Summary
Though OKRs are best known for guiding businesses, they are a fantastic tool for personal lives, too. Learn how two married professionals used OKRs to address their relationship issues and build a healthy and long-lasting relationship.”
Like millions of people, my wife and I found being around each other quite an intense experience during the pandemic. We lived in a two-bedroom apartment in central London, with limited space. Thankfully there was a garden, but there were periods when our otherwise mostly blissful marriage was tested.
By the time we got into a bit of a rhythm, it was summer. We were doing our jobs fully remotely just as well — if not better by now — so we decided to join some friends in Portugal to catch some sun, as all of our planned holidays had been canceled. Surprisingly, this was where the trouble started, and exactly where OKRs came to the rescue.
OKRs work for big business, startups, and relationships
My wife, Melissa, and I are both fans of OKRs and have been using them in our respective businesses, which are very different. I run a brain care start-up called Heights, which launched in January 2020 (I know, great timing). It grew quite quickly despite the pandemic, now up to 64 full-time employees and counting.
Meanwhile, Melissa worked at the youth media powerhouse VICE. When she became Director of Operations in February 2020 she was tasked with implementing an organizational system that would scale.
After some reading, researching, and asking around, we both chose OKRs, despite the different stages of our businesses. Melissa’s not religious, but believes in organization above all else; and, since discovering John Doerr’s Measure What Matters in 2018, she had declared it her bible. Her hard copy is peppered with index tags, filled with notes, and the spine is weathered from constant bending.
Anyway, this isn’t about how we used OKRs inside startups or giant media companies. This is a far more relatable story.
Relationship Issues
The pandemic made many people, Melissa among them, especially vigilant around things like cleanliness, hygiene, and personal space. After almost six months of being in our own space together, controlling what went in or out, we moved into a four-bedroom villa with three other couples in Portugal’s sunny Algarve. We all worked remotely in different nooks and crannies, but each with a different attitude when it came to what “tidy” or “clean” meant, all preloaded with our own COVID-19 anxiety levels.
Needless to say, it was a shock to the system. It started to manifest in our marriage as bickering, something we didn’t generally do with each other, and while we had been married for almost three years at that point, the pandemic made it feel like we had fast-forwarded to 10!
After a couple of tipsy altercations in front of our friends, it was clear we had some underlying issues to work through. We decided to discuss them the following day on a long walk.
Although both Melissa and I are process-oriented, it manifests in different ways for each of us. I love to try new process techniques related to personal growth, while Melissa loves any and every process that makes things more logical and organized. After getting to the root of the problem with the ‘5 why’s’ approach, we diagnosed a few behaviors that really triggered each of us, and talked about how to call them out in a supportive way.
With the crux of our issues defined, it was time to have a much more rewarding conversation — how to have the best marriage we could.
Visualization
I am a big believer in the power of manifestation and visualization techniques. Ultimately, you have to believe in the future you want to live. Melissa and I spent about five hours in January doing a variety of manifestation exercises, which we got pretty wrong. But no harm in hoping for the best!
It’s one thing trying to visualize your future, like many of the world’s most successful people have famously done. It’s quite another to try to manifest a “great relationship.” The rules are slightly different.
We had a very obvious “North Star metric” of “have a healthy and long-lasting marriage,” so now it was time for the magic question — and I knew what the answer would be.
Me: “What framework do you want to use to make sure we are taking personal responsibility for achieving this outcome?”
Melissa: “There’s only one framework I love. OKRs. P.S. I love John Doerr.”
She might not have said that verbatim, but you know, that’s essentially the message, loud and clear.
Set and Setting
IIf you are going to tackle a big serious topic like “have a healthy and long-lasting marriage,” you need to give it the proper time and space to define what good Key Results look like. Tip Number 1 is, when setting personal goals, don’t rush, as good Key Results could easily impact how you start to live your day to day.
We decided to say goodbye to co-living in the villa and headed off to a beautiful, less popular part of Portugal. In a random farmhouse surrounded by green. With no wi-fi, we disconnected from everything and reconnected with each other, and with nature.
The plan was to write a little every day, and then go for a long walk to discuss any obvious challenges that came from our Objectives or Key Results. The process took about two hours a day for three consecutive days. But we didn’t force it, and it felt quite natural. If we started going round and round and not agreeing on something, we left it to come back to the next day.
