Self-strategy: A new approach to New Years’ Resolutions

For a while now I’ve been experimenting with applying the tools I use to set strategy at work to what I want to do with my own life. It started out as a thought experiment, but I’ve increasingly found these tools to be just as useful in helping me achieve what I want to do personally as they are in helping my company achieve its professional ambitions.

Over several years I’ve fleshed out different elements of my personal strategy:

• I have a long-term (50-year) career ambition which loosely sets my overall direction - this is my guiding light, and hasn't changed in the 5 years since I set it;
• I considered what I need from a job in the short-term in order to be working towards this ambition - this has helped me weigh up professional opportunities that have arisen;
• I articulated (and have since evolved) my own personal values - these guide me as I work towards my long term ambition;
• More recently, I’ve started holding annual(ish) personal strategy retreats where I go offline for a day or so to work through big questions about how I’m going against my ambition.

With these processes humming I wouldn’t normally set specific new year’s resolutions, but last year I’d just taken Future Super through it’s first proper strategic planning exercise using the OKR framework, so I thought I’d give it a go.

Quick explainer: OKRs

OKRs originated out of Google (you can read about it on their re:Work blog here) – it stands for Objectives and Key Results. The way I like to think about it in simple terms is:

• OBJECTIVE: Where do I want to get to by the end of the year?
• KEY RESULT: What measurable ways will tell me that I'm on track / have gotten there?

OKR-ing my new years resolutions

With the Future Super experience fresh in mind, I turned these questions on myself, and for 2019 I came up with 3 objectives that I would be stoked to have achieved by the end of the year:

1. Nourish my body
2. Nourish my mind
3. Minimise my impact on the environment

Within each objective there were some key results that would indicate whether I’d achieved my objectives. These were:

2019: a personal retro

Like any good strategic process, I had to make my personal OKRs live in my day-to-day. For me, they became guardrails as I worked through the year, and a benchmark to measure whether or not I was on track. As we did our quarterly check-ins on the Future Super OKRs, I did quarterly check-ins on my personal OKRs. At the end of the year I did a full retrospective (or retro) to work out how I’d gone. Here it is:

Objective 1: Nourish my body

Starting point: I’ve always been someone who’s taken joy from exercise and my health, but after several years in demanding corporate environments and then adding pregnancy / parenting on top of it, suffice it to say I was not living the way I wanted to – I hadn’t run for 5 years (despite previously running several times a week), I had done one ocean swim in 7 years (despite being a competitive surf lifesaver through to my mid-twenties), and I was surviving on take-away food eaten behind a laptop screen while working well into the evening. There was a lot of work to do.

Objective 2: Nourish my mind

Starting point: The effects of many years of demanding work environments and parenting a newborn was such that I couldn’t even remember the last book that I’d read that didn’t have to do with either work or parenting. And as fascinating as The Founders’ Mentality or Save our Sleep are, I was craving stimulation outside of these areas.

Objective 3: Minimise my impact on the environment

Starting point: As with my comments under objective 1, my reliance on take-away food and coffee was generating a huge environmental impact. There were some weeks (OK, many weeks) when I was in consulting where I would buy breakfast, lunch and dinner – that’s about 10-15 coffee cupss, 20-30 plastic take-away containers, and a bunch of disposable napkins, cutlery, and plastic bags. It had to stop.

My lessons about using the OKR framework for personal goals:

In the same way that the OKR framework is successful in a corporate setting, there is huge benefit using it for personal objectives (e.g. new years resolutions) as well.

For me, the major benefits were:

• I was constantly reminded of WHY I was making the change: Setting objectives that really motivated me and linking them to the key results made it easy to stay motivated to make the change. Instead of caving in if I forgot my KeepCup and getting a take-away, I would remind myself that I was striving to minimise my environmental impact, so detouring via the office or sitting 5 minutes in the café became easier to justify than accepting the single use cup.
• My resolutions were MEMORABLE: By having three high level objectives which were easy for me to recall, I was better able to remember the key results that sat within each. This also gave me CLARITY and FOCUS to pursue them.
• My key results were MEASURABLE and HABIT-FORMING: I wasn’t just setting out to lose weight (though I did), or read more (though I did), but I was setting out to do a certain number of events, and read a certain number of books, and cook a certain proportion of my own meals. Achieving these goals over the year required small changes in the day-to-day, guided by my objectives.
• My key results allowed FLEXIBILITY: By setting them for the year I was able to catch up if I fell behind. For example, in m key result around reading, despite the fact that Infinite Jest took me 6 (!) months to get through, I was able to catch up in the back half of the year. (Embarking on reading the Harry Potter series to my daughter helped too!)

Overall, I am super proud of the results that I was able to achieve personally in 2019 using this framework. At the start of the year I thought this was a really ambitious set of personal OKRs, but looking back, I achieved almost all of what I set myself as key results which, according to the theory, means I should have been more ambitious. I'll keep that in mind for 2020.

Have you used a similar process for your own resolutions? Or applied other corporate strategy tools to your own personal ambitions? Let me know in the comments below!