2021 Objectives and Key Results

Stephanie and I had a conversation yesterday about what would make 2021 a “good” year for ourselves, and I got to thinking that maybe this could be an interesting time to apply the Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) framework we use at work to my personal life. Because I’m a geek like that. So what would mine be for 2021? (Bear with me as I totally ignore the shit storm of 2020 and the continued fallout into 2021 from it.)

But first, what are OKRs?

I like how they are described at perdoo:

An OKR consists of an Objective, which tells you where to go, and several Key Results, which are the results you need to achieve to get to your Objective. Initiatives are all the projects and tasks that will help you achieve your Key Results.

To me, they are better than New Years Resolutions in that they define the why for what you wish to achieve and are intended to NOT be all or nothing. Below I’ll list out some high-level Objectives (the “where I’m wanting to go”) with some Key Results follow (how do I measure that I’m getting there?) for the year.

So, what are mine for the coming year? (Note that some are really more long-term than the next year, but fuck you don’t be pedantic).

Objective: Live a long and healthy life

I like the idea of being able to go on hikes with my grandkids and live to maybe see my great-grandkids and not be sitting in a charge for 24 hours a day as I hit 80. This does have some differences from just “being healthy” - I don’t aspire to run a 5 minute mile again or deadlift 500 lbs, I want to be able to walk when I'm 95 and play catch when I’m 75 while being mentally present.

• KR: One day or less of drinking/week (measure x/52 weeks)

• KR: Home cooked meals daily (measure x/365 days)

• KR: Some form of regular cardio (measure x/365 days)

• KR: Lift weights 3 days/week (measure x/52 weeks)

• KR: Sleep 7.5 hours/night (measure x/365 days)

• KR: Do a daily fast once per month (measure x/12 months)

• KR: Reach a healthier long-term weight of 170lbs (measure from 185lbs)

Objective: Be a good family man

We plan on having kids this year, and I want to make sure I’m doing my part for our household, being a good husband, and preparing for our first child.

• KR: Complete work making house more livable (basement remodel, yard, finishing)

• KR: Actively participate in child prep (books, appointments) and care

• KR: Spend time 5 days a week training the dog (measure x/52 weeks)

• KR: Improve communication with Stephanie through regularly touch-in conversations

ObJective: Develop a “Deep Life”

I’m a fan of Cal Newport’s “Deep Work” philosophy, and also enjoy the extension of this to every day life to create a “Deep Life” (also this) - one filled with spending intentional time on things that are worth spending time on. The biggest item here is getting my life mind back in a practice where I can focus again, after spending the last 10 months giving myself leeway due to COVID and having fully scattered days as a manager at work.

• KR: Meditate daily (measure x/365 days)

• KR: Journal week-daily (measure x/261 days)

• KR: Less than 30 minutes of mindless screen time daily (measure x/365)

• KR: Establish and develop three creative hobbies through daily time spent (measure x/365 +/- travel times)

• KR: Switch to an IC role where I can develop my craft of programming

Objective: Become financially independEnt

This Objective is a bit more of the “what” than the “why” than I wish to put here, but given the benefits of becoming financially independent (freedom in what you work on, given that I still want to work after becoming “FI”) I did want to put some distinct results KR’s around finances. We’re already starting the year in a pretty good place, so these mostly focus on reducing some spending so we can get to a place where we no longer need to work faster.

• KR: Reduced recurring/daily life spending to under $2000/month (not counting housing expenses and travel)

• KR: Do monthly budget check-ins

• KR: Develop a concrete number where we consider ourselves to be financially independent

• KR: Reduce food waste significantly (we waste a fair amount of money on wasted food)

Closing Thoughts

For the most part, these are pretty self-centered and privileged OKR’s, and I acknowledge that. I considered putting in some around family and friends, but decided against that as it isn’t something I particularly want to track and charity is similar.

I’ll likely follow up in another post on how I’m tracking these, so this idea isn’t over!

Simple vs Easy

SIMPLE VS EASY

It’s a conversation I’ve had now a few times:

“What do I need to do to get a promotion?”

While I won’t go into details of answers, it has brought up the comparison of Simple vs Easy, which on the surface sound interchangeable but mask different concepts.

Easy things don’t take much effort. Simple things don’t require much thought.

• Navigating a car is easy, but not simple (at least when you’re first learning).

• Lifting a 500 pound weight isn’t easy, but it is simple.

