(2016-12-31) Wodtke Personal OKRs

Jan'2013 Christina Wodtke: Personal OKRs. I found myself stuck, unable to make progress in my personal life

coach who reminded me to dig into my own toolkit to solve my problems

So first I set an objective for Q1 (Quarterly Review).

Objective: Be financially stable while preserving health and doing work I like to do.

So now I needed KR’s. I knew I’ve had reached my objective if these three things were present

I had spent the previous quarter prototyping a life.

I now had some good hypothesizes about what happiness night look like. So: I needed to teach, write and run.

creating a collection of projects that you can frequently evaluate

I have had to write a lot of weekly reports (Weekly Review) in my career, and they are usually annoying and boring laundry lists I didn’t want to write and my boss didn’t want to read. But at Zynga, we learned how to make them awesome. It had everything to do with only tracking and reporting things that made a significant difference

The format for the emails is similar to stand ups. Last week, Next week, Blockers

My coach agreed to receive the emails, in lieu of a boss.

Dec31'2016: Personal OKRs, Three Years Later

Since then I’ve created a life I love living

First, Close Out the Last Quarter with Learning

consider how close I got, and grade that

Let’s look at the rest of the weekly report

Will you Explore or Exploit Next Quarter?

In Algorithms to Live By, Brian Christian explains the explore/exploit problem. How much time should you spend exploring new possibilities, and how much exploiting ones you have proven work?

My problem with OKRs was that they seemed to be designed for exploiting — driving performance in known areas — and not for exploring. That’s when I invented what I call hypothesis OKRs. In a hypothesis OKR, the objective is a hypothesis about a success state, and the key results are the metrics that prove if it’s true.

I wanted to test a hypothesis: I can be happy and financially viable writing while teaching part-time

3. Focus on Won’t Get Done

What Do Personal OKRs Look like?

*First Draft

Objective: Work Well, Be Well KR: Something around shipping drafts KR: Something about health metrics, move to KR for extra attention KR: Happiness/Burnout?*

Next, I need to narrow the focus of each KR, and add a metric.

My coach, Andrea Corney, once told me to picture all the things in your life as balls you are juggling. Some are made of clay, some are made of crystal, and some are made of rubber. If it’s clay, and you drop it, you won’t care. It’s just clay. If it’s rubber, it won’t be hurt if you drop it. But crystal is valuable, and if you drop it it’s all over

Objective: Work Well, Be Well KR: Working with Pictures in market with 10 reviews 4 stars or higher KR: Down one clothing size KR: 80% of days content or higher

Now I stare at them: can I really look at these every week for three months and be ok with these goals?

Living Your OKRs

Historically, I send my coach an email on Monday that looks like this:

This quarter I also sent my status report to two friends, Livia and Donna, and they sent theirs to me. We wanted to coach each other through figuring out personal OKRs and what they meant to each of us

The biggest lesson was how hard it is to build the habit of checking in on your OKRs each week

Improvements & Experiments

Next quarter I’m going to try to keep my OKRs in a spreadsheet. I want to get better at finding patterns of why things don’t get done

Final Random Thoughts

Sizing is hard. You have to pick an OKR set that fits into your life, considering other obligations like family and work. Goals can be as big as a novel, or as small as a garden.