Product Review: OKRs.app
My readers know I’m obsessed with goal setting (see here and here.) In an effort to do this bigger and better than before, I’ve been working to transition from setting annual goals to establishing quarterly OKRs, or objectives and key results. For those who are not familiar with this concept, OKRs are a goal setting framework popular in the tech world. The intent of the framework is to set 2-5 aspirational objectives and measure achievement of those strategic objectives based on 3-5 measurable key results. Objectives should be big and bold, articulating the vision for where an organization (or a person) is headed. The key results measure progress against those objectives. Typically, if you’re anything like me, you set a goal with the intent of smashing it. But with OKRs, the idea is to strive for average. If you’re at 100% completion, it means you didn’t aim high enough. OKRs are designed to push you out of your comfort zone.
To that end, I figured that, as long as I’m trying new things, I might as well experiment with a platform to track this quarter’s OKRs. Enter OKRs.app, a bare bones tracker for aspiring productivity nerds. I selected this platform for its easy user registration process and no frills user interface. On the introductory page, you have the option to establish your objectives and corresponding key results.
For each of your key results, you can denote how you want to measure progress. For the key results I listed above, I indicated that I’d like to check in on my progress weekly. While this worked well based on the way this OKR was written, it worked less well for those that I wished to track at a different frequency. The only options were either weekly progress or total progress. I would have liked to see an option for monthly check-ins.
Once you’ve created your OKRs using the set OKRs page, you can display each objective and its corresponding key results on the dashboard view, which also offers you the ability to track daily progress against those key results. Best part? Logging the time I spent working on my key results auto populated the progress meter on the dashboard. The closer I got to achieving my goal, the darker the color of the bar on the progress meter. Adorbs.
Other cool features? You can add buddies to view your OKRs, promoting accountability as you work towards fulfillment of your objectives. The app contains a learning page that summarizes best practices for setting OKRs. There is also an option to view historical OKRs so that you can track accomplishments from past quarters.
In summary, for someone who tends to make goal setting overly complicated, I greatly enjoyed this app’s simplicity. My wish list would include more interval options for tracking progress—specifically, monthly progress in addition to weekly and total progress, so that I could align key results reporting with monthly progress reviews. It would be cool to see a graphical representation of OKR progress in addition to the tabular data view. But, for those seeking a clean, free, simple way to get started with OKRs, this is the app for you.
