Measure What Matters: Transforming Personal Goals with OKRs

In my previous blog post, I shared my journey of rediscovering my love for reading fiction and horror books.  Another part of this journey has me to focusing on reading books about business, career, and technical subjects. As someone who works in IT, I am always looking for books that could help me grow professionally and stay relevant while also benefiting my personal life. One such book was Measure What Matters by John Doerr, recommended by my company as part of our performance review process. The book focuses on a goal-setting framework called OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), which we use to track progress and align our efforts.

While many colleagues mentioned that reading just the first few chapters would be enough to grasp the concept, I found that diving deeper into real-world examples from companies like Intel, The Gates Foundation, and even U2 gave me invaluable insights into how OKRs could be applied not only in business but also in personal growth.

Applying OKRs to My Health Journey

Inspired by the idea of setting clear, measurable goals, I decided to apply OKRs to a personal challenge: improving my health and fitness. With the end of the year approaching and my commitment to getting back into better shape, I realized that setting specific, trackable objectives would help me stay on track.

Here’s how I broke down my OKRs for better health:

1. Objective: Improve Overall Health and Fitness

• Key Result 1: Lose 1 pound per week
  • Weight loss can be tricky, but setting a small, achievable goal of losing one pound each week seemed like a manageable target. I started at 254.1 pounds and set my goal weight at 244.1 pounds for the end of the tracking period.
• Key Result 2: Work out 4.5 times a week
  • I wanted to maintain a consistent workout schedule. With my company’s wellness reimbursement needing 16 visits for 100% reimbursement, I aimed for 4.5 workouts per week. This gives me flexibility while still keeping me on track for consistent exercise.
• Key Result 3: Limit fast food consumption to 0.5 times per week
  • As a busy parent, fast food can sometimes be the easiest option, but I knew it wasn’t conducive to my health goals. I decided to limit myself to no more than one fast food meal every two weeks, giving me some flexibility without falling into bad habits.
• Key Result 4: Drink 100 oz of water daily
  • Staying hydrated is often overlooked in health routines. My goal was to drink at least 100 ounces of water a day, and I tracked this using a simple app to ensure I stayed consistent.

Tracking Progress

I created a simple tracking sheet to monitor my progress each week. While I started on November 6th, I plan to update my progress regularly in future posts to see how these OKRs help me stay accountable and improve my habits. I will be following the C25K app which helps train you to run a 5k by nine weeks, so using a 9 week model to track this.  Below is an image of my tracking sheet, but I had already imputed the first day before grabbing the screenshot.

Reflections on OKRs in Personal Life

One of the biggest takeaways from Measure What Matters was the idea of aligning objectives with measurable key results. The beauty of OKRs is that they’re specific, trackable, and tied to real outcomes. So far, applying this framework to my fitness journey has kept me focused and motivated. I’m excited to see how these small but meaningful changes will add up over time.

As I continue to track my progress with my first update for week one coming out next Monday, and I plan to share my updates every Wednesday after that.

What About You?

Have you ever used OKRs in your personal or professional life? Or perhaps you’ve read any books that had a lasting impact on you? I’d love to hear your thoughts and add more titles to my ever-growing “to-read” list!

How I read the book

I read the April 24^th, 2018 version of this book from Penguin publishing checked out from Libby (through my local library) on my Kobo Libra Color in the ePub format.  One thing I did notice is that it seemed more than ever off on the pages read to the percentage finished of this book from my lock screen on the kobo.  I remember thinking it was pretty off, and having to do the math from where I was.  While this gripe is for most non fiction books, I wish the appendixes in the back didn’t court toward the percent read, or the total pages of the book.