Forward

If you’re looking to keep your team accountable, on-track and organized, Objectives and Key Results are one of the main stepping stones in your path to success. Every company does it in their own way.

Making The Process Personal

Instead of OKR’s, or Objectives and Key Results as they are more formally known as, I personally identify them as Initiatives, Expectations and Values (IEV’s).

  • Initiatives are the things that matter to you.
  • Expectations are how you measure how much they matter.
  • Values are what keeps you focused.

Initiatives are goal-driven phrases that you want to achieve, mirroring an objective. Although the noun form clearly means a “goal”, the adjective form is a bit more involved.

With this approach I make sure I’m doing what I identified as being necessary to grow myself, which in turn will make me happy. I set expectations and hold myself accountable, a personal weakness for many years. I use my values to make sure I keep my integrity and humility aligned with my goals for life.

Initiatives vs Objectives

Personal OKRs are designed to benefit you, personally. For a goal of the company, whether it’s on boarding new clients, hiring or completing technical feats, there is one outcome; make the company succeed. This is why objectives work well for company and departmental goals. However, this is also the reason they don’t work well for personal goals.

Objective (adj.) — not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts.

Contrary to its definition, I feel that your personal OKR’s should be extremely personal and should based on your opinions. You are the one setting them and you are the one that needs to hold yourself accountable. It is for your personal gain, so you should be selfish when defining them. For this reason, I felt “Initiatives” was more of a relevant term.

Initiative (noun) — the power or opportunity to act or take charge before others do.

Expectations vs Key Results

In a business organization, progress is important. Some companies even embody the mantra “motion vs progress”. Key results are a great a way to measure, if done right. However, in a personal context, I feel expectations allow me to hold myself accountable better.

Key Results (noun) — specific measures used to track the achievement of a goal.

By setting my expectations, I’m able to hold myself accountable. I can say, “to be happy I need to do xyz. This will make me happy.” Everyday, I expect to do certain things as well as expect certain results. When you look at the definition, I don’t Target the “should” sense, but instead embody the “will”. These more closely align in my opinion to something being achieved, and more specifically the how much and by when’s. Most of all, you need to believe in yourself.

Expectations (noun) — a belief that someone will or should achieve something.

My Initiatives, Expectations and Values

Values are your compass in life which are keeping you oriented through the good and the bad. I used this to define my initiatives:

Do amazing things by being the healthiest I can be.

But what is health? It’s not just being resilient to a cold but ensure the structure of my body is resilient as well. That includes not just my muscles but my brains to. I joke that your brain is not just your smarts but your emotions too, which in turn means you have one thing doing two functions and humans weren’t meant to multi-task.

Now how do I define my health? That’s where my expectations come in.

  • Grow my mind by reading or listen to a book for at least 30 minutes every dag
  • Keep my life clean an organized by spending 5 minutes cleaning my work area every day
  • Relieve stress by engaging in a relaxing artistic activity for 45 minutes every day
  • Create a healthy savings plan that saves $500 every month

These expectations are simple enough that I can do them everyday while leaving plenty of time for other necessities like family, hobbies and work. There are some givens, general health is a precedent, taking care of myself by eating healthy is a given and exercise is a fundamental requirement of achieving that.

The books I read were not self-help books in my opinion, but they were perspective books. They were books about how to approach life differently, how to understand other peoples minds better and how money works the way it does. This combination helped keep me grounded every time I needed to make a decision. Anytime I am in a situation that’s unfavorable to myself I think to myself that “you can’t hurt me” and I come up with two creative responses to the situation. This allows me to control the outputs of uncontrollable inputs.

Conclusion

I used what I valued most in life within my formula towards achieving personal happiness when I began my journey of discovering my personal OKR’s. Instead of New Years Resolutions that easily fall to the wayside, I took a different approach, something I was familiar with and something I could use to keep track of my progress and failures. It has kept me grounded. It has given me something to work towards; a successful metric of personal happiness. I am not afraid to hold myself accountable, a practice that took me a while to really understand.

And remember, quality input means quality output.

My IEVs in Todoist.

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