I was surprised to see how in-depth and detailed these objectives are. Not to knock the author, mind you; the dedication to breaking these things into granular tasks is impressive. Rather, I feel that there's little room for flexibility in taking an OKR approach to personal development.
Case in point, I had a personal objective to do more service in the community in 2020. The way I had envisioned the key results was more volunteering, more interactions with people, more things like spending weekends working on a Habitat for Humanity house or something of the like. The pandemic really disincentivized those kinds of in-person activities for the sake of the community, so I pivoted to identifying more causes I could donate to or provide help to in remote ways. It was hard, no doubt, and I was still disappointed that I didn't get to do the former things, but considering the circumstances it _feels_ like my original objective was achieved. The takeaway is that I think personal objectives that leave little room for flexibility are fighting an uphill battle from the start.
What you were thinking of before was not a KR. It was an individual task to achieve the KR. There is so much bad KR advice out there. Making each KR an individual task is exactly how OKRs (well its one way of doing that) fail in companies.
The objective you had was kinda fine even though it certainly has the connotation of volunteering in person. But if you just make the KRs something like "increase time I help the community by 5 hours per week" then the individual tasks can adjust without making you fail the OKR. Well sure you really envisioned doing a full "work day" each week for habitat for humanity. Covid hit so now you volunteer at the "teens in trouble hotline" for 8 hours a week. KR checked!
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That last statement is crucial.
I was surprised to see how in-depth and detailed these objectives are. Not to knock the author, mind you; the dedication to breaking these things into granular tasks is impressive. Rather, I feel that there's little room for flexibility in taking an OKR approach to personal development.
Case in point, I had a personal objective to do more service in the community in 2020. The way I had envisioned the key results was more volunteering, more interactions with people, more things like spending weekends working on a Habitat for Humanity house or something of the like. The pandemic really disincentivized those kinds of in-person activities for the sake of the community, so I pivoted to identifying more causes I could donate to or provide help to in remote ways. It was hard, no doubt, and I was still disappointed that I didn't get to do the former things, but considering the circumstances it _feels_ like my original objective was achieved. The takeaway is that I think personal objectives that leave little room for flexibility are fighting an uphill battle from the start.
What you were thinking of before was not a KR. It was an individual task to achieve the KR. There is so much bad KR advice out there. Making each KR an individual task is exactly how OKRs (well its one way of doing that) fail in companies.
The objective you had was kinda fine even though it certainly has the connotation of volunteering in person. But if you just make the KRs something like "increase time I help the community by 5 hours per week" then the individual tasks can adjust without making you fail the OKR. Well sure you really envisioned doing a full "work day" each week for habitat for humanity. Covid hit so now you volunteer at the "teens in trouble hotline" for 8 hours a week. KR checked!