OKRU — Part 2 : Features, Dreams and Promises

OKRU is a bunch of scratch-your-own-itch, experimental and open-source tools to track goals for ensuring both long and short term accountability. Most things of any value in life are hard and it takes an unbelievable amount of discipline to be even half decent at them. Getting fit in hard. Getting competent is hard. Building useful products is hard. And we can use all the help we can get.

What do the tools actually look like / How does one use them?

TOOL 1 : PERSONAL OKRS

Objectives and Key Results is a goal-setting system used in teams at Intel, Google etc. to outline broad (quarterly) goals for teams (and individuals), track progress and ensure accountability. Objectives are meant to be directional and Key Results, actionable means to reasonably satisfy an objective. OKRU follows a quarterly cycle — I think it is a reasonable amount of time to make progress on goals. Objectives are ideally vague and ambitious, but Key results tend to be very very specific, simple, and measurable. An important addition is to measure systems and not goals — measuring the number of times you go to the gym is useful, but measuring your weight everyday may not be very actionable.

Spending time thinking about Possible Failure Modes can help preempt and mitigate them. Do not add more than 4–5 objectives, and 3–4 key results per objective. Make sure you round the goals out to everything important to you — fitness, work, academics etc. A common failure mode is to use this as an extra-work-hobby-only space. A good indication of well crafted OKRs is the overlap of your time approximate distribution of time on OKRs and other activities each day. Note that all OKRs on OKRU are currently public. At the end of each week, indicate how you’re doing on your goals — by clicking on bubbles below each KR [Red : Haven’t made much progress; Yellow : Made some progress, need to step it up; Green : This is a pace I’d like to continue next week].

You can also search for friends, follow them, and check out their OKRs. Finally, print your OKRs! Because it looks really cool on paper, trust me. I have my OKRs printed and stuck to my room wall, office desk, and my bathroom mirror. :)

TOOL 2 : COPOM

In the Pomodoro Technique, you work in chunks of 25 minutes with a break of 5 minutes in between. I’ve been using this for a while everyday, with decent success. I love co-pomming with friends and decided to build it into OKRU. It can get pretty lonely and disconnected working alone at homes, right now. Currently on OKRU, you can :

• Start, pause, resume Poms
• Add a one line description to each Pom to let other people know what you’re working on
• CoPom with friends you follow on OKRU

  

Check out an example here : https://okru.app/?user=vivekaithal44&q=1

The idea is to build OKRU, over time, to be useful. So, you can fully expect current useless features to be mercilessly removed, and new features to be added. I’m working on more minute privacy controls and a short mail digest each week of friends’ updates, as you read this. Do add your OKRs, CoPom with friends, and let me know how it goes! You can also add issues/feature requests on Github Issues.

Much of the content here is just a condensed, and cached form of things said by much smarter people in books, tweets and talks. Reach out to me in case you have any questions or want to discuss about OKRU, at vivekaithal44[at]gmail[dot]com or @nuwandavek. Hope you get cracking on your goals! I’m sending you much love from my end. :)