult. Look at all these colors and percentages! I'm doing something!
Obviously this isn't true for everyone. But I've found focused plans are much better than trying to juggle 3 million things. It'll lead to burnout.
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.
If it works for you, great, but this seems like something I would never want to import into my personal life.
I use Trello for a to-do list (https://memo.barrucadu.co.uk/self-organisation.html), and have recurring cards for chores - it's very helpful!
For what I might term "loftier" aspirations (diet, fitness, etc), I just make sure I am being consistent. Those things have to be built into your lifestyle, or at least, that is the only way I can get it to work. There was a time, for instance, when I did track my nutrition with a spreadsheet. But after a few months I realized I could manage it all within my head: I had gauged my daily macro needs, and could largely judge by eye, and it has worked for years since.
I have tried todo-style apps, as an example of where I have tried a more explicit approach. I find that they are just procrastination and delay lists for me. If I am not actively doing it already, with exceptions, it probably won't be done at all.
I keep my objectives in my head. No need to write this kind of thing down and keeping scores of myself. And whatever happens happens. I don't need to bog myself down with some corporate invention.
I keep it simple. Choose a couple things to focus on and write those down in my planner (pen and paper). Lately it’s been:
- read more books, especially biographies and histories
- spend time with my kids
- write a blog post or essay once a month
Outside that, I don’t get much more specific. Work is already busy enough to juggle. I don’t need another thing to juggle. I’m not interested in forcing that much structure on my time outside work. I try to prioritize simple things that make my family or myself happy.
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 knowing what to do: we all know we need to lose weight and reduce BMI.
The devil is building the habits (eating less, exercising more, avoiding temptation, being more disciplined, being around people with likewise habits) to achieve the OKR.
I’m not saying that the OKRs are a bad idea – just that they are a map of a terrain that leaves out all the devilish hills that really need climbing.
I was surprised to see how in-depth and detailed these objectives are. Not to knock the author, mind you; the dedication to breaking these things into granular tasks is impressive. Rather, I feel that there's little room for flexibility in taking an OKR approach to personal development.
Case in point, I had a personal objective to do more service in the community in 2020. The way I had envisioned the key results was more volunteering, more interactions with people, more things like spending weekends working on a Habitat for Humanity house or something of the like. The pandemic really disincentivized those kinds of in-person activities for the sake of the community, so I pivoted to identifying more causes I could donate to or provide help to in remote ways. It was hard, no doubt, and I was still disappointed that I didn't get to do the former things, but considering the circumstances it _feels_ like my original objective was achieved. The takeaway is that I think personal objectives that leave little room for flexibility are fighting an uphill battle from the start.
The objective you had was kinda fine even though it certainly has the connotation of volunteering in person. But if you just make the KRs something like "increase time I help the community by 5 hours per week" then the individual tasks can adjust without making you fail the OKR. Well sure you really envisioned doing a full "work day" each week for habitat for humanity. Covid hit so now you volunteer at the "teens in trouble hotline" for 8 hours a week. KR checked!
I definitely agree with the above.
I found my way around this by doing weekly check-ins where I report on progress and accordingly formulate strategies for achieving said goals. Those reports are meant for no one but me, but they allow me to:
a) Measure my progress
b) See what's working and what's not
c) Most importantly, hold myself accountable
Such reports are a version of looking myself in the mirror and talking about the week that was, my habits, and the progress (or lack thereof) I made. Furthermore, at least for me, the mere act of writing allows me to crystallize my thoughts on a topic, lends clarity and ultimately provides an infusion of motivation to keep working toward my goals.
Of course, what works for me might not work for someone else, and we all need a different framework based on our individuality, but I hope I was able to add to your point surrounding accountability.
edit: Formatting
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.
For example last year I invested a lot in lifestyle habits around exercise and cooking. Now those habits are largely autopilot and I'm looking at mental habits around attention, complaining, and negativity.
This is not only untrue but is actively harmful to those with lighter bodies.
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"
It may seem like overhead, and there's some snark in this thread about how it's project / team management without the project and team.
I completely disagree. If you set up your KR's so they are 1) quantitative, 2) daily measurable, 3) simple to log ( a few keystrokes while journalling) and 4) completely under your control to achieve.
