Speaker 1: Goal setting can seem like a fairly straightforward process. You likely write down whatever you want to achieve and then begin to do what you can to reach that goal. But somehow there still seems to be a lack of direction in our approach which significantly diminishes our chances of success. In order to truly have a shot at accomplishing those goals, we need to have a way to measure our progress and achievement. And this is where the OKR framework comes in. OKR, or Objectives and Key Results, is a goal setting framework that was initially developed by Intel Corporation CEO Andrew Grove and Man of the Year in the 1970s. Grove introduced the OKR concept to Intel as a way for the company to improve its success rate for meeting its objectives throughout the organization. Since then, OKR has grown in popularity in the corporate world, having been adopted by businesses like Google, Netflix, Twitter, and Airbnb. The essence of this framework is to set challenging or ambitious goals with measurable results, starting out with your objective. Simply put, an objective is what you are striving to achieve. It is your main goal that informs your actions and process. The objective can be thought of as the what that you are working to accomplish. For every objective, you have 2-5 key results. The key results are the benchmarks that you use to help track your progress. They serve as metrics of your success and indicate whether you are heading in the right direction. They can be thought of as the how you are going to achieve your objective. Now there is obviously a clear distinction between your objective and key results. Objectives set the direction that you are heading in and should not contain a metric, while key results often provide the measure to gauge that progress. For instance, one of my objectives was, increase my knowledge of personal finance and improve my relationship with money. My key results would be, read 3 books on personal finance by the end of the year, create a 6-12 month emergency fund to provide me with some security, and contribute consistently to a retirement account. Each one of these key results gave me tangible goal posts that I could have my eye on and work towards that would ultimately get me closer to my overall objective. John Durer, an early investor in Google and perhaps the main reason for OKR's popularity, has described the structure of an OKR as, I will blank as measured by blank. The first blank being your objective and the second blank being your key results. He's also gone on to say that many of us approach goal setting in the wrong way because we don't move towards these goals with a sense of purpose and inspiration. At first look, one may think that an OKR is suspiciously similar to your run-of-the-mill KPI or Key Performance Indicator, but KPIs are generally used as reporting measures that have less to do with goal setting. They also tend to be less specific since they aren't objective tied metrics. I think that's what sets the OKR method apart, that we often get lost in pursuing our goals simply as an idea or concept, but we don't generally have results to quantify our approach and improve the odds of us actually achieving that goal. Now, there are plenty of things that pop up in our schedule that we need to take care of, but having an idea of what your OKR is also gives you the ability to manage your tasks better and see whether these spontaneous items are actually moving you towards your major objectives. In my experience, using the OKR framework has helped me focus on what I'm trying to accomplish. If there are others that I'm collaborating with or working with, knowing our goals and benchmarks has helped us become better aligned with what we're striving for. The great thing is that this framework is flexible because you can use it to evaluate what's working with regard to your aspirations and along the way you'll be able to track where you're succeeding and where you might be falling short. And that's the whole point, that you learn from each attempt at a goal and use actual metrics to know where you can pivot and improve as you keep moving forward. Thanks so much for watching. Drop me a like down below if you found this video helpful and subscribe with your notifications turned on for more on how you can up your productivity all day, every day. See you next time.