A while ago I listened to a teacher’s very thorough explanation of OKR.
Really benefited a lot.

Prelude

When the teacher introduced the topic,
he used “whack-a-mole” and “firefighting” as examples.
The following is the original wording, processed through memory:

If I asked you to think,
what are the three main things you did last year,
can you count them?

Many people can’t count them.

Because many times without goals or plans,
what we do is easily like whack-a-mole:
this one thing pops up, very urgent, so do that first;
then another thing pops up, has prospects, so do that.

Or to use another metaphor,
suppose we have to pass through a place that’s on fire everywhere
to reach our destination.
Then if we plan well,
we only need to put out the fires on our route.
What about the other fires?
Let them burn.

(At the time PM Xiao Yu said she found this passage very moving, learned a lot)

Through this little story,
the point is that setting goals is itself meaningful.

So how to set specific goals?
Of course, that’s OKR.

OKR

Actually, last time chatting with Little Mia,
I’d already learned about OKR.

Hearing the teacher explain it again this time,
two parts left a deep impression.

One part is OKR’s nature:

OKR’s full name is Objectives and Key Results.
It can be compared to KPI (Key Performance Indicator).

KPI directly ties to performance reviews,
while OKR definitely doesn’t tie directly to performance reviews.

When the teacher got to this point,
I heard a sentence that shook me deeply:
The reward of work is the work itself

This belongs to the kind of thing I understood,
but couldn’t express plainly in language before,
and got beaten to the punch by someone else.

Very scientific.

The second part that left a deep impression is OKR’s characteristics:

  • Objective (O) should be, within a certain timeframe, qualitative, inspirational, achievable.
  • Key Results (KR) should be quantitative, factual, challenging.

Uh, examples would be many,
too lazy to write so I won’t…
Just look it up yourself.

My 2018 Annual OKR

After several days of thought,
the OKR I set is as follows:

  • O1. Significantly increase technical influence
    • Learn / understand / use / master 6 technical tools
    • Become a main contributor to a 1k+ star project
    • Output 20 tech articles
    • Have my own code project with 233+ stars
  • O2. Make major contributions at work
    • Team OKR completion rate above 80%
    • Review 100k lines of code
    • Be the interviewer for 300 interviews
    • Become the top 1% of the entire team
  • O3. Maintain a state of overflowing happiness
    • Total voice chat time with family over 1000 minutes
    • Fewer than 3 arguments with girlfriend
    • Help strangers 50 times
    • Add 500 new favorite songs

Yep! Roughly like that.

Starting from today, the clock starts ticking~