2026 OKRs

    Following onto my OKRs from… 5 years ago… I thought I’d try the exercise again. First I will start with a review of last year.

    2025 Review

    2025 was a year where my thinking of it was primarily driven by outside factors. My dad died. My kids were young and… a lot of work. I was laid off. These are the big things I think of through the year, but weren’t particularly actionable “I did this well/poorly” things. So how did the year go?

    What went well?

    What went poorly?

    Objectives and Key Results

    Below are some high-level objectives for the year and some key results that help indicate movement towards the goals. Typically in tech parlance, Objectives are “a significant, concrete, clearly defined goal”, but life isn’t like a shippable product or feature so I’ll be a bit loose with that definition.

    [Objective] Continually improve health

    Last year, I did well continuing my lifting streak with 175 works and lifting every week (currently at over 3 years of at least weekly lifting!). I didn’t gain any more weight, but I am still heavier than my ideal weight hovering around 220lbs. My main key result for the year will be losing weight, with the mechanism of doing so being to increase activity, improve food choices through meal prep, and reducing alcohol consumption.

    Some things here like “do meal prep” I don’t particularly want to list as KR. Additionally, these are my low-end bars and if I do better, great!

    [Objective] Establish a new career path

    This year I hit my FI number despite being laid off. With this, my immediate salary and bumps to that aren’t really what needs to drive me and instead I seek to find out what I want from a career going forward. I considered for a period just stepping out of the game, but I do mostly enjoy work and still thinking being very early on at a startup some day would be interesting.

    [Objective] Live a more memorable life

    The years keep coming and they don’t stop coming. I think my highest goal is to be able to look back on my life and think I lived it well, and a big part of that is doing more memorable things.

    It’s so easy to be tired or lazy. This is an objective to realize that time is finite and make the most of it.

    [Objective] Cultivate deep relationships

    One thing I’ve discovered being a new parent is the ease of creating shallow friendships and the challenge of deeper ones. It’s easy for me to pick up a conversation with another parent at the park or arrange play dates where the focus is the kids, but getting deeper than that and developing real relationships takes work. Also with kids, where a couple-focused relationship was easy, it now takes work to take the time to be a couple.

    Conventional “New Year’s Resolutions”

    Just for fun I’m going to pop out some resolutions, mostly so I can look back and grade myself on this hodge-podge next year.

    What could throw things off my goals?