On the one hand, it's a framework with all sorts of rules that your organization should adopt if you want to do OKRs properly.

If you buy any book about OKRs, you can read about these rules and how you should use them within your organization.

And these rules are actually nothing else as best practices that the corporate world has learned ever since objectives and goals started playing a big role within the management of organizations with the introduction of management by objectives in the early 1950s.

However, OKR is also just a way to structure your goals.

And it's a very good and powerful way to structure your goals because it will give you a lot more clarity about what matters to you.

Imagine that in 2018, you'd like to get in shape again.

You want to lose 10 kilo.

You probably set all sorts of other goals for yourself, such as going to the gym twice a week and going for a run once a week.

And while you're doing that, you're probably also getting on a scale every now and then to see whether you're actually progressing towards your goal towards losing 10 kilo.

Now, you end up with all these different goals, getting in shape, losing 10 kilogram, going to the gym twice a week, going for a run once a week.

And they all seem they all sort of seem similar.

But actually, they're not, because the only thing that really matters to you was getting in shape again.

Now, imagine that at the end of the year, you did go to the gym twice a week and you did go for a run once a week.

But you only lost two kilograms.

This is how progress will then look like.

Would that make you happy?

Are you happy with these results?

If you would, then probably losing 10 kilograms wasn't the thing that really mattered to you.

What really mattered to you was getting in shape again.

And getting in shape again meant to you to lose 10 kilograms.

Now, if you would have structured this as an objective with key results and initiatives, your objective would be to get in shape again.

And your key result will be to lose 10 kilograms.

Now, the key results helped you identify what you meant by that objective.

And it also enabled you to measure progress towards your objective.

It enabled you to get on the scale every week to see if you are actually getting closer to your objective or not.

And the initiatives are all the things that you'll be doing in order to achieve these results.

So that will be to go to the gym twice a week and to go for a run once a week.

But if you go to the gym twice a week and all you do there is sipping smoothies, then probably they won't generate the required results.

So as you are working on your initiative, you keep an eye on your objective and key results to see whether they are generating the required results or not.

And if they're not, you should be changing your initiatives until the needle moves for the key results.

Now, in the old way, as you've seen, you end up with a list of goals where it is get in shape again, losing 10 kilograms, going to the gym, going for a run.

And you'll have no clarity about what's truly important.

And if you move to OKR and structure your goals as objectives and key results, you'll have a lot more clarity about what truly matters to you and where we want to go as a team and as an organization.

Now, in your private life, having these different types of goals mixed together, that could be OK.

Because somewhere inside, you probably know what's most important to you.

However, in an organization, you're working together with way more people than just yourself.

And then achieving clarity of intent is absolutely key.

You should ask yourself whether you want people in your organization to be focused on goals that are actually initiatives without them being able to see where their team and where the organization wants to go and which results they need to achieve in order to get there.

Or do you also want to show them why they are working on certain things?

Structuring goals as OKRs does require more effort.

But I would say that's time well spent.