As our startup team has continued to build our current company, we began discussing roles and responsibilities. Anyone who has worked in or on a startup knows that the hats to wear are plentiful, something that is necessary and insightful. As you grow and learn the validated scope of your business, it is imperative to know how to evaluate yourself and know you are working on the right things. “Radical Focus” by Christina Wodtke was a phenomenal, quick read that I took many key takeaways from.

The framework and purpose of Objective Key Results (OKRs) and the practice around them as an individual and team has the potential to shift an entire culture of how we set meaningful goals, how we use and protect our time, and how we uphold accountability.

If you are working on a team, need to validate your focus, or want to analyze and evaluate whether you are making progress, this book is for you. (I also recommend checking out Wodtke’s article “One Objective to Rule Them All” (Medium, 2016).

Quotes & Notes from “Radical Focus” by Christina Wodtke

• “It’s not important to protect an idea. It’s important to protect the time it takes to make it real” (p. 8).

• “…the enemy of timely execution is distraction” (p.13).

From working on a startup to finishing a study to lesson planning for your learners, time is your best friend and worst enemy, depending on how you use it. An idea is only as good as your execution, and the time to execute is where the magic happens. People need the resource of time, space, and support to allow their potential to flourish. By protecting time, you are protecting the innovator.

“One: set inspiring and measurable goals. Two: make sure you and your team are always making progress toward that desired end state. No matter how many other things are on your plate. And three: set a cadence that makes sure the group both remembers what they are trying to accomplish and holds each other accountable” (p. 9).

By insulating the execution of an idea with goals, accountability, and milestones, understanding that protecting time becomes a necessity. It is hard to have one without the other without sacrificing the essentials and well-being of the innovator. You can’t cultivate a sustainable capacity of inspiring goals with stretch results if you are not nurturing the environment to grow metrics time and time again.

• “Impossible goals are depressing. Hard goals are inspiring” (p. 104)…

• “You don’t need people to work more, you need people to work on the right things” (p. 107)…

• “Life always gives you plenty to do. The secret is not forgetting the things that matter” (p. 109).

• “If everything is important, nothing is important” (p. 148).

Keeping goals and those who work on them relevant will keep morale positive and strong while moving in the right direction: forward. Identifying skills and strengths within ourselves is one area of work to reflect upon. However, it is also important to understand that just because you are capable does not mean you should. What you are capable of may not align to the goals at the current moment. Being careful with what you say ‘yes’ to will continue to protect your time, well-being, and the mission for the team. Moreover, team members and leaders must also be cognizant of protecting their own and others time, well-being, and mission. This is the culture.

“Why We Can’t Get Things Done”:

• “One: We haven’t prioritized our goals” (p. 147).

• "Two: We haven’t communicated the goal obsessively and comprehensively” (p.148).

• “Three: We don’t have a plan to get things done” (p. 149).

• “Four: We haven’t made time for what matters” (p. 150).

• “Five: We give up instead of iterate” (p. 151).

There is a method to this beautiful madness that can transform your practices and analysis of priorities.

• “…as an organization scales, the OKRs become an increasingly necessary tool to ensure that each product team understands how they are contributing to the greater whole, for coordinating work across teams, and in avoiding duplicate work” (p. 169).

• “What all too often happens in this case is that the actual people on the product teams are conflicted as to where they should be spending their time, resulting in confusion, frustration and disappointing results from leadership and individual contributors alike” (p. 170).

• “OKRs are about continuous improvement and learning cycles. They are not about making check marks in a list” (p. 193).

What can help you identify whether you are working on the right thing is aligning your priorities to the mission, along with understanding as a team what others are doing to contribute. Weekly conversations regarding OKR intentions, monthly forecasts, progress status, and health metrics can ensure that everyone is on the right track and avoid duplicate tasks. More importantly, applying the understandings that OKRs are a conversation, not a meeting, and that it is not a list of tasks but a continuous learning cycle, will further contribute to the culture of protecting time, trust, and confidence.

The paradigm shift in how you look at and use time, energy, and abilities will only make you and your team better. It will impact the density of your outputs while leaving you free of any unknowns or nonessential tasks that weigh you down. Taking the time to identify ways to protect time and energy is well worth it and will allow you to know what to say ‘yes’ to, confidently.

Wodtke, C. (2016). Radical focus: Achieving your most important goals with objectives and key results. Erscheinungsort nicht ermittelbar: CWODTKE.COM.

Wodtke, C. (2016, September 02). One Objective to Rule them All. Retrieved from https://cwodtke.medium.com/one-objective-to-rule-them-all-1058e973bfc5