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.
Today, between balancing life goals, family responsibilities, and professional obligations, I need organizational systems to hold it together. In another twenty years I don't think I'll need the same structures again.
For me, an organizational framework is the difference between reactive and pro-active. It need not be elaborate, but I need one to augment my own weakness and ensure that everything that needs doing gets done.
Same for me. I found it difficult to balance energy across work, life, wellness. My over focus on work meant I didn't get as much exercise in, which for me is an important outlet and endorphin booster. So would carry more work stress home. Ultimately built a simple notepad system for balancing which has improved my balance a lot.
Discipline is the only thing that allows my life to not completely fall apart. I believe it’s common in depression, to take an edge case, to lose “routine” either as a preceding or correlated or succeeding event.
Agree. On those mornings when I feel lazy, I've learned those are the game changing opportunities to exercise discipline. It's easy to stick to the plan when motivated. I find it empowering (and uplifting) to stick to the plan when unmotivated.
I can't speak for the author (and indeed, from his tone, I'm inclined to agree with you that perhaps he may need to let off the throttle a bit), but taking time to set non-work goals can lead to greater mindfulness about an activity, precisely because you've spent time considering it.
If I decide that "In Q1 2021, I will be biking precisely 3 out of 5 workdays a week to the office", this might not sound 'common sense humanity', but that fact does not then preclude me from enjoying the chill of the morning wind on my face once I'm on the bike. But if it helps me get on the bike in the first place, hey...it takes all sorts right?
“Bike 3 out of 5 days to the office” is a reflection of your goals as a human — fitness, enjoying the outdoors, whatever.
The problem is our natural inclination to be lazy and take the bus prevents us from accomplishing our desire to be healthier or enjoy the outdoors.
Having an explicit goal you measure the results of is a way to assess if you’re living the way you want to.
You’re captain here: no one is making you ride the bike — but if you want to ride your bike more, making that goal explicit and measured is a way to overcome your own internal conflicts preventing you from doing that.
My cool-headed long-term-thinking self wants to "eat well, go for a run", but my saturday morning self just wants to sleep in and have a donut. Some of us need some form of accountability structure to help our rational selves prevail over our self-sabotaging hedonist selves.
Habit forming works better. That’s why you don’t need a teeth brushing OKR. Or a dog walking OKR. Check out tiny habits.
I find performance metrics tiresome these days, especially at work. As a programmer you are doing creative and fairly reactive work, yet you are trying to please some performance metric written 2 months ago for the quarter, which with new information is BS so now you need to negotiate to ignore the metric.
I don't think those things are opposites. I don't exactly do personal OKRs, but I'm definitely working towards goals. To hit some of those goals, I build habits. And to build those habits, I carefully track how well I'm doing on that.
E.g., I had a goal of being more fit. I wanted a habit of daily exercise, so I set a target of 10k steps/day. My current streak is 33 days, but I'd say the habit is still forming. I'm going to shoot for 2 months and see how strong the habit feels then.
I do agree that bad metrics are terrible, though. My sympathies!
Be careful with streaks. There’s another thread on today (about phone addiction) that goes into more depth how streaks can be harmful, but as an anecdote, I had a 500+ day streak on my Apple Watch fitness rings until the watch developed a fault intra day and I didn’t notice til the end of the day, breaking the streak. There’s no way to reset that, or show me new streak information. So I gave up entirely. The pandemic didn’t start for another 3-4 months, by which time I’d given up already.
Fair point. Luckily, for me streaks become boring. They're just a tool for getting into a habit. Once I have the habit, I'll drop tracking the formal tracking of that particular metric. I really can only track so many things at once, and so I'll set some other goal.
> None of this needs a chart or a strategy or a plan. It's just common sense humanity.
For some folks. All sorts of different people in the world.
My wife needs a plan for every day. Not to the level of checklists and planning it out in software, but if she has an "open ended" day she doesn't do that well mentally and doesn't sleep well unless she has a mental model for the day coming up.
For me, I'm the opposite. I hate scheduled days, but I also know I need a bit of structure for myself otherwise it's easy for a long weekend to devolve into napping on the couch and posting to HN. My entire organization for this is just a simple TO-DO list where I toss a couple objectives of the day down in the AM while drinking my caffeine. It adds a tiny bit of order to an otherwise unordered personality and helps me move along my personal projects and social life.