At the end of the day, I mark down my progress on all my OKRs. I can quickly plot them, look back at progress, and look back at goals and concerns by seeing the types of objectives I had. It's a 10,000 foot journal that I otherwise wouldn't have.
There's more to this than simply quantifying yourself. We like #'s because they are representations of complex systems. The self and your personal history are absolutely a complex system worth tracking.
Looking back at my OKRs when I was dating my (now) wife, comparing the ways I put effort into our relationship and our changing priorities. Seeing over time my running distances, weight lifting activity, meditation record, and seeing how I consistently attempt to over-achieve by setting KR values too high ... Having those points of reference has made today more enjoyable, and been a constant reminder that progress comes slowly and missing on any particular attempt at something is irrelevant. It's so completely a part of my life now that I can't imagine setting goals or daily priorities without it.
Think of it like quantitative journalling.
I can open and edit that file quickly using bash. From within VIM I can quickly commit to reduce the # keystrokes. More details: https://github.com/jodavaho/bashlog#git-integration
(Really though, you can just save as an environment variable your file location)
The text file is structured with space-delimited text, like this: https://github.com/dkogan/vnlog
My current structure for tracking a contribution to an OKR item (e.g. "meditate") by date (e.g., 2020-01-15) and amount (e.g., "1") is simply:
"# date item amount"
Easy to open, easy to plop down today's date and the item / amount. Save multiple date/item entries and add them inscripts ... Easy to save. Done.
The work came in building stuff to plot it:
I have other files that link "items" to goals or other metadata like categories, etc. Like a relational database, but easily edited in text.
For example, to make a link from daily items to Key Results
"# item okr"
The OKR categories are usually Fighting (I box), Tech, Mental health, and Social, but YMMV
Another example is "workout-mapping.vnl" with structure: "# item muscle-group factor"
etc etc.
vnlog has nice vnl-join commands that quickly build the table and all linked metadata and output formatted text (one command). Then reading that in R is easy ...
``` data <- read.table('../2020-Q4-OKR.vnl',skip=2,stringsAsFactors = FALSE) ```
Aggregating by date is easy:
``` data.agg<- aggregate(x=data$Amount,by=list(data$Date),FUN=sum) ```
Then plot using ggplot2.
Examples from 2020 Q4 (just ran the numbers yesterday!)
https://josh.vanderhook.info/media/okr.png
That perspective may misunderstand those who are engaged in a multitude of activities that are all extremely worthwhile, which does include relaxation and self-care, but may also include nurturing a marriage and developing oneself, or developing a child.
There is finite time & opportunity in the author's day, and he is perhaps acutely aware he must choose his time expenditures wisely. It is good to step back, admit this, and install structure to support your true and prioritized goals.
Otherwise, we may easily find ourselves neglecting activities that are dearly important to us, like connecting with a spouse.
To those that say: "just do less," I would say: there is a time where that suggestion will become natural law for each of us. Enjoy your abilities while you can.
That said, I'm actually a fan of OKRs for achieving personal goals as long as you can be honest to yourself about what your Objectives actually are. (ie, if you don't really value being fit but put it on the list because you feel it is compulsory then no framework is going to provide enough motivation) In corporate settings, the incentives are typically not aligned at all and that tends to break implementation very badly. But for personal settings where you are both goal-setter and implementer it can work quite well.
Granted, but sometimes you can find proxies and variables that increase the likelihood of success if you hit them consistently. For example, what's "successfully land an aircraft"? It's a sequence of hitting certain parameters within certain time windows that, when you do that, result in a smooth, successful, landing. Successful landing is a "lagging indicator".
There are many things, even in "artistic performance", that are a sequence of consistently hitting a target within a certain tolerance, at a specific time, etc.
In the workplace, you may have the problem of having a quality relationship with your colleagues or "reports". You may not be able to "quantify" that easily, but you can have regular one on ones in a relaxed enough setting that lead to candid conversations that unearth problems early enough that you can effectively solve them. The relationship quality is a lagging indicator, if you will, of what has been done upstream.
What do you think?
Do you have any learnings to make such initiatives work?
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 but may be the choice of which methodology to use is personal or psychology driven.
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.
Commit to striking up a conversation with 10 new women every day. I'm sure that would push you forward a lot.
