OKR for Life

My simple solution to manage productivity and push myself across multiple spheres of my life

I am a fan of planning. I enjoy making long lists, experimenting with yearly journals, finding the right calendar template to manage work, personal life, events and more. I have tried many things from TinyChange life planner to multiple Trello boards in an attempt to manage my personal productivity. Even though often I would achieve only a portion of what I would set out, but I still feel these different methods have helped me push myself, keep track of what’s important and at times given my tangible proofs of my progress to look back at.

Today I want to share one of these methods that have greatly helped me over years. I call it OKR for life.

What is OKR?(pls skip the para if you already know this). OKR is short for Objectives and Key Results. It is a common planning tool used in the software industry by product managers to track progress of software being built. Objective stands for the overarching objective that the software is set to achieve and key results stand for measurable outcomes for the objectives.

The simple concept: OKRs for life mean setting objectives on an overall level from what you want to do and then breaking it down into measurable actions i.e. key results. It is as important for the key result to be measurable and trackable as it is for the objective to be broad and wholistic. I do this exercise on a yearly/half-yearly basis.

Sharing my method here but everyone can define what works best for them.

Step1: I broke down my life into different segments and subsegments that I wanted progress in :-

Step2: I setup my broad objectives and measurable key results in all the subdomains

(sharing few examples)

Step3: Based on the key results I wanted, I made detailed trackers to measure my progress on a daily/monthly basis

As it can be seen in the illustrations, I would often lose track in a few months and reprioritize things (making new half yearly OKR sheets). But this method helped me achieve some significant life milestones like -

1. Cut my binge watching time significantly (it was a serious problem for me at one time)

2. Made me a reader (I attempted 100 days reading challenge through it)

3. Keep track of things that are important but I ignore (like hair care)

4. Do thinks that were in my wishlist but I never acted on it (like writing articles, trying a new style of choreography)

Thanks for reading this :) Hope this helps other meticulous trackers out there looking for different methods to improve their lifestyle. Would love to know what works best for different people as I am still learning and keep experimenting vividly on this front. I would also love feedback on how to improve this piece and my overall writing, TIA for that :) :)

In the end, a question to leave you all with - In your busy lives filled with multiple meetings and infinite to-dos - are you tracking what matters?