Perhaps in the short time being more flexible and in the moment is better, while over time Marshall Goldsmiths maxim regarding goals not surrendered of “unrealized ambitions end up being frustrated yearnings for the soul” might hold.
Your solution sounds more European and likely better for overall satisfaction. However, if you for some reason did want to get to grade VIII on the piano and the ability to watch and notice the hues at sunset didn’t come with a mental cue to deep down legitimately let go of that (not to be Buddhist) inkling of desire, then you’re in trouble.
Frankly, if I'm not so driven to get to grade VIII on piano it's on my mind with or without fake goals, I don't really see the point of getting to there?
Sure, agree, but the more subtle second order point is that those unrealized potentially borderline subconscious things you set out for your self can accumulate and gnaw at you with low acuity yet chronically forever.
As a datapoint American garages are full of dormant dust covered dreams. It takes effort to donate that exercise bike or old piano to Goodwill because you have to face your demons that you will _never_ become that version of yourself, there's no future you that will be really fit, and without evidence I'll assert that it's that very conscious act which symbolically represents the destruction of ambiguity is difficult for most humans. So we go through our life with splinters serving as thorns we carry around forvever.
We're getting a little too foo-foo spiritual from here which is probably against HN rules, so I'll stop at that comment.
“Work Life Balance” is missing and item—Career. I don’t think it should be that hard to find the right balance between all three, and you should especially try to have career bleed into work more than life. But if you have any aspirations of getting promoted to a high level and making lots of money (I’m not saying you should have those aspirations), then it’s very likely you’ll need devote at least some of your free time to gaining skills and knowledge that will help you grow in your career.
I think people have begun to fetishize their actual plan. It's an excuse to not do any of the real "hard" work, but rather plan to do it. The planning feels great because it really isn't all that difficult. Look at all these colors and percentages! I'm doing something!
Obviously this isn't true for everyone. But I've found focused plans are much better than trying to juggle 3 million things. It'll lead to burnout.
Why did you assume that people are not enjoying life ? It is not a either or thing. You can relax and enjoy life with your families in nature and also spend some remaining time to reflect and strategize for a better future.
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.
Good question. I wish I had a more sophisticated answer, but everything I do is fairly low-tech. First, memory: this works for nearly everything in my case. Second, a whiteboard for grocery items, which I update as needed. Third, just keeping momentum going for my goals.
For what I might term "loftier" aspirations (diet, fitness, etc), I just make sure I am being consistent. Those things have to be built into your lifestyle, or at least, that is the only way I can get it to work. There was a time, for instance, when I did track my nutrition with a spreadsheet. But after a few months I realized I could manage it all within my head: I had gauged my daily macro needs, and could largely judge by eye, and it has worked for years since.
I have tried todo-style apps, as an example of where I have tried a more explicit approach. I find that they are just procrastination and delay lists for me. If I am not actively doing it already, with exceptions, it probably won't be done at all.
I keep my objectives in my head. No need to write this kind of thing down and keeping scores of myself. And whatever happens happens. I don't need to bog myself down with some corporate invention.
Couldn't agree more with this (and the OP). Life changes. All the time. What about your plan for Q2/Q3 2020 to finally do that world cruise you had been waiting to do all your life? Riiiiight.
Now having some sort of principles you live by and to keep yourself honest maybe write them down somewhere (read The 7 habits of highly successful people), sure. Quarterly goals with OKRs? Sorry that already doesn't work at work as no higher up or HR person ever has used them for good if you ask me. Bringing that to my personal life? Lol? 'Increase happiness of my family by 50% in Q1 2021'? Well duh, I don't need OKRs to know Covid sucks and I should try to make the kids life as normal and happy as I can without trying to even measure happiness. I had no personal OKRs ever and I built a tobogganing hill in the front yard (the slope helps) and I'm working on the skating ring (yes ring, like circles, not hockey rink :)) in the backyard. Yes I was keeping this in my head just fine.
An alternative “system” that unfortunately works with your criticism while still being a system is simply a value aligned “DIDMB” (did I do my best....to say something nice to my spouse? To start the day with clear goals, etc) question list self served at night.