• Getting promoted to a senior engineer is simple, but not easy.

Let me clarify the last bullet point there. To get promoted from a junior engineer, you need to show 1) technical proficiency and 2) an ability to deliver on a project of increasing scope. It’s that simple. On the flip side, gaining technical proficiency by doing months and years of work is not easy, nor is leading a project.

But the path is simple.

Why is this important?

Most things in life are pretty simple when you have a clear understanding of the playing field. If you don’t think something is simple, it might be worth taking a look at your assumptions and to learn more about what you’re trying to accomplish. Test those assumptions.

Once a simple path has been determined, things might be hard, and it’s important to differentiate the two to ensure you’re working on the right things.

Jumping Into Management: Lessons Learned So Far (Pt 1)

About one human-baby-gestation-period ago, or 9 months in common parlance, I jumped into management. At first it started with a single human, then a few months later that escalated 400% to four (or a nibble of engineers, in non-common parlance), and now seven unfortunate souls have to sit with me in 1:1s every week.

How I viewed 1:1s at some point

While my efficacy in the role is still up for consideration, and maybe something someone else should evaluate, I have learned a few things in this time.

You really should stop/greatly reduce time spent on technical work

During most of my experience so far, I have spent significant percentages of my time doing technical work. This, more often than I count, resulted in me rolling into 1:1s saying dumb shit like:

“Well you know I’ve been heads down on this bug for the last week and haven’t given any thought to you followed up from our items last week”

A great way to show care!

If possible, you really should make strides toward reducing time spent on non-manager tasks to give people the time they need. This lesson has been reflected in pretty much every piece of beginner-manager advice I’ve read, but it’s also one of those things that can very easily fall under the “oh after THIS one time I’ll start doing my real job!”.

People are not you

After spending many, many hours in talks with people about their work, how they operate, and where they want to go, I’ve come to the conclusion that other people are not the same person as me.

This has come as a bit of a shock!

• Where I may push back on every assumption or request on my time, others may not, and so working with them I’ve needed to keep that in mind when planning projects.

• Where I might hassle my manager every 1:1 about promotion or ratings leading up to PSCs, other people are less comfortable talking about this or are more passive about it, but still be stressed by the process and need to be talked to.

• Where I’ll want to know what I’ll be working on 13.5 weeks out, others are more flexible with their plans.

Finding those differences and framing conversations with them in mind is a muscle that is difficult to flex. This is should be obvious, but I’d say most people do a very poor job at this and it can be hard to be self-reflective enough to identify your own hidden assumptions and beliefs. These assumptions and beliefs you have are a key part of your ability to manage humans.

Old conversational habits live long

I’m a very informal and often not-PC person. Pausing and thinking through what I’m about to say when a witty witticism pops into my mind has been a difficult habit to bring on. I find it a bit difficult to filter myself.

Beyond just non-PC things, talking frankly about opinions on projects, people, or ideas is more of a no-go area as well. If leadership comes up and says “For reasons, we are planning to put Porkchops into Meatsickles”, it’s part of my job now not to chat with the team and tell them how stupid the plan is in my opinion or otherwise colors their minds.

The reasoning is pretty clear about why not to do this, and I agree with the reasoning. If your team thinks you think the project is a waste of time and they’re working on it, the corollary is that you think they’re wasting their time. No one wants their manager to think they’re wasting their time.

I have no idea where my time goes

As an individual contributor, I knew exactly where my time was going. Now, at the end of the day almost every day I think to myself “I was busy all day, what the fuck was I doing?”.

I can think back to specific things I did, like editing a wiki or talking to the seating captain about seating chart changes or meetings, but I entirely lack the plot arch to present as an engineer - at the start of the day X feature wasn’t complete, and now it is! Yay!

Maybe I should be better at this than I am, but from my understanding this is a pretty common situation.

Fake it till you make it doesn’t really work

A large portion of my team works in a codebase and in a world that I am still not entirely comfortable with. My background is in firmware, while the team I now manage is about half firmware and half more general software people working in an entirely different codebase than I have knowledge about.

Yet, most people wanting to interact with the manager of these engineers don’t know that, they just assume I know everything.

They’re wrong, I don’t know everything. Far from it. Solid 2/10 knowledgeable.

Telling these people coming to me time after time “I don’t know, I’ll get back to you after talking to the team” doesn’t breed much confidence in me from the questioner or the team. These aren’t answers I can “fake it till I make it”.

