Weekly Highlights

Weekly Report CW6

Every Monday, I measure how many weekly highlights I’ve achieved. This week was weaker than the previous ones, with a score of 0.5. I had 14 weekly highlights and reached 7.1. These goals contribute to the quarter’s objectives and key results. Let’s look at how this works practically with this example:

Objective: Peace of mind
Key Results to get peace of mind:
- Daily sports activities
- Daily meditation
- A two years financial plan
- Launch a group that meets weekly to map out business ideas
- Make one business idea happen

What creates peace of mind has every individual to find out themselves. But for me, the examples above are not too far from what I’m doing right now, and I feel pretty dang good.

Key Results have to be measurable. This means that you must be able to say if you achieved it or not. Have you been to the gym? Yes gives a 1, no gives a 0. It’s a matter of definition. You set the rules. If you want to make sports activities a strict daily routine, you break it if you miss a single day. The KeyResult might look like: “Do sport every single day for at least 10 minutes”. This means if you do six days of sport and miss one, your Key Result jumps to 0. With this example, it’s all-or-nothing.

But how strict you measure is up to you, it should be defined before. Let’s say you set the Key Result “make 5 times sport per week”, and you don’t want to be as strict as above. Then you go 4 times, you can give yourself a 0.8 (4 divided by 5).

KeyResults are a higher-level task with plenty of subtasks. With this sports example, a task might be “buy good running shoes,” I mean you better need some good shoes if you want to run a lot.

How to get from Objectives to KeyResults, to Weekly Highlights.

I’m going to take another example with the business ideas group. It’s a group that meets every week to map out business ideas theoretically. These ideas should be at a state to get funding and start-up companies. From the book “measure what matters” by John Doerr, KeyResults can become objectives for other departments or divisions, or people. So let’s turn this one into an objective first, then set key results to get there.

Yearly Objective: Becoming a start-up machine.
KR: Build a group that creates new business ideas
KR: Meet with this group every Monday evening
KR: Map out 48 business ideas
KR: Set four business ideas into reality

Now to make business ideas happen over and over again, like being a real “start-up machine,” it makes sense to have a booklet full of business plans. It also makes sense to meet with other people to create these. It doesn’t make sense to meet just once in a while, a machine is relentless and consistent. So meeting every week to push this forward makes sense too. All of the above KeyResults are measurable by the end of the year. But hey, one year is far away. So we have to shrink it down to a quarter. Ask yourself what’s possible because, by the end of the quarter, you’re going to measure your results.

Quarterly Objective: Start-up the Start-Up-Machine.
KR: Outline the idea for this group
KR: Build a group that creates many ideas
KR: Kick-Off first meeting
KR: Meet for all the other Mondays
KR: Map out the first 8 business ideas

Okay, now we get to the weekly tasks. Imagine the quarter started. It’s the first Monday. You have to start with the idea outline to pitch the idea to potential fellows. You need a