Weekly 6 - OKR Plan on a Page

Have you ever found that you struggle to stick to a plan because of too many distractions? That's been me this year, but I think I found a potential solution. This is the sixth weekly of the year and today I've got a few things I want to share with you. A little bit different to normal. So before we get into all the details and weed per se, let's do some scores. Productivity is 5. Enjoyment has been 4, teamwork 3. Learning 3, serenity 3. Overall average of 3.6, which is up a whole point. Let me explain as to what's been going on. Okay, so for those that are watching, you will probably notice that I'm back in a new area. The office and studio is coming together, but not quite set up how I like it yet. However, as you can tell from the background, we have got a lovely color scheme going on. Now the flooring is down, so now I just need to do the furnishing parts. All that is a side thought, but at least we're making progress and it is still a little bit of a distraction for all the things I want to be doing with Petals. As for those scores. So as I said, it's been a really productive week for me. Actually. After some feedback and some observations, I realized I was getting a little bit distracted from other things. And the Six Nations Rugby website is just running now. I don't need to do much with it. Happy days. So I don't need to worry about that. So I did bring my focus back onto Petals as my little side project. What I've been doing as well, I revisited some of the OKRs that I talked about in a previous weekly. This was on the idea that I just had some goals and some metrics to kind of align with our deliveries. Some people will say it's overkill and I kind of get that. But just writing this stuff down and documenting it and giving it some structure gave me peace of mind as well as to what my goals are going to be. So the OKRs are now set up as quarterly objectives or outcomes. One a quarter, and within each OKR, three to five key results that I'm looking for to make sure that is a success. But timings around these, obviously, because I'm setting them as quarters or seasons. I like the idea of language and to get the ball rolling. The main outcome that I want to get out of this quarter is the redesigned web app so that we can go out and start upping the game with usage. At the moment it's a prototype and it looks like one. Unfortunately Some of the styles and themes are a little bit rough around the edges. So now that I've got some designs that I'm happy with, all in the Canva whiteboard, and we've got some clean code to play with, it's time to start building on that now. So again, back on last week, some of my goals were to kind of just clear up some of the outstanding pull requests and code and there was a lot of work items and issues that were in flight across the team. So on Friday we tidied it all up. We got everything merged into the right environment. Everything's deployed to the staging environment now. And with that in mind, I also hit the backlog. So typical manager in me, I couldn't help myself. We do have a GitHub project that we are using to organize all the work that needs to be done for the website, the web app and all the other stuff around it. There are other tools available, but before I got distracted by that because I did have a quick look at Linear. No, just went back. So I went back through the work items, made sure that they were tidied up and actually relevant. I introduced milestones based on the quarters that I've just talked about as well, and then I made sure that the issues were actually aligned to the outcomes for each of those quarters as well. So there's a bit more structure to it. Now we know the back looks nice and clean and I can get a better idea of spread of work as well. If I can see that there's too much work to do in a quarter, then we can already start clearing that out. And that being said, last week I know I talked about giving the marketing website Petals Team a bit of lick of paint and getting that in a better place. It does need doing, but there's no point in doing that until I've got a web app that needs the marketing site doing. So I'll park that until Q2 and then as I get towards the end of Q1 and hopefully we've got a bit more of the app running, I can start preparing for that finally. I also talked a little bit around the newsletter last week as well. From a marketing angle, yes, there are people there waiting for content, I hope, but again, I don't want to just chuck anything out. What I'm going to try for the next couple of weeks is just putting out some of the weekly content like this on the newsletter, but they can be released on the Thursdays after the main content is released on the main channels on the Tuesdays. That's right, it's not going out on Monday anymore. I set myself up a little bit too much because I typically get my head together on Monday, record the content, edit it, get it ready to release. It's too much to do in one day. So I've just set myself a new goal of releasing these weeklies on Tuesdays now and then the email content will follow suit on Thursdays. So typically at this stage I will jump into my learnings of the week, but I've got a new idea here for you that I want to share and hopefully will give you some ideas to play around with. Too often we try to organize our plans and projects and all the tools available to us. Yes, most of them work what I thought I was missing. More recently prior to pure digital hybrid online only work, we used to have a physical whiteboard in a room and that whiteboard would have our typical Kanban columns. We put our actual cards on the wall with Blu tack and we'd move them across the board at stand up. I really missed that. Tangible connection with a work item or a story and seeing it progress through the board got me thinking about tangible content and real practical pieces of work. So what I thought about was how could I pull together my plans for a quarter one of the OKRs into a simple page? What I came up with was an A4 view of my plan for the year. Let me take you through how this works. So what we've got here is your typical A4 piece of paper. A3 might even be better for this, but for the purpose of these demos I'm going to use a piece of A4 paper. So what I do divide it in half, said twice, once, twice, three times, four times. Easy thin duh. But what you got here now here's 16 rows. Now let's do the same to the opposite way. Once, twice and three seconds this time you do this much neater than me using three folds on that way. What I've got Now is an 8 by 16 grid. Bear with because what this becomes is your map, your plan. What you do is your 8 grid becomes a 7 grid for your weekdays. Your 16 grid becomes 13 or 14 rows for your week view. What you then do is go well for week one. I need to start with your months. I've come from 1st of January through to 31st of March. So you number them out so you've got your month views. Then you will tick them off as the days progress. What this will give you is a view generally of how much time you've got in a quarter and how much you've completed, then I'll go back and say, right, my OKR for this quarter is to build and deliver a professional looking web app. Also add in here so I can get more users and it's by a certain timeline, typical outcome driven format. And then what I've done down the bottom here is call out my goal. This is to launch the app on the 31st of March, week 14 to start and then not to go into the next quarter. Another nice little addition to this. I've also lined off Saturday Sundays because everyone, not everyone works on Saturday Sundays. I've identified the 50% mark which is again quite worrying when you say look at this, I've already finished half of Q1. What can I do in the remaining half? What I've then done is identified what I've committed to doing this quarter. I've committed to doing my weekly content every week. Originally I was going to do it Mondays, but as I've already talked about today I'm going to shift this to Tuesdays, hence the RSD to Tuesdays. One other thing that I've talked about previously is how much time I'm spending on project. So I've mentioned in the past I'll do two hours every other night, eight or 10 and these ticks or crosses will be how much time I'm actually done. So it'll be a tick if I've done it or a cross if I haven't. And the final point of this is on each week I'm going to set myself my goal. I've said here I'm going to try the SHADCN component library. That'll be my weekly goal and I can keep doing that as I go down and how it maps to my end outcome. It's very much a work in progress but as you can see, this is a nice piece of paper that I can own, I could hold, I can take around with me because I can fold up and put it away or I can put it up in my workspace or if I'm with a team I can put it up in a shared workspace. It's a very much a tangible demonstration of what you can do with a piece of paper and own your okrs. So that's how you put your plan together. Hopefully you will get one yourself and you find this quite a useful concept. Please let me know if you try this or if you have any questions or concerns about it. Personally, I'm going to be folding this up and keeping it on me at all times so I know what my plans are. And then at the end of the quarter I can get a better view and feel the satisfaction. I've actually completed that thing. We'll see. Right, so that's enough for this week. I'm going to wrap it up there and be back next week. If you enjoy this content, please do the obvious, like subscribe and all that jazz and let me know your thoughts on the concept of your plan on the page, how you're going to use it, if you are, and if you're going to do it as a team. Tell me how you're going to execute that and I'll be back next week with more content.