The Gist
OKRs, or Objectives and Key Results, are a clear and measurable way to track progress and ensure everyone in an organization is working towards the same goals.
Because they work so well for our company WPCS.io, I decided to implement some in my personal life. In this article, I explain how I did that, why it worked so well, and how they still form the cornerstone of all systems and processes I’ve built for my entire life.
I’ve been asked a lot about the systems I’ve designed to organize my life. I’ve noticed that the people I speak to started implementing some parts or some version of it into their own life. This blog attempts to capture this information and make it more readily available.
This is a longer article than I usually intend to write. But as this is quite literally my jumping-off point for life, I will revisit it often and link to new articles on specific topics mentioned in it.
My Goals for Life started at work
“So KPIs are bottom-up, detailed performance measurements,” Sybren explained patiently. “OKRs, on the other hand, are a top-down approach to goal setting. They’re more strategic”.
He looked at me confidently, the way he always does, to see if I understood.
“I see”, I said hesitantly. “So how do we make them?”.
Sybren stared at me for a moment before erupting into a stutter.
“Well, ehm, we get together and take our company vision and mission. Based on that, we determine a few objectives we can’t measure to act as goals. Next, we decide on key results that we can measure to check if we’re on the right track in attaining the objectives. And then we kind of take it from there”.
Devising a strategy for 2022
Sybren’s stutter was completely understandable. Lately, it felt like I had done nothing but paint pictures of our company vision to investors and VCs. The notion that we had to come up with yet another strategic document felt like putting our foot on the brakes when all we wanted to do was put the pedal to the metal and drive.
We had been busy raising a seed round for the past six months. Pitch deck after pitch deck. Explaining our tech, the market, roadmap, growth potential, and financial forecast. In December 2021, we got an investment from top-notch VCs APX in Germany and Arches Capital in the Netherlands, which in hindsight, had been a much smoother process than what you hear and read online.
But Sybren proposed we had to come up with an objective about more than a prognosis or a roadmap. A prognosis tells us what we need to turn over to call the company a financial success. Our roadmap would tell us what we wanted to build to get there. Objectives, as he put it, would help us reach the goal of financial success, and Key Metrics would help track if we were building the right things to get there.
It was one more thing to track, but on a more strategic level, Sybren assured me. A helicopter view, instead of the granular control I was used to with tracking our KPIs.
KPIs, which I was initially confusing with OKRs, are detailed metrics we always used in our agency to measure the success of ad campaigns, the conversion of funnels, or the amount of traffic a website can handle. But now, we had to formulate an objective that wasn’t measurable but would encapsulate a grander vision for the upcoming year and ultimately lead to financial success.
Sybren is usually right about these things, and it was the Christmas break, after all, so we sat down and got to work. We quickly came up with something grand: “Ignite a new wave of independent WordPress-based SaaS worldwide”. That was an Objective we could all get behind.
After all, that’s what our technology does, and it’s aligned with our vision: to preserve and strengthen the open web. It’s also an Objective that you can build Key Results around.
The puzzle fell into place
For context, we built the first Multi-tenant WordPress Cloud Platform. In layman’s terms: it allows WordPress websites to be managed like a SaaS or to build actual WordPress-based SaaS products.
By “manage like a SaaS”, I mean a centralized way to develop, maintain, and scale an unlimited number of individual WordPress websites. With WPCS, we introduced the scalable cloud infrastructure of SaaS to the world’s largest open-source ecosystem, WordPress.
I’ll dive into more detail in a future article, but for the context of this article, I’ll share that we think that SaaS is the next frontier of WordPress. Our platform enables that. We want to ignite a new wave of open-source, low-code SaaS solutions.
It felt elegant. You can measure the number of new SaaS and determine if it substitutes a “new wave.” You can work up to that number in each Q; you can organize different departments and marketing efforts around that. It sounded pretty good.
Suddenly, pieces of a puzzle I didn’t know I was playing fell into place. I could see a larger picture thanks to this clear Objective. I also felt very aligned with my company and the phase it was currently going through.
To build our company, I drained all my savings, which was effectively my pension. I hadn’t been paid in 8 months, and I was running on fumes. I had built “technical debt,” as my co-founders call it, on my body too. I was exhausted, hadn’t been to the gym in ages, drank too much, and ate and slept poorly, and it was showing.
I was ready for change as much as our company was. I was geared up, paid my dues, and was excited about the year ahead.
We were about to embark on a new journey with fresh energy and enough resources to weather the storms to come. It was a fresh start, and I was going to ride this wave and use the momentum for my personal gain, also. But where to start?
It was clear that if we were spending time creating OKRs as the strategic foundation of the upcoming year, I should do the same for my personal life.
What are OKRs?
Objectives and Key Results is a framework for setting, tracking, and achieving organizational goals that help align the objectives of individuals, teams, and the entire organization with the company’s overall strategy.
Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, introduced OKRs in the 1970s to help the company stay focused and achieve its goals in a rapidly changing technology landscape. One of the key benefits of OKRs is that it helps align everyone in the organization toward a common goal, creating a shared purpose and focus.
This can lead to increased productivity and collaboration, as everyone knows what they need to do to contribute to the organization’s success. OKRs also help in focusing on the right things by ensuring that resources and efforts are spent on initiatives that are aligned with the organization’s overall strategy.
The OKR framework consists of two main components: objectives and key results. Objectives are the specific goals that an organization or individual wants to achieve, such as increasing revenue or improving customer satisfaction. Key results are the specific, measurable outcomes that must be achieved to reach the objectives. These can include things like increasing sales by a certain percentage or reducing customer complaints by a certain number.
How I designed my Personal OKRs
Even though the “organization” of my personal life consisted of only one person, me, I did have multiple departments that were all currently working on different projects without any form of synergy. OKRs seemed a perfect system to get all my departments working towards the same goal.
My “Mission Statement”
I started by formulating a mission for 2022. I didn’t have to think for very long. As you can imagine, I longed for a fresh start and to build from there.
My mission: Build a foundation for the rest of my life.
You might think, “how old is this guy?”. I see why you might ask that. At 31, it did feel a little sad to formulate this mission statement. But as I mentioned, I had spent every penny and abandoned every form of sure footing, trying to keep my head above water. The pandemic had affected me quite a bit.
In January 2020, I was staring across the water at the beach in Bali. I remember thinking to myself, “if this is what the rest of 2020 is going to look like, I can’t wait”. Less than two months later, the Dutch government announced a complete lockdown, and our agency, which specialized in restaurants and gyms, lost all of its clients in a single week.
The lockdown and the subsequent shutdown of our business led us to this fantastic startup and the unique technology we’ve built. But I’d be lying if I said it was easy to hold on to that vision as we slowly built the business into what it is today.
After solidifying my mission for the year, I started making an inventory of all the different “departments” in my life and taking stock of the projects they were working on.
The “Departments” and Objectives of my Personal Life
After making an inventory and doing some serious reflection on the Objective for each in relation to my Mission, I came up with the following list (Department > Objective):
- Finance > Insight and Control over how much I spend and save
- Physical > Build a Strong and Resilient body
- Mental > Establish Balance and Peace
- Relation > Be Helpful and Reliable as a default
- Marketing > Build a Personal Brand
- Sustainability > Contribute to a better life for all
As you can tell, each of my Objectives had a foundational aspect. They were intended to ground me, establish a baseline, and get control over my life and surroundings.
But also, I wanted to communicate my newly found “foundation” to the outside world as a way of anchoring them. With the Objectives “Be Helpful and Reliable as a default” and “Contribute to a better life for all,” I intended to do that.
After formulating Objectives, Key Results came easy
I won’t go into every Key Result, but I will share a few examples of general systems I designed to achieve Key Metrics for my Objectives. They helped me greatly, and I think they’ll help you too.
My Expense System
At some point during the pandemic, I hadn’t been paid in 8 months. But for some reason, I had also earned too much at another point. That meant I had to pay back all the government aid I had received. It was a confusing system I couldn’t make sense of, and it was putting a lot of stress on me, especially since I was also draining my pension fund at the same time.
One of my Key Results was to pay off this debt ASAP. I decided to track every cent coming in and going out of my account and set a deadline. I made a monthly accounting overview with individual budgets for aspects of my life (rent, phone, food, etc.) and started tracking everything.
The result has been tremendous, and I’ll dedicate an article to this system soon, as I still use it daily. Not only have I gotten complete oversight and control over my finances, but I’ve also been able to spend more on the things I find essential while saving to pay off the debt.
“What did you spend more on?”, you might ask. Well, let’s just say a special someone got a huge ring and this guy is now looking for wedding venues 😉
This is because I can now control my expenses on things I don’t need or shouldn’t spend as much on and expand my budget on things that improve my sense of wealth and well-being.
My Daily Habit Stack
This might sound weird, but the inspiration came from the bestseller “Atomic Habits” by James Clear: I have a habit stack that creates structure and flow in my daily routine.
Again, this deserves an entire article (coming soon), but the goal is to stack micro habits on top of each other to create flow.
The way this works is to start with a tiny habit: drink a glass of water every morning after you wake up. You do this habitually via the method that James Clear proposes. When it’s done, you have a small form of success—a win.
This win creates momentum, so you stack another habit on top of it. In my case, the habit was to go to the gym. Not have a workout, but go. When you get there, you make another small habit like “doing one workout.” You see where this is going.
