10 Steps to hold yourself accountable, today, for your future self.
As mentioned in the last issue of the Curiosity Sunday Newsletter, we will be reframing the OKRs framework for personal life goals and explain why further down. "Objectives and Key Results," are known to be a goal-setting framework that helps organizations and individuals align their work with specific, measurable goals. It involves setting both long-term and short-term objectives, and then identifying key results that will be used to measure progress towards those objectives.
I have been leveraging this framework since 2020 as an accountability system in my personal life projects and this piece is a summary of the process in bullet points.
Why are we doing this?
Becoming more intentional with our goals and progress.
Building consistency and perseverance, with a top-bottom balanced system, starting from the “why” to the daily habits we are implementing, rooted in who we’d like to become as a person.
OKRs helps with: the WHY? and the HOW? Is doing X serving me in Y aspect of who I want to become? It’s about intrinsic motivations, while reflecting more often to re-prioritize and align with our values over time.
Being proactive, productive and building mindfulness, all at the same time.
It’s been proven in Psychology studies that frequently monitoring progress towards goals increases chances of success .
Where can this be used?
All areas of life, building a workout habit, reducing stress, building financial freedom or creating your next multi-million dollar business.
A step-by-step of a simple first version, with questions and prompts to help in the process:
1. Start with couple reflections from last year.
Collecting data points is important to start with and to develop an introspective mindset. Reflecting over last year will give you more substance to work with for the next steps: What went well? and what could have been better?
2. Define your objectives (your North Star).
Who do you want to be/become as a person?
What are the core values you’d like to focus on this year?
High-level traits/skills/values allow you to have a direction, a steady reference every time you lose purpose and need a reminder, a boost to why you are doing what you are doing. This way, you can always find your way back and give yourself much more grace when “life happens”. It builds towards the consistency and persistence that makes the difference.
3. List a number of areas you’d like to work on, e.g. :
Personal well being,
Financial well being,
Professional growth,
Relationships,
Books,
Learnings,
…
4. In each area, list the big picture around how you’d like to tackle it.
This is a brain-dump of all the aspects you are considering to improve on and a mix in granularity of actions.
5. Looking at the big list in 4. , add a new section “Focus of the year” with the most important and urgent items on a time scale.
Make a reasonable choice for the number of items. Remember this is a trial and error when it comes estimations, the more you use the system, the more you adapt it to your way of functioning.
I’d suggest 5/6 items to start with.
6. Set up 4 new sections for each quarter of the year, under each quarter, add a section for each of the 3 separate months.
Having multiple layers of timelines, starting at the year, moving into the quarter, then the month, leaves space for reflection and accountability to come back to the “plan” every month and track the progress, re-evaluate the practices deployed, re-prioritize if anything came along to shift gears - life happens! Taking that into account means a better handle over mental health, hence a more sustainable progress and execution plan towards what’s most important to you over time- .
Let’s assume we are in Q1 of the year January-February-March section:
7. Choose items from the focuses of the year, break them down into more tangible progressive actions.
8. From the quarter breakdown, pick 2 focuses of the year, move into the current month and breakdown the actions into more granular tasks, of the order of one day, or one week at most.
Each month, have 2/3 action items around maximum 2 main focuses of the year.
9. Add your assessment criterias at the end of each quarter.
Create a list of “successes” and one for “learnings”. I usually highlight one in green and the second in orange for visual mapping.
These keep you accountable for the “progress” celebrating the small wins, the “feel-good” moments that gives a boost towards moving forward with further steps. They keep you accountable for the mistakes you need to learn from and the practices that worked well, which you should be doing more of. It gives perspective in times when the mind naturally goes into rabbit holes of “not doing enough” and giving up.
Bonus Tip:
10. Setup a color code, emoji code, visual components for the system to make you feel the most visually satisfied with your progress and move forward, a mantras’ section for extra motivation also helps - #mindhack!
Considerations and perspective:
Leave room for re-prioritization and flow.
Some individuals are more comfortable with breaking down the whole year, others are less overwhelmed breaking down one quarter at a time at the smallest granular level.
Iterate over what works for you and what doesn’t, maybe less or more breakdowns by week/day (I use a bullet journal for that).
From personal experience, I realized some of my big theme intentions in the first “big list” (step 4.) manifest themselves in ways I couldn’t have predicted before, they align with the intentions but in new ways -. Leaving room for flow allows me to incorporate them progressively.
It’s about progress, iterations, reflections.
Some things will seem to be important in January, they can take the backseat in May because another aspect of life came up to be more important for the bigger picture. We get far more data points within that 5 months time period.
Don’t be afraid to re-evaluate focuses, which is one aspect I have loved about this framework. Everything is laid down in front of me and it’s easy to flow around and move things around as they seem appropriate at a given time.
Use this strategy as a boost in favor of your life goals, long or short-term. This is a starting point and positive energy from where consistency is built, and habits stick. It’s about intrinsic desires rather than external checklists. If this is your first time with this level of accountability, or resetting your intentions in a new way, it will be challenging, but with time, it’ll get easier.
Remember “What got you here, won’t get you there”. So what habits are you breaking and what are you adopting to grow towards your future self?
This is a simple version to start with the reflections and setting up the process for the first time. In a more advanced adoption of the OKR framework, you can go further by implementing status and progress rates to assess the risk of completion for each Objective. That can be more beneficial when it is used for a business project and/or managing a team.
Let me know how this helps you in your endeavors, shoot me a message here .
Stay curious, Stay unique & talk soon!
Oumaima Talouka