The quest for achievement
I'm not really into making New Year's resolutions, I get the idea, but they're a bit too vague for me. I do have goals to achieve though. The challenge is managing them, staying on track, and knowing how well I'm doing.
This year, I decided to try out the OKRs framework to make my goals more concrete and easier to keep tabs on.
I won't get into the details of the framework here, there are plenty of helpful resources online. Here are a few I found useful:
Just do a quick search and you'll find ones that work for you.
Defining objectives wasn't easy. My goals seemed clear in my head, but when it came to describing them and figuring out the key results (KRs) to achieve them, it took a lot of effort. Still, it's the most helpful thing to do. I have to break down my goals and figure out how to reach them.
Once I had my objectives (I chose two for this quarter), I made myself define around 10 KRs for each one. Then, I narrowed it down to the three most useful ones.
After that, it's all about tracking your KRs. And behave to achieve them, of course. I decided to use Notion to jot them down, and an Android habits app to help me stay consistent.
Notion is a powerful tool that you can customize however you like, but I didn't want to start from scratch. I found a template by Austin Yang that I tweaked a bit to fit my needs. It includes a handy countdown to remind me of the time left in the year, quarter, and month to keep me on track.
My workspace structure looks like this:
- Main dashboard (similar to Austin's, but without the daytime widget)
- Books to read
- Courses to take
- Sources to finish reading
- Tools
- Projects (a kanban board for all my projects, organized by labels)
Each section of my workspace is designed to help me reach my goals, either directly or indirectly.
The template also includes a quarterly reminder to review my OKRs because things change, I change, and my goals may need adjusting.
As the theory suggests, my goals are ambitious. They're not impossible, but they're definitely challenging given my current daily life.
The first review of the year is coming up soon, and I'm feeling pretty positive about it. We'll see how it goes!