A score of “10” on eating well might mean one thing while on PTO and another on a busy travel day where simply not grabbing the king size snickers at the airport convenience store is a massive win. So it’s relative to your ability and to the environment and to where you are that particular day.
I personally paid a young teen to call/text me daily with the question list for about a year and tremendously enjoyed it (as in benefited from it).
But sorry to agree with you by jamming another system in :)
Don't get me wrong, where necessary I totally agree that writing things down helps. That helps in a lot of places in life (like the principles mentioned if you choose so might help someone while for others that's not needed). Or writing down what I ate (sorry I really can't keep track of how many grams of carbs are in each of the things I eat and since I no longer do keto, which is easy to keep track of in rour head but only try to minimize carbs I need the written help).
But I don't see value in trying to measure how much better I did with not jumping to conclusions (which I see on the list he has in the article and I also keep an eye on this personally). But I don't think you need an OKR and try to make it measurable. I just need to consciously decide that I will keep a more open mind and inquire a few more times on whether I understood correctly and that the other person probably meant it in a good way. However badly formulated it was and how it came across. Then every time "something happens" and I handle it better than last time I can recognize that and pat myself on the back. Or recognize after that it all fell apart and I "judged back at them" and it spiraled out of control. Try to do better next time. Do I need to graph this and look at it and get myself down because I didn't do as well as I wanted to?
OKRs are meant to set goals that are somewhat unachievable. Like hitting 70% on your target is awesome. Sorry but I don't work that way. I'm not deadline driven. I'm task driven. I know I'm in a minority in that but if you give me an unachievable deadline in order to try to get me to deliver at the date you secretly thought was the real goal post then it's just gonna frustrate me and when I see you not using my results for another month or so because that was the real goal post then I'll definitely not give it my best next time. I can be selective that way.
As a task oriented person I just do whatever needs doing and do it in priority order in the best and fastest fashion I can. If your deadline is in two weeks but I got nothing higher prio I'll deliver early by a week instead of procrastinating and then doing an all nighter to get it to you when the deadline is. I really really detest these deadlines people put. I just recently purposefully didn't push back on a stupid deadline and just gave way subpar results (I had 15 minutes with the team in between two other meetings for something where we should have spent about an hour to discuss properly. And I purposefully kept that time box very very well). You know what? They accepted and loved the results. Had they just put a reasonable deadline that took into account our sprint start and end times as well as the internal hackathon happening that week...
Did I mention I turned in my master thesis a week before the deadline?
I keep it simple. Choose a couple things to focus on and write those down in my planner (pen and paper). Lately it’s been:
- read more books, especially biographies and histories
- spend time with my kids
- write a blog post or essay once a month
Outside that, I don’t get much more specific. Work is already busy enough to juggle. I don’t need another thing to juggle. I’m not interested in forcing that much structure on my time outside work. I try to prioritize simple things that make my family or myself happy.
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.
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.
What you were thinking of before was not a KR. It was an individual task to achieve the KR. There is so much bad KR advice out there. Making each KR an individual task is exactly how OKRs (well its one way of doing that) fail in companies.
The objective you had was kinda fine even though it certainly has the connotation of volunteering in person. But if you just make the KRs something like "increase time I help the community by 5 hours per week" then the individual tasks can adjust without making you fail the OKR. Well sure you really envisioned doing a full "work day" each week for habitat for humanity. Covid hit so now you volunteer at the "teens in trouble hotline" for 8 hours a week. KR checked!
> 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.
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.
Not that I'm a particular David Allen GTD fan (and really am not much of a "methodology" person in general) but one of the handful of his ideas I really did like was the idea of breaking down projects into specific actionable tasks. Whether it's losing weight or getting better organized.
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.
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 completely agree. At work they never work out because there are inevitably so many detours. OKRs do nothing but reveal that management know nothing about the environment they're managing. Unfortunately, when the fad does pass, you know some other nonsense fad is going to arrive on the scene. If only people would stop with fadding.
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.
My current structure for tracking a contribution to an OKR item (e.g. "meditate") by date (e.g., 2020-01-15) and amount (e.g., "1") is simply:
"# date item amount"
Easy to open, easy to plop down today's date and the item / amount. Save multiple date/item entries and add them inscripts ... Easy to save. Done.
