You may have come across the term OKRs and want to know what it is and what’s it used for? Of not then I am going to give you a simple overview of the OKR framework and how it can help you measure your way to meeting your objective. 

OKRs stand for Objectives and Key Results and organisations such as Google, Amazon, Twitter and LinkedIn and other companies use this framework as a way to set measurable goals, alignment to business objectives and how to achieve them. 

The benefits of this framework help organisations to implement their strategy and improve focus and better alignment of employee’s objectives to organisations strategy.  You can also create your own personal OKR to keep you on track of meeting your goals rather than having it in a to do list or notepad. 

In my blog I am going to show you how you can create your own personal OKR and benefit from it to effectively track your goals and progress. 

What Are OKRs? 

In simple terms, OKR (Objective and Key Results) is a tool / framework for setting goals and achievable outcome. 

Big Technology companies are using this simple goal setting framework to align everyone’s objective to a common business goal. 

The great thing about this framework is that it can be used collectively for a team or business unit to meet its business goal or it can be use on an individual basis to build your own simple measurable and achievable goals. 

OKR is made up of two parts: 

Objective 

The objective is your high-level goal in what you want to achieve. Your objective should be something that can be measured. 

Key Results 

Key results are quantitative and is a way of measuring your progress against your objective. Think of it as what activities you need to do that will get you the key results that will get you closer to your objective. 

Each objective should have at least a maximum of five key results.  

OKR Examples

You are thinking, Fox show me an example, well here is a simple one.  So, since we have been working from home from March, I have not been able to get back to my regular exercise habit so I want to get fit and healthy, so below is how I would setup my OKR. 

Objective: Get fit and healthy 

Key Results 

KR1: Go to the gym at least 2x a week for the whole year 

KR2: Cook my own meals at least 3 times a week 

KR3: Run 10k every week. 

It’s as simple as that, and it’s better than setting a new year’s resolution as now you have a metric you can measure yourself against to help you know whether you are on target to meet your objective, in my case whether I will get fit and healthy. 

The most important thing when setting up your OKR is not to make unrealistic and not truly achievable, as this way you will set yourself up for failure.  However, do stretch yourself so that you can push yourself a bit by setting pushing your key results out a bit to push yourself.  

Below OKR is a copy of the above objective to get fit and healthy but this time I am pushing myself a bit more in the key results section. 

Objective: Get fit and healthy 

Key Results 

KR1: Go to the gym at least 4x a week for the whole year 

KR2: Cook my own meals at least 5 times a week 

KR3: Run 2k every week. 

I typically get asked if you can have more than one OKRs, yes you can but don’t have too many as you won’t be able to commit to them.   Having too many OKRs could be a distraction to meet your life goals.