A New Way to Set Goals: OKRs

Have you set SMART goals and continually failed to achieve them? I have. Are you as frustrated and tired as I am of achieving only a small percentage of those goals?

In my last post, “Focus and Direction,” I talked about a new strategy I applied to my business that brought me greater clarity to what I do every day. Today, I’d like to talk about a new way to set goals that supports greater focus: objectives and key results (OKRs).

I learned about this business practice recently from my professional development coaches (Life Is Now, Inc.) and have implemented it. OKRs are set for a year and then broken down into quarters. Since I implemented mine, I feel more empowered to succeed and motivated each day.

I consider each of you professional writers running an author business. Perhaps you don’t see yourself in that light, and that’s fine. At least skim this post because this method can be used for both personal and professional goals.

The Objective and Key Results

The idea is to set one objective you want to meet for the year, and then set 3 to 5 key results that will show you’ve met your objective (3 is best, but if you want only 1, do it).

“Only one objective?” you say.

Yes. You want to focus. With 3 or 4 objectives, nothing is important and you can’t bring sustained focus to any of them.

The objective is qualitative and inspirational. You want it to motivate you. You also want your objective to stretch you.

Key results tell you if you met your objective. Now we get quantitative, so you’re looking for results you can measure. You’re not creating a task list but results. Your KRs need to stretch you as well, so you rate them on a scale of 1 to 10 (1 being no way, Jose, will I accomplish this; 10 being this’ll be a slam dunk). You want your KR to be a 50/50 chance.

Examples

Yearly Objective: increase book sales so I can drop my full time day job to part time.
Example KRs:

• Brought in monthly Amazon royalties of $500/mo
• I held 4 live book selling events that sold $100 of books at each event
• Brought in monthly royalties from D2D of $200/mo

Once you have your yearly OKR, then you’ll break it out into quarterly.

Quarterly Example

Objective: increase book sales (your quarterly can be the same as your yearly)

KRs:

• Held a live book event and sold $50 of books
• Brought in $75 in Amazon royalties each month
• Brought in $20 in D2D royalties each month

Your KRs are going to prompt the question, If I were to hit these, what would need to happen? This allows you to brainstorm ways to get there, decide what to use, and set 1 to 2 priority tasks to accomplish each week to get you there.

WhatMatters.com says: “SMART goals provoke the question, ‘What is the goal?’ Yet OKRs ask, ‘What is the goal and how do we get there?’”

This might look complicated, but it really isn’t. Remember, you have a 50/50 chance of reaching your KRs. If you don’t, that’s okay. What did you achieve? Probably more than if you hadn’t set that KR. If you reach all your KRs, then you’re sandbagging yourself about what you can accomplish. Pump up those KRs for the next quarter.

When I reach the end of the quarter, I’ll give you brief update on how I did. Below are further resources you can read if you think you’d like to give this a try.

For further reading:

“OKRs Defined: The Ultimate Goal Setting Framework”
“What Is an OKR? Definition and Examples”
Radical Focus by Christine Wodtke (affiliate link)