Radical Focus - A book review

-
Focus, just focus. That is the main message in the book Radical Focus by Christina Wodtke. I've read a few OKR (objective w/ key results) books and this one is by far the best IMO. I appreciated the fable story in the beginning (the first 2/3 of the book). It provided a good example of how messy startups can be, how OKR can help them, and how you won't be getting it right the first time. It may take some big changes to your organization, but the benefits are really helpful. 

The nuts and bolts of OKRs are this; people get distracted from why they are doing things and they can get off track... sometimes waaaay off track. That is okay, we are all humans. Let us be honest, the internet is the digital version of Vegas. Squirrel! The methods outlined in the last third of the book are pretty cut and dry which is exactly what I've been looking for. 

Setting Up OKRs

I like how they suggested working on configuring each level of the OKRs. All the pitfalls, and what to do to correct them. I truly think that if a company/team/individual is thinking about trying this they should just do it in full. That being said, they reiterated many times in this book that it will never be perfect and it will be weird the first time. Try it, learn, and repeat. Anyway, key takeaways for me are the following: ask your teammates what you think the OKRs should be to get input, review the input, aggregate what you think as PM, provide that to C suite, C suite reviews and as a leadership group you come up with OKRs. Once company OKRs are set, then provide that to the teams to build out your team OKR that bubble up to that.

Weekly Check-ins are Critical to Focus

The weekly setup of OKRs are pretty simple; you meet on Monday and go over the 4 quadrants: How is everyone feeling about the KRs (rank out of 10), are the things we want to keep healthy still healthy, what are we doing this week toward the OKRs, and finally what is coming up in the next month.

On Friday, we celebrate

I really liked this bit. Every Friday you get together and demo what was accomplished. Don't talk about next week, just discuss what you accomplished.

I'm Trying it Out

So I felt like I needed to try this out for myself. We are doing something like this at work, but I wanted to try the vanilla version. So I'm starting a new workout schedule and using OKRs as my way to hit the goal. I have a meeting with my family every Sunday to review, and every Saturday we celebrate. I've created my 4 quadrant configuration, see below.


If you are looking for a new way to plan, read this. 10/10 (I don't rate many books 10)


PS: The links out to Amazon are through Amazon Associates. It's a program to give kick back to people that refer to a sale. It doesn't cost you any more and I may make a small portion of your purchase.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How I used Eisenhower's matrix to tame the noise of Slack

-
Image
It happened again. I missed something critical on Slack—a message buried beneath the flood of notifications that should have been front and center. This was the wake-up call I needed. Despite all the efforts to stay organized, Slack’s constant stream of notifications, unread messages, and channels I don’t even remember joining were drowning out the important stuff. Sound familiar? That’s when I turned to an old, yet effective, decision-making tool: Eisenhower’s Matrix . You may know it as the framework that helps prioritize tasks based on urgency and importance, separating what's truly critical from what can wait—or what shouldn’t even be on your plate at all. But how does this tool apply to Slack? Let me explain. Understanding Eisenhower’s Matrix If you’re not familiar, the Eisenhower Matrix categorizes tasks into four quadrants: Urgent and Important : Do it now. Important but Not Urgent : Schedule it for later. Urgent but Not Important : Delegate it. Neither Urgent nor Important
Read more

How to use Google Tasks

-
Image
  I love a good todo list, and I’ve tried a lot of apps, and none of them stuck, until I found Google Tasks. I think it stuck, unlike the others, because Grafana uses Google Business Suite. Google Tasks is an application that is fully embedded with all other Google work suite products (docs, gmail, sheets, slides, etc…) and it’s very powerful! I wanted to write a small post about it to share what I’ve found useful. Tasks is available in the right sidebar of most Google Applications: When you click that icon then a new sidebar appears, you can quickly add tasks manually, like every other todo list. The little arrow circle is a way you can set tasks as recurring. Need a way to remember to fill out your TPS report every Friday, here ya go. You can also make multiple lists, if you want to do that. I’ve found it’s useful to just have 1 for work and 1 for personal stuff but everyone is different here. Google Docs Integration In google docs, Tasks is also embedded.  By clicking that icon in t
Read more

Year in Review - 2021 Edition

-
Image
 Holy buckets, 2021 went by quickly. Felt like 6 months! It's been a very rollercoaster year, but here we are, about to reenter the start/finish line and preparing to start another year. Starting off, we are still going through this pandemic, that has had an impact on my goals and aspirations, more on that later. Regardless, on to the review section. Looking back, I didn’t ever publish my 2021 goals, LOL. My general ideas were to stay healthy, and read a book per month. I read a lot more this year, reading 10 books (2 shy of my goal of 1 per month), and even enjoyed a few non-fiction books this year. We built a house and moved to a new town (still near Madison) and have really been enjoying the quieter life and funny enough my walking score here is way better than when I lived on the edge of the city. This was pretty huge part of the first half of the year. My kiddo started preschool and is really having a lot of fun. I did a bit of working out, more on that later. I took on a new
Read more