This may be an unpopular opinion on HN, but I just don't get it. The whole notion of setting personal goals, working out tasks and sub tasks and strategies and charts - like, you deal with all that stuff in your work life.

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.

Maybe I'm too cynical with regard to today's corporate practices, but what would be next? Maybe weekly tasks can be filed as Jira tickets? Burndown charts for how one's week went?

If it works for you, great, but this seems like something I would never want to import into my personal life.

First off, I like the exercise. I think it’s healthy as a form of journaling and more people should be introspective in this way.

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.

OKR is probably one of the worst fads to happen to project management and software engineering.

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"

I've used OKR for 7 years, on a quarterly basis. I had simple markdown files at first, then vnl-log files, and now R notebooks (https://github.com/dkogan/vnlog) to read / plot.

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 cannot imagine structuring my (non-work) life like this. Nothing would suck the joy/play/freedom out of my leisure time faster. Happy for you if it works for you though.

Appreciate the spirit of the post and wish the author success. Well-meaning comments here ridicule the idea of structuring personal goals, either in this way specifically, or entirely. They ask, why not just live your life?

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.

What I like about OKRs is that it really focuses on providing ways to clearly specify your goals and measure whether you are achieving them. This is also its biggest weakness, since "Key Results" that cannot be expressed as continuous, clearly measurable values will suffer. This leads to cold-seeming Initiatives like the "Connect to the girlfriend for at least six hour-long sessions." from the blog post. Well meaning no doubt, but relationship quality just doesn't lend itself to quantisation like that.

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.

Wow, just wow. Someone contributed to OKR getting a wife. I am blown away. I will never quantize some parts of my life. Work is work. Learning is learning. There are a lot of methodologies for GTD, but in my experience balancing order with improvised chaos is healthy practice :)

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 have a pretty extensive personal system partially based on OKRs but I find the key element is doing the exercise as a group and having accountability partners.

Pretty interested in whether people are getting more mileage out of specific, SMART-type goals (like the ones in the article), or more open ended ones as described here [0].

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-...

[1] https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/#Comptools

This is how I've decided to do my goals for the year. I split mine into 4 categories: personal, professional, physical, and reading. And then do monthly goals for each and track what I do per day. I don't have to do something in each category every day or even have to do anything any day. It's just helpful for me to see if I am slacking in an area over a stretch of days. The idea is to keep the goals fairly easy to accomplish and not plan more than a month out so I can pivot.

I’m amused by the contrary positions a lot of folks seem to be taking here. Either people agree with the author, and think personal goal setting and measurement helps actually accomplish tasks, or people are astonished that someone would live so structurally. On both sides it seems like there’s bewilderment at the other - what kind of monster would live like this?

It reminds me how different people are, and how much we need empathy even with something like how people set personal goals.

I think writing down your objectives and results you'd like to achieve are good. Writing them down is itself a form of positive thinking and self-help; they're "just" words, and there's no limit to what you can write.

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.

Live a little. Put the business bullshit away.

I really like this but some of your objectives don't have a timeline attached. For example, "Write 10 reviews on twitter". I would have liked to see a parenthetical "(1 per week for 10 straight weeks)" or "(within 60 days)". Without this its hard to put concrete tasks on a calendar.

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'm all for self-improvement (no to self-optimization, though), but I find phrasing this in corporate productivity terms to be somewhat problematic. Six Sigma Your Life?

With regard to your juggling KR, I learned by a method of breaking it down that I found very helpful and learned from a book that I can't remember the title of, and would like to relate here.

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.

I’m doing the same this quarter and looks like a very similar setup. However, I don’t think I could handle managing that many objectives and try to keep it to at most three. That way I spend time really reflecting on what actually matters.

Leave it to an engineer to automate self improvement by building a complicated system instead of just spending that time doing the improvement. Just how I like it.

What is your morning workout routine?

The Viv Savage OKR.

This is doing “it” wrong. Set up SMART goals and follow through. It’s painfully simple.

That last statement is crucial.

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.

> But for an individual, i think the bigger challenge is motivation, discipline, dedication, commitment.

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

It's just a variation on stuff like "making SMART goals". It's a framework for breaking down your goal into identifiable steps and finding ways to check your progress early, instead of saying "this year I'll lose weight" and checking back on December 30.

I think the common element in both cases is building clarity and focus.

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.

There are usually more obviously good and desirable things than I have the bandwidth to accomplish in one time period; it's useful to pick the subset that will be my current focus.

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.

> we all know we need to lose weight and reduce BMI

This is not only untrue but is actively harmful to those with lighter bodies.

Can you share more about your process? I'm very interested in learning more. How do you track your daily data points?

Any books you recommend along these lines?

This is how I learned. The most important step here is selection of the right thing to juggle. Nothing adds more difficulty (well, maybe riding a unicycle). The hackysack was made for this. The heft and size are perfect, especially when you move to having two in one hand and one in the other (the juggling starting position). After that, it is all muscle memory. After I got the basics, I would go out in the yard and just do laps while juggling. Before a week or so I was able to juggle fairly well with three identical objects, then figured out doing different sizes and weights together. At some point, I realized girls were not going to be impressed enough by this skill to overcome the other deficiencies I had, and I stopped. :)