The work came in building stuff to plot it:
I have other files that link "items" to goals or other metadata like categories, etc. Like a relational database, but easily edited in text.
For example, to make a link from daily items to Key Results
"# item okr"
The OKR categories are usually Fighting (I box), Tech, Mental health, and Social, but YMMV
Another example is "workout-mapping.vnl" with structure:
"# item muscle-group factor"
etc etc.
vnlog has nice vnl-join commands that quickly build the table and all linked metadata and output formatted text (one command). Then reading that in R is easy ...
```
data <- read.table('../2020-Q4-OKR.vnl',skip=2,stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
```
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.
>Well meaning no doubt, but relationship quality just doesn't lend itself to quantisation like that.
Granted, but sometimes you can find proxies and variables that increase the likelihood of success if you hit them consistently. For example, what's "successfully land an aircraft"? It's a sequence of hitting certain parameters within certain time windows that, when you do that, result in a smooth, successful, landing. Successful landing is a "lagging indicator".
There are many things, even in "artistic performance", that are a sequence of consistently hitting a target within a certain tolerance, at a specific time, etc.
In the workplace, you may have the problem of having a quality relationship with your colleagues or "reports". You may not be able to "quantify" that easily, but you can have regular one on ones in a relaxed enough setting that lead to candid conversations that unearth problems early enough that you can effectively solve them. The relationship quality is a lagging indicator, if you will, of what has been done upstream.
What I have found for myself is that I easily fool myself into applying these kind of frameworks for everything in my life, because every problem can be a nail for the OKR-shaped hammer. Some problems are better approached in different ways though. It's a valuable tool to have in the mental toolbox but it is also good to have a variety of approaches to choose from when confronted with a new problem or task.
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.
the main benefits of OKRs might be transparency and alignment, not having a quantifiable goals. I am dating without much success for more than one and a half years now, and I have yet to meet someone who might be open to build something together. I regularly spend money on platforms like tinder, veggly, okcupid with a hope that despite corona, it might contribute to such a development. Still I did not put much effort in my activities there, as I wantee to keep it playful and not follow up on it as I would with a "real goal". I feel unhappy about my lack of progress in this area and I hope that for this new year, acknowledging it as a committment will help move this forward.
Thanks for the ideas, my post was intended as an example why personal OKRs might be helpful -to align existing efforts, become aware of them and invest time with more care and purpose.
I am not looking for dating advice here, nor assumptions about my supposed views on women or my other activities in that area. There is a pandemic going on and my former social life outside is frozen, there were positive and inspiring encounters through dating apps and I even met a few friends there over the years. I am glad that more opportunities to meet new people online are slowly emerging (or more people discover them) such as zoom/gathertown meetups, discord groups etc, even as they can't replace dancing.
On this topic I will share my humble observation. Women are mythical creatures, they come and they go. One big lesson in life that I have learned, the only winning strategy is never to overestimate yourself and move quickly when they give you a signal.:) There is one problem in making this a commitment - the outcome is not in your control. There is a limit in projection when other peoples are involved.
Note: Don’t use dating apps or services. They are really dangerous. Find other ways to connect.
Generalisation is just generalisation. It has usage in my view. I cannot elaborate further without making more controversial comments. For me they are mythical creatures because they are the gateway of life, and I have learned with time to listen and be aware for signals in communication. The assumption that I as a men know everything because of my rational and have tangible results is "overestimation". Women are feeling first, they have a different sensitivity and intuition for things. Thats why I love them, they provide meaningful point of view with empathy (wired in biology and very important).
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.
I’d like to see this added to the system. At my company, every goal has a “POC” – point of contact aka “owner” or “partner”. I think you should add a partner to each goal – a person who will rate you on the objective. The objectives are what matter. e.g. if you hit 6 hrs time with gf, but she still thinks you are rubbish , you haven’t made any progress on the “strengthen relationships with gf” objective.
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.
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.
Its an area that I've neglected a lot in my adult life. I started off the year saying I am going to at least read one book (any book) per month. Currently reading One World by Wendell Willkie FWIW. I don't mind if there is cross-over and if there is that's even better! All about easy goals and progress.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.