Measure What Matters

Measure What Matters teaches you how to implement tracking systems into your company and life that will help you record your progress, stay accountable, and make reaching your goals almost inevitable.

First, let’s recognize that this book teaches these skills primarily to businesses. But don’t let that stop you from finding ways to implement the lessons here in your personal life!

We also want to make sure to understand what OKRs even are right up front. First, you set your objectives, or your longer-term goals. In the case of Intel, they had an objective to become the best in their industry. As you can see, this part is a little more vague. You can think of it more like your vision of where you want to end up.

The second part of an OKR is the key results, or KRs. One of Intel’s KRs, for example was to get one of their processors to be used in other companies products ten times. This perfectly sums up the more concrete next-steps of this part of OKRs. Another way to look at it is like the plan for how you will achieve your objectives.

We see a similar system in The 12-Week Year. Here, the authors refer to lead indicators, which is what you track, and lag indicators, which is your end goal. In other words, an objective is a lag indicator and a key result is a lead indicator.

To make the best use of this system, record your progress on KRs frequently. Then occasionally review how they’re helping you get closer to achieving your objective. This way you will constantly have information on how you’re doing while also maintaining the ability to modify your long-term objective.

I use a personal tracking system to help me keep up with my own objectives quarterly and key results daily. Sometimes I find that midway through a quarter, I need to make some adjustments. This is easy to do because of the way I’ve set it up, which is a major benefit of OKRs as well. I check in with my progress on KRs every day, but if you’re running an organization you might do it a little differently. Google, for example, meets with employees monthly to review their progress on quarterly goals. In these sessions, they can review their progress, identify roadblocks, and make updates. There are four ways that you can change your OKRs if you find that they need modification: Continue Update Start Stop Continue is the most common outcome of a review. This option makes sense when your goal is running smoothly and you still feel that you want to end up where it’s taking you. But sometimes external factors…