Up until now, you can tell Dan has written this article because it’s all story and fluff. But at this point, if you want specifics or a detailed, high-quality action plan, that is where Melissa really comes into her own. So, enter stage left … Melissa 👇
As with any good framework, you need — well — a framework. So we started by pulling together a layout and template for the OKRs to live. For us, this was a Google sheet. One thing you’ll notice is that there is space to include a summary for each Objective and Key Result. There are a couple of reasons for this:
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It allows you to elaborate on what the Objective means in detail, without fluffing up or complicating the wording of the Objective or Key Result.
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It acts as a detailed reminder of what you’re really trying to accomplish in case you ever forget — which is something Dan struggles with because he juggles roughly four full-time jobs. They include his Instagram updates for his devoted 8,000 followers (The cats, who mostly sleep, have 9,000 followers — you can follow them here — so I wouldn’t be that impressed.)
For our overarching Objective, “To have a healthy and long-lasting marriage,” we crafted this accompanying summary statement: “To have a fulfilling partnership that results in the longevity of our marriage, supporting our minds, bodies, and souls.”
Notice that the summary statement identifies the three key areas we agreed would define the North Star of “healthy.” In order to align with our overarching Objective, then mind, body, and soul each needed to be covered in our Key Results:
KR 1 MIND: Achieving at least 36 weekly engaged meaningful communications with each other.
Summary: These relate to activities that we could do together or separately, that add value to the relationship from a mental perspective. It could be journaling, reading, sharing knowledge, meditating, or just having independent space to re-energize to better contribute to the relationship.
KR 2 BODY: Achieve at least 32 weekly activities that contribute to the growth of our bodies.
Summary: This relates to a combination of physical movement, sexual connection, intimacy, and health that will collectively help us maintain our bodies in a positive and meaningful way
KR 3 SOUL: Achieve at least 10 weekly activities that nourish our souls.
Summary: This relates to a combination of activities that fulfill us both emotionally and spiritually. It could be indulging in a shared pastime, having our favorite meals, seeing our favorite people, working on projects, or contributing to our communities or loved ones in a meaningful way.
These overarching Objectives and Key Results probably took us the longest time to agree on. We debated a lot — namely, on the difference between sex and intimacy (men! SMH). But we also had many talks about whether the metrics chosen for the Key Results were measurable and, more importantly, if they were aspirational enough.
Cascading to Personal OKRs
Once our Relationship OKRs were established, the rest cascaded easily into our Personal OKRs to support them. The KRs for “a healthy marriage” became guides for our personal Objectives. Each Objective then had four Key Results with a clear data source defined. Some are (very) private (!), but here are a few examples:
O1: MIND = Become the most engaged communicators with each other — ever
KR3: Each digest at least one new fact/story and share it with each other every day
O2: BODY = Have the healthiest possible relationship with each other’s bodies
KR1: Each complete at least five forms of heart-rate-raising movement per week
O3: SOUL = Have deeply nourished souls
KR1: Do 1 Do one dinner every week (at our dining table) with no phones allowed
We then decided on incorporating our OKR tracking into our daily journal (see image above), because it felt natural to incorporate it into an existing habit.
Surprises and Discoveries
The main surprise about our Relationship OKRs was that we were surprised that they were working. Of course, we both use OKRs in our businesses, and we’d seen them work. So it was great to see how well they transitioned on a personal level.
The biggest discovery was probably that they reduced nagging — or what can feel like nagging. Setting OKRs against meaningful areas in your relationship, whether they are meaningful for both of you or just your partner, means that there is an agreement on what you are both going to contribute. They act as reminders, instead of feeling like forgotten conversations or broken promises.
In a time where every day risked feeling like the movie Groundhog Day, it was easy to slip into bad habits or unhealthy routines — not just physically, but also emotionally. During that time it was easy to look to your partner to fill the void left by colleagues, friends, and random encounters, but those expectations could quickly turn into burdens.
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Happily, we can both confirm that our personal OKRs worked for us: We exercised more regularly, ate healthier, and didn’t begrudge each other time apart (even if was just an hour sitting in different rooms). But the greatest achievement was reviving our capacity for teamwork. After all, that is what a marriage is about.
Work and life blended together so much during the pandemic — living and working in the same space — so in many ways it seemed only fitting to bring the values that OKRs hold in our businesses to our personal life.
