Goal setting is not wish-making—OKRs say “where to go,” and the 12 Week Year says “what pace to use.”
Raymond’s explanation
Five years ago, at the beginning of each year, Raymond enthusiastically listed a pile of goals, only to have forgotten most of them by March. He later understood that the problem was not a lack of willpower; the way he set goals was fundamentally wrong.
Most people’s goals actually come from other people’s success stories—someone with no reading habit sets “one book a week,” or someone who commutes in the morning expects to go jogging at 5:30. Goals detached from one’s personal context are bound to fail.
Raymond breaks goal setting down into a combination of two tools:
OKRs (Objectives and Key Results): First use problem analysis to clarify the real challenge, then set a directional Objective and pair it with two or three measurable Key Results. For example, rather than saying “I want to get healthy,” set “exercise three times a week and lower body fat to 20%.”
The 12 Week Year: The fatal flaw in a traditional annual plan is that the time span is too long. The brain thinks there is plenty of time, slackens for the first few months, then rushes to catch up at year’s end. Twelve weeks (three months) is just right:
- Long enough to accomplish something meaningful
- Short enough to maintain focus and urgency
- A full review every 12 weeks becomes material for problem analysis in the next stage
As an analogy: an annual plan is like saying “I’m going to walk from Taipei to Kaohsiung” and then setting out. A 12-week plan first maps the route and sets rest stops, then checks progress at each stop. The destination is known, and so is the next step.
Origin
- OKRs: Invented by Intel’s Andy Grove and popularized by Google
- The 12 Week Year: Brian Moran’s The 12 Week Year
- Raymond’s integration: problem analysis → OKR → 12-week plan, a three-step closed loop
Where it has been discussed
Course scripts
- 23 | Effective Review (Part 2): How Should Goals Really Be Set? — a practical guide to OKRs + 12-week planning, including a Google Sheet template
Articles
- 2021-06-15_How to Use Notion to Build Your OKR Goal Management System
- 2021-06-15_How to Use OKRs Well: A Practical Example for Learning Task Breakdown and Goal Management
- 2021-06-15_Understanding the Difference Between OKRs and KPIs: How Goal Management Can Help Companies Communicate Effectively