OKR Reflection

A Half In Review

This was my first full half staying in one place (my apartment). Let's break down the major events for this half.

January

Highlights:

Started my first ever therapy sessions.
Got myself an eight sleep mattress (smart everything!).
Started dating again.

Lowlights:

Working too much. Specifically, not efficient with work.

February

Highlights:

Promotion at work!
Figured out my tax scenario particularly with my overdue taxes in Australia. Paid off student loans. I no longer owe the Australian government any money :).
Sorted out basics for medium term planning (401k backdoors, etc).
New glasses and contacts!

Lowlights:

Physical Therapy for my foot as I've been getting some strange cramps in the morning
Still working too much, no deep focus blocks. No time to focus on my habits.

March

Highlights:

Did some morning meditation for at least a third of the days.
Did the Motorcycle Safety Course (one step closer to getting my motorcycle) .
Continue to play tennis!

Lowlights:

G A M E S T O P (GME). The saga begins.

April

Highlights:

Got my MOTORCYCLE <3
I became the Tech Lead :o
Built a magic mirror!
Joined bay club to play more tennis. Played in some social competitions and met a few people!

Lowlights:

Stopped dating.
GME consumes an unwieldy amount of time for little to zero value.

May

Highlights:

Fully vaccinated! It's almost over (or so I thought at the time)?
Joined a USTA tennis team!
Full motorcycle license (still don't have a car license in CA D:)

Lowlights:

G M E

June:

Highlights:

I got highlights (:P it was too good not to include)
Tennis has been engraved into my identity. I don't know how I can live without it now :P.
Signed up for tennis coaching!
Starting to work from the office.

Lowlights:

Fell on my motorcycle
Physical Therapy for my knee (which turns out to be an issue with my foot) due to overdoing tennis.

Metrics

Sleep Score - 76 -> 77 Activity Score - 82 -> 83 Readiness Score - 78 -> 75

Wakeup Time: 07:57 -> 07:10 Bedtime: 23:51 -> 22:52 Total Sleep: 8h 4min -> 7hr 49min

Objective 1: Learning

[P0] KR: Mindless is used to reflect on OKRs and Sprints

Completion: 3/10
I have something that barely works and could be called an app. There was a severe lack of investment into this KR.

[P1] KR: Write a post every two weeks.

Completion: 8/10
This one I'm pleasantly surprised about. If you include the planning posts (which are kind of cheating) I started writing a lot more. There were a good amount of internal posts I did too (I created my own group). Keep it up.

[P1] KR: Read a book a month.

Completion: 2/10
It's like I don't even know how to read.
I have more books purchased now but barely made it past 10% of any of them! No habits :(

Objective 2: Foundation

[P1] KR: Compete in a tennis tournament

Completion: 10/10
Yay! I did something. My record is 0-1 singles, 1-1 doubles. It's still ongoing (two more matches) but I'm marking this a success!

[P1] KR: Sleep score >80 and Wake Up Consistency Score >80(?).

Completion: 3/10
This was modified, but from metrics sleep score went up once, activity went up too but readiness plummeted. From the metrics, sleep hygiene has gotten a little bit better.

[P1] KR: 90 sessions of meditation.

Completion: 3/10 - Did ~30 session of meditation
I think we did less meditation this half than last D:. I blame GME.

[P2] KR: Activity score >85.

Completion: 2/10
Moved a little. I'm surprised this is not higher. I felt much much more active last half. It might just be recency bias since the last month I've been very active. That's why metrics are good. They don't lie :)

[P2] KR: Complete the morning/night routine for 90 times

Completion: 0/10
GME Saga took over my routine.

Objective 3: Work

[P0] KR: Have a daily deep work block

Completion: 6/10
This one is a little tricky. The intent was to be have deep work block for focused individual work. However, as I became the TL and more generally the scope of my work changed it required much more distracted work. I still kept my deep work block (so didn't really talk to people out of my team) but jumped around a lot. Need to cut off everything to qualify it as a deep work block.

[P1] KR: Work less than 50 hours a week.

Completion: -1/10
I think we regressed here and worked more than last half.

Holistically

Overall, I'm happy with how the half went. Of course I didn't make huge strides with my goals but I need to give credit where credit is due. Staying in the same studio apartment for 6 months, with your family and a majority of your friends out of reach is pretty isolating. I could have easily crawled into a ball and gave up but I moved forward and actively focused on my mental health (video calls w/fam friends, therapy, dating again etc). We started to write a lot more and enjoy the process of writing and teaching. We focused on our health and joined a tennis tournament. We adapted to a new promotion and new role fairly effortlessly.

However, if I had to sum up the lowlights of the last half I would place it as reactionary. Long term goals were thrown away for short term dopamine spikes. GME proved to, for better or for worse, a gigantic distraction. Media was overconsumed. We fell into the day-night cycle of work, media, sleep and repeat. As things changed, sure we adapted quickly but we over-adapted. We overcorrected and right now it might not seem like a big deal but an overcorrection into the wrong direction compounds. The problem is this isn't new. Maybe there's something deeper to this behavior. We'll have to find out!

Here are some more of my thoughts on certain topics:

Work

Work is such a tricky one to evaluate. From the outcomes it would seem like things are going extraordinarily and that'd be 90% true. I absolutely love the work I do, the colleagues I can learn from and all the hard problems we're solving. However, that's the problem. I enjoy it so much it's consuming all my time. I need to be more effective and less brute forcing. This does mean taking a step back and outputting less temporarily to scale my output in the future. I will say work has likely been another escape from me during this pandemic. It's easy to dump all my time into work when there's a lack of things I can do outside.

Dating

Can I just say I am not a fan of online dating :). I'm glad I at least tried. In fact, I did date a girl for a few months. However, I cannot wait until things re-open. Zoom dates suck.

GME

Okay GME was initially interesting but do I regret getting involved. It was meant to be a quick way to learn (and the best way to learn is when your money is on the line :)) but quickly became an obsession. Things have died down but there were a period of weeks there where the first thing I did everymorning was read about GME.

North Star

So how far away are we from what we wanted to achieve.

Learning: I've enjoyed writing a lot more both internally and externally. Teaching is the best way to learn! I've also been dabbling in a variety of things - I built a magic mirror, worked on Mindless, random pieces at work. Overall, I'm quite happy with the high level goal of learning.

Foundation: The foundations I think I've built is writing and tennis. It doesn't take effort for me to play tennis or formulate some ideas through a message. Items that I didn't build the foundation are still around sleep, reading and meditation.

Work: The North Start was themed around being efficient. This, obviously, was before I knew about the promo + change in role. We have to mark this as not achieved for being more efficient. I don't think I regressed heavily in efficiency (still played tennis, didn't stay late) but it didn't improve either.

In 2020H2, I assumed I'll just wait until post COVID to start this exploration but I think in 2021H1 I need to find mechanisms to adapt.

I think we did well here in the "adapting". We jumped onto online dating. We joined bay club and started more social tennis. We got our motorcycle so we could actually go places :P.