Note: Don’t use dating apps or services. They are really dangerous. Find other ways to connect.
Is there really?
Personally I've found that with a good tool to measure and track progress (I'm using the Hacker's diet logging which produces a nice graph [1]), my weight loss is coming along nicely without a set endpoint.
[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-31/new-years-resolution-...
It reminds me how different people are, and how much we need empathy even with something like how people set personal goals.
And then review your progress at some velocity that makes sense (weekly for some, monthly for others, quarterly or thereabouts for the rest) to see if you're on track, if your objectives have changed, etc.
But the book Switch by Chip and Dan Heath kind of opened my eyes to the danger of "SMART goals" / self-motivation. They talk about the "rider" (your rational, critical inner voice) and the "elephant" (your emotional id-like creature) and how you have to get both working, and OKRs and the like satisfy the rider but don't reach the elephant.
They recommend for example drawing up a "concept poster" or postcard (similar to Amazon's "future newsletter" touting the success of a proposed initiative) to really get alignment on what will get you excited to do the good things you want - health, wealth, family, community, planet, whatever - without having to prescribe it to a chart or metric.
BTW I like your goals, too. They seem quite wholesome and achievable, and reasonable (granted I don't know your BMI now, for example, but waking up before 8:30am is a good one.)
I learned in ~3 hours of low effort while watching TV during a single day, told a friend about it, and they subsequently did the same thing that same day. Afterward we both said things to each other like "wow, I had no idea it was this easy!"
A quick disclaimer: this is for 3-ball juggling. 4-ball is a bit different, and I have heard it is a better foundation for 5,6,7+, but I never learned how to do it well.
First, get your three balls or similar. Hacky sacks, tennis balls, bean bags, rubik's cubes, whatever you've got.
Second, sit somewhere comfy and safe, with your arms down and your hands roughly near your knees if they were crossed. Hold just one ball. Practice tossing that one ball from one hand to the other hand, tossing it to about eye level on each throw. Your goal here is to keep your hands mostly down and apart and to get used to the feel of what power of throw you need and where your hand needs to be to catch the ball, without spending too much attention watching your hands. Practice left to right repeatedly, and right to left repeatedly, and then also practice back and forth. This should take somewhere between 5 minutes and an hour total -- but try to make this easy. If a later step is hard, do this first step more. Make sure the ball gets right to about eye level on each throw, in a neat little arc.
Third, once you feel good about the above, sit in the same position, with one ball in each hand. Throw one and when it hits the peak, around eye level, throw the other, and then catch them both. That's it. Now practice this, again repeating first a left-hand throw and then first a right-hand throw, and then a little back and forth, and try to keep that consistency where each just gets to about eye level in a nice little arc. This teaches the real "trick" of juggling: knowing when to throw. This should also take somewhere between 5 minutes and an hour to get comfortable with.
Fourth, sit now with two balls in one hand and one in the other. Throw with the hand that has 2 first, and just do what you did above, but this time, at the point the second ball thrown is in the air at peak, instead of waiting and just catching both, throw the third ball. You can still just catch them all from here. Practice each direction, another 5 minutes to an hour here, but you might slip into the next step naturally.
Fifth, and finally: rather than just catching at the end there, try to just continue the pattern. You have all of the skills required at this point and you will be "juggling" each time. Once you've thrown all 3 starting from each direction, it likely won't be hard to do a 4th or a 5th throw, which feels amazing to get to, and then it's just smoothing things out and finding consistency.
At that point, try to hit 10 throws, then 30, 100, etc. Getting a string of 30+ might take a day or two to actually get, but it'll likely be addictive and you'll want to just keep trying, and it's easy to do most of these steps while you do other low-hands-use things like watching TV, having a conversation, or listening to a podcast.
This comment may get lost, but maybe it'll also help someone! Juggling is a wonderful little skill to have, and it sticks around for life. I learned a little over a decade ago while in school and actively played with it for about a year, but can still easily resume it today.
- 50 jumping jacks [3 sets]
- 25 knee-highs [3 sets]
- 30 mountain climbers [2 sets]
- 25 pushups
- 1 minute plank
I stopped doing it after I was able to meet my weight loss milestone, need to restart.