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This hasn’t been an exhaustive list and I keep coming up with more as I write, but I’ve procrastinated enough. So I’m going to publish this after appending a “Pt 1” to the title and carry on with my other responsibilities.

Experiment: Time Tracking

Over the last few months I've been catching up with the Cortex podcast which focuses on productivity in the digital age amongst other things.  One of the hosts often talks about time tracking and its benefits.  

So I thought I'd try it out for a week.

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What I Wanted Out of Time Tracking

Before starting, I decided I wanted two things to come out of the experiment:

1. See where my time was going
2. Be more mindful of how I spend my time

The first item was the result of me coming home from work one too many times thinking to myself "what the hell did I do with my time today?"

The second item was more general and something I've thought about over the years - making an effort to spend time "consciously" rather than "unconsciously".  It can be all too easy to lose yourself in mindless tasks like browsing Reddit where you can't put a finger on exactly how long you'd been doing the thing, but don't feel that you've gotten anything out of it.

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Methodology

The system I decided to use wasn't the result of much research.  I started with the base of using Toggl, which allows you to start and stop timers connected to "projects" so you can see how much time you spent on each (I used the desktop and iPhone app versions).  I defined a set of projects for myself which weren't all actual projects.  These boiled down to:

• Commute - getting to and from work
• Socializing - chatting with people in the office not about work
• Communication - general tasks like reading/writing emails, catching up on message threads, etc.
• Tomfoolery - looking at random tech sites on my computer, playing with my phone, etc.
• Bodily Functions - bathroom breaks and eating/snacking
• Exercise - I go to the gym every day before lunch
• Meta-Work - setting things up at my desk, cleaning my work area, planning out my day, etc.
• Meetings
• Reviews/Teamwork - doing code reviews, reading design documents
• Project work - this I broke down by actual work projects which I'm not going to name here. I had 4 separate work projects I worked on during the experiment

Along with the activity breakdown, I set up a few rules for myself:

1. Tracking hours - Track all time from getting in my car to go to work to entering my garage on my return home
2. Log everything - Every time I context switch, no matter how long, log the change. Even if I only switched for a few seconds.
3. Priority - If something qualified for more than one activity, log it for the more general one. For example, a meeting for Project A would be tracked in the Meetings activity, and time spent writing an email for Project B would be tracked in the Communication category.

With these rules set up on Sunday, I set out on Monday to track my time. 

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Execution

Luckily for me, Toggl has an excellent desktop app that makes logging incredibly easy.  Literally the press of a single button to switch, so the overhead of logging each switch was low.  This ended up being important so that I would actually log each context switch.

This app, which I dedicated 1/3 of a mac OS Space to on my dual-monitor setup (or 1/6 when not connected to a monitor), along with the app made the process painless.

A typical work setup on my laptop

The only hitch on the execution phase was the awkward moment I'd spend deliberately pressing the Socializing button whenever someone came up to talk. 

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Results and Learnings

I learned more than I thought I would during this experiment.  Some of this was meta-learned from thinking about tracking of time in general rather than directly from the tracking itself.

Below are my main take aways.

I get distracted a ton

All together, I had approximately 118 "interruptions" during the week that I recorded, and I believe I did not mark down many of them.

I broke down my distractions to five sources:

1. Online, external - Notifications from emails, messages, tasks, etc.
2. In-person, external - People stopping by my desk
3. Internal - e.g. "I'm bored, I should check out Reddit!"
4. Obligations - Meetings
5. Bodily functions - You can figure this one out

Below is a very rough estimate of the numbers of distractions for each cause.  Keep in mind that it is difficult to track each distraction accurately and I had to make some estimates.

Number of Distractions and Their cause

With these in mind I set about thinking about how I could decrease the frequency and length of each systemically:

1. Online, external - Disable all notifications, instead setting a time when I'd check if any message came in (e.g. only check on the hour).  Almost all notifications can wait at least an hour.
2. In-person, external - This is the hardest of the bunch, and I could only come up with telling coworkers to bug me less (ineffective) or working from home.  Both can be difficult.
3. Internal - A long struggle of mine, battling the inner ADD, this is a subject for a whole other entry here.  This isn't as easily systemized out.
4. Obligations - RSVP "Yes" to fewer meetings, only attend what is needed and feel free to leave if the meeting isn't helpful.
5. Bodily functions - This one I let slide.  Sometimes you just have to go.  Sometimes you're just hungry.

