Last year I quietly practiced personal OKRs for a year,
and the start of this year is the time for review.

Introduction

When I wrote 《These Are My 2018 OKRs》 last year,
I was just in an excited phase having learned this skill from various channels,
so I set down with great excitement several (in my own opinion) very ingenious little goals.

Over the year, my gains were not small.
The deepest impression was the effective help that persistent self-examination provides for personal growth,
or in other words, “the power of persistence.”

Things like OKRs are like elementary schoolers’ fantasies about future careers,
something both wonderful and easily-shattered.
The key isn’t how the goals are set,
but how the person setting goals cognizes their goals.

For example, one of my annual goals was “help strangers 50 times.”
This made me unable to walk steadily on the street, always looking around to see if anyone needed sky-falling help.
(In the end I also incidentally completed quite a few mundane achievements of picking up trash and throwing it in the bin)

Review

Last year’s OKRs were like this:

  • O1. Greatly improve technical influence
    • Learn/understand/use/master 6 technical tools
    • Become the main contributor of a 1k+ star project
    • Output 20 technical articles
    • Have my own code project with 233+ stars
  • O2. Make significant contributions to my career
    • Team OKR completion rate above 80%
    • Review 100k lines of code
    • Be the interviewer for 300 interviews
    • Become top 1% of the whole team
  • O3. Maintain a state of full happiness
    • Total voice call time with family over 1000 minutes
    • Arguments with girlfriend fewer than 3 times
    • Help strangers up to 50 times
    • Add 500 red-heart songs

Very simple, just look at three points.

Technical Influence

For technical influence, it actually deviated significantly from the direction I envisioned,
the main reason being: throughout 2018 I was responsible for an entire team, not just for myself.
One big difference is before I could very actively grab the dumpster,
then gain direct experience in frontline business tech training,
and quickly level up.
Now much of the time I need to moderately distribute the dumpster,
then let teammates train in the frontline business tech,
so comrades with different demands can find their balance between individual and company.
So there was deviation in the direction of the Objective,
and the completion situation of Key Results deviated even more.

In terms of technical tools I encountered a lot more in the year than I thought,
not only had deeper use of language frameworks libraries (Python/Django/ZeroMQ),
but also gained further awareness of project schedule cooperation and even upward and downward management.

And in public output, since the year’s free time was basically dedicated to my career (meaning work),
open source this year only naturally grew to 200 stars,
and I only wrote 18 articles in a year,
overall, I’d give myself 70 points for this item.

Career Contribution

I think the investment in career in 2018 gave me huge returns.
Although over the year, the department’s career didn’t board a rocket, my department brothers didn’t get promoted, raised, or shared prosperity,
but currently, our future is still very promising.

From the giving side, Review 100k lines of code is definitely done,
just the code I wrote in the past half year is over 10k lines.
300 interviews as interviewer is also achieved,
but this KR was actually poorly set,
because its realization depends entirely on company hiring plans and HR sisters working hard on resumes.
For the team part there’s no first-hand data to verify,
but the thing I’m most proud of is that everyone in our team consistently maintains very high R&D standards,
no broken-window effect, and the atmosphere is great, making me love working here.

And from the gaining side, what I gained most was various kinds of indirect experience.
Including not only tech stack choices, some experiments in team cooperation, project management tool experiments,
but also requirement analysis, design reviews, and even strategy formulation with the founder that I listened to throughout the year from the product team.
If past-me only had confidence in “zero to one,”
now-me also has full confidence in “one to ten” and even “ten to a hundred.”

Overall, I actually paid the most on this goal,
and correspondingly the gains were the biggest.

Happiness

Actually when adding this item to the OKRs at the time,
I had a sort of dismissive “small thing, just adding it for everyone to see” thought.
As long as people are content, it’s easy to reach a happy state.
Of course, the facts of the year also validated my thoughts.

When I first started practicing the goals,
I gradually realized another thing:
“What the heart wants will echo in the subconscious.”

For example I set myself “total voice call time with family over 1000 minutes.”
What does this mean?
Subtracting Chinese New Year, the year has about 50 weeks.
If you call home every week,
each call keeping to 20 minutes is enough.
So back then when I called home weekly I paid special attention,
and arrived at a conclusion that stunned me:
“Without actively taking up topics, calls with home can’t reach 20 minutes.”
Like the chicken soup says, family love is a phone cord that distant and thin.

Overall, I’m very satisfied with the completion of the happiness goal.
At year end my NetEase Cloud red hearts also successfully grew to 2500,
and gave me a feeling that I’d listened through the Cloud Village.

Future

After seriously going through last year’s OKRs,
I feel this thing called time,
is truly delicious when consumed.

I haven’t thought through this year’s goals yet,
but one thing should be unchanged,
write more articles, record my own thoughts,
then produce echoes of black ink on white paper.

After all, the eternal method,
is carving in stone.

(End)