I made sure I savored each win and kept on track by creating a Habit Journal. It’s a list of all habits and the times of day they should take place. Having a clear overview, I could test, rearrange, and review them to see what works. If I got stuck, I could analyze and optimize.
But not only did I track good habits, but I also tracked bad habits with the goal of getting rid of them. Every good habit done got 1 point, every bad habit -1. Every day, I counted my points to reach a maximum of 20.
I still track my habit score daily, which has changed how I remain consistent with my goals tremendously.
Foundational Exercise milestones
For the objective of “Building a Strong and Resilient body,” I was going to go to the gym 4 to 5 days a week. But I wasn’t sure how I would know if I was on track to reach my goal.
The answer came (as it often does) after a Google search. I searched for “foundational strength exercises and milestones.” After some research, I discovered that if you want to measure overall fitness, there’s a general rule of thumb. You must master a few foundational strength exercises at a weight proportional to your body weight.
These were exercises like the bench press (do 10 reps at your body weight), deadlifts (do 1 rep at 200% of your body weight), Turkish Get Ups (do 1 rep at 50% of your body weight), but also running 10 kilometers in under an hour.
When I knew these milestones, the rest became easy. I designed a workout plan that would incorporate these exercises and do an assessment at certain times to track my progress.
At some point, I noticed that I was on the right track and was reaching my milestones faster than expected. At this point, I also realized I had started to see the gym as an integral part of my habit stack and a way to ground me in the morning.
After a while, I shifted the focus from my Foundational Exercise Milestones as Key Results to just the simple act of going to the gym and enjoying the way it made me feel. I still go to the gym every day when I wake up at 06:00.
Meditation ladder
A similar system applies to my goal of “Establishing Balance and Peace”. I have done a lot of meditation in the past, but when I started again in 2021, it had been ages since I’d had a good session. I knew that a good session wasn’t necessarily dependent on the duration, but I needed to gamify the experience to make it stick.
So I set a Key Result for the end of the year of being able to meditate for one hour. After that, I created a Meditation Ladder to increase my weekly meditation time and build up to one hour. Of course, meditating became part of my habit stack.
It took some time and a few adjustments to find the proper habit stack that created enough flow to fit meditation in my life. I couldn’t find the right time of day when my mind was in a good place to sit down and close my eyes (without falling asleep or wandering in a million directions).
Subconsciously, I think this was one of my most significant challenges, and I knew I had to align all the stars and be in an excellent state of flow even to have a successful meditation session of a few minutes. Again, my daily Habit Stack and the fact that it was written down helped tremendously with this. I could rearrange, stack multiple habits, and tweak until I got the right configuration.
Other tools
Journaling / Note-taking
I have been journaling for many years. Sometimes every day, sometimes only when I needed to “unload,” so to speak. One of my best decisions last year was to make journaling part of my daily habit stack.
I still journal every morning, and I’ve designed a whole system around it (article coming soon). In short, I do a daily “Morning Dump” to unload all my thoughts and start the day fresh. As Tim Ferris puts it, “trap the monkey mind on paper”. It’s a game-changer.
After that, I have a “Weekly Journal” where I have sections for every day of the week. Every morning, I review my notes from the day before and iterate on them. I keep track of my to-dos, jot down ideas during the day, or make small notes.
Personal Kanban
My Weekly Journal also has a Kanban for projects and tasks. Because I use Notion for everything, I’ve made a Journal template that automatically loads the same database. That way, my Weekly Journal is fresh every week, but my Kanban carries over week by week.
I’ll write an article about how I organize my Personal Kanban soon, but I’ll now share that I organize my projects and tasks based on Urgency. I found that all I need to know if whether a project is Urgent or Not Urgent (next to a few other things).
Databases
I mention it in my Kanban segment, but I create databases like I get paid to do it. Every list, project, or system gets a database. In Notion, this has many advantages. For starters, it’s a more systematic way to organize things.
What I like most is uploading and viewing the same database into different documents, like my Weekly Journal. This is how I can have a new document to write down fresh ideas and put the resulting tasks and projects into the same database. It makes iterating on systems very easy.
Conclusion
Personal OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) have been the strategic, guiding principle for every system and habit I created for their life. I started by formulating a mission statement for 2022: “Build a foundation for the rest of my life.”
Then, I made an inventory of the different “departments” in my life (finance, physical, mental, relation, marketing, sustainability) and reflected on how each department’s objectives related to my overall mission.
I also shared some examples of systems I designed to achieve Key Results for my Objectives, such as my Expense system, Habit stack, and Foundational Exercise Milestones. Finally, I benefitted from a couple of additional tools to help me stay on track, such as daily journaling and creating databases (for Kanbans, for example).
I hope this creates some insight and you can get something out of it for your own life. If you have any questions or want to start a conversation, please feel free to reach out directly by adding me on LinkedIn or post a comment below.
Cheers!
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