Distractions are a topic I'll likely write about more at a later time and could easily fill an entry in itself.  This is just scratching the surface.

I spend more (Relative) time than I thought working

Removing all the non-project and necessary communication/meeting time, the relative time I spend actively working is more than I thought. 

The general timing broke down as:

• Total time: 42:40* (31:25 without commute + exercise + bodily functions)
• Project work: 20:43
• Non-project work: 6:57 (meetings + communication + meta-work + team work)
• "Wasted" time:  3:02 (socializing + tomfoolery)
• Life overhead: 11:15 (commute + exercise + bodily functions)

*Admittedly this was a lighter work week than usual so the hours are low, but the ratios still apply.

Here's a visualization of my relative work amounts:

If you take out the "life overhead", the amount of work to wasted time actually looks favorable!

I Rarely Work in large, unbroken chunks of time

This is mostly the result of distractions and is the end-goal of reducing distractions.  My ideal is to fill my day with as many uninterrupted chunks of time on single tasks so I don't incur the mental overhead hits of context switching.

Here's a graph showing how many of my entries were short, interrupted ones versus longer, uninterrupted ones:

Number of Entries With Given Durations

As you can see, most of my entries are for short durations. 

My Hours are more Regular than I thought

While I maintain that I enjoy the privilege of setting my own hours, it turns out my enter and exit times for work are largely determined by traffic and dinner time. 

Workday Start and End Times

Time is in 24-hour format

This is the information that will likely change the most as I continue on tracking time, especially when summer comes around and I can bike to work.

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Going Forward

I am going to continue tracking my time, but I am going to approach it a little differently to get a better return on investment.  Continuing the experiment will keep me honest with myself and keep me using the systems I'm putting in place to get distracted less.

There are a couple things I'm going to change though...

Time-Tracking Logistics

The biggest logistical change I want to make is to stop tracking commute, exercise, and major meals as these don't unintentionally break up my chunks of work as they are planned.

Mixing Up Location

Last year I spent a very productive week working in Maui.  What made it productive?  No distractions, mainly. 

My perfect office

With that previous experience in mind, I'm going to push for more time working out of the office, be that in a different location or at home, I can't really increase my distractions from socializing much more than I have at work so it's worth a try.

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There's more to come!  I have a few more productivity "hacks" in mind that I'll be writing about once I've ran through the experimentation phase, so stay posted.

Experiment: Alcohol Free Week

Last Sunday I drank an entire bottle of wine.

Why?  Because... I did.  Compulsion.  Shit, that's scary.

The Problem

Alcohol isn't tearing my life apart, causing me to lose friends and the trust of my family, but isn't this how alcoholism starts?  With a compulsion, a need to drink.  

I'd been sliding a bit with only 13 days without a drink in the last 8 weeks (tracked on the Way of Life app).  Most of which were having a few after work at home, entirely non-social drinks that sometimes escalated to whole bottles being drunk.

Habits

Years ago I read The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg which introduced me to the Cue-Routine-Reward cycle of habits, which I think drinking had become.  So I broke my drinking into these three parts.

Cue

The cue for my casual, at home drinking appears to be as simple as being home in the evening.

Routine

Acquire bottle of wine, drink 1+ glasses.

Reward

Relaxation, a feeling of letting go of the day and focussing on something like reading or a documentary.

Swapping the Routine

The cue is unavoidable and the reward is good, so I needed to tackle the Routine.  In this instance the routine swap was pretty clear as I enjoy tea, and there are decaffeinated teas, so there you go!  

Forcing my hand to rewire the Wine Routine with the Tea Routine was harder.  So I messaged my sister: If I couldn't tell her that I had had no alcohol in the last week in 1 week, then I will write her a $2000 check.

Well it's been a week now, and so far so good!  Still have my $2000 and some respect for myself.

What I've Learned

I've learned to import lessons.  First, Routines are relatively simple (not easy) to swap if you can identify them.  Second, not drinking in social settings when others are is actually much simpler than I thought it would be.  After the ordering of the drinks and initial sips, the desire to join in greatly drops!  As long as you can decline that first step it's much easier from there.

Going Forward

Going 1 week without drinking is easy.  Going a lifetime is overkill.  I'm going to continue drinking socially where drinking isn't the task at hand (read: drinking to get drunk) but will continue with my Routine swap when at home so I don't continue that casual, at-home drinking that I find more scary.