1-Year Personal OKRs

Pick what this year is for, write three objectives with two measurable key results each, and decide what you will do this month. Then book the check-ins, because goals only steer while you look at them.

Goal-setting is strong research (Locke & Latham, 2002), and so are its side effects when goals are overused (Ordóñez, Schweitzer, Galinsky & Bazerman, 2009). OKRs are a practitioner format built on it (Grove, 1983; Doerr, 2018), with little study of their own. The number of objectives and the stretch level are rules of thumb.

Use it when:

• A new year, a new role or a new business is starting and you want a few goals that actually guide your weeks.
• You have a direction from 1.9 Personal Vision & Strategy Canvas and need this year's part of it.
• You keep ending the year busy but unable to say what changed.

Skip it when:

• You do not yet know what you want: start with 1.8 Workview & Lifeview or 1.9 Personal Vision & Strategy Canvas.
• Your goal is one skill: use 1.5 Skill Gap Map & Priority List, which plans practice and debriefs.

The research under this page is among the strongest in applied psychology: specific goals tend to produce higher performance than vague ones, by directing attention, raising effort and persistence and prompting a search for better strategies (Locke & Latham, 2002). The same literature records the side effects of overuse: strong goals pull attention onto what is measured and away from what is not. OKRs package that research for practice. They were built at Intel (Grove, 1983) and spread widely later (Doerr, 2018); the pairing of an objective with measurable key results has little scholarly study of its own, so treat the format as consulting practice on a well-evidenced base.

So Step 1 ties the year to your values and direction, because specific goals without meaning produce compliance, not drive. Step 2 asks for outcomes, not activities. Step 3 turns each objective into an action this month, and Step 4 books the check-ins. Keep at least one objective outside your career, since the year tends to deliver what you measure and the area you leave out is the one that slips.

Write one sentence about what this year should change, and tick the pages it builds on. If you cannot tick anything, the objectives risk being borrowed from your employer or your feed.

Strong answer: "This is the year I become someone senior people outside finance ask for, without losing my evenings." Not "have a great year."

This year is for:

It builds on: ☐ My workview and lifeview (1.8) ☐ My vision and goals (1.9) ☐ My career hypotheses (1.6) ☐ My balance check (1.19)

Illustrative example: the person and all numbers are made up.

A finance manager at a regional energy company in Sweden leads a team of five and wants a director role within two years.

Step 1: "This is the year senior people outside finance start asking for me, without losing my evenings." Builds on 1.8, 1.9 and 1.19.

Step 2:

• Objective 1, trusted beyond my team. KR 1.1: three leaders outside finance invite me into their planning (aspirational; today none). KR 1.2: lead one project across three departments to a board decision (committed; not started).
• Objective 2, think strategically. KR 2.1: my investment analysis is used in the board's long-term plan (committed). KR 2.2: shadow the CFO for a week and present what I learned to my team (committed).
• Objective 3, a full life outside work. KR 3.1: exercise three times a week in 40 of 52 weeks (aspirational; today about one). KR 3.2: fifteen days of leave with no email (committed).

Step 3: book time with the operations director; ask the CFO about shadowing; block Friday afternoons.

Step 4, Q1: KR 1.1 at one of three, behind. Adjustment: ask for two introductions through the CFO. KR 3.2 at zero: book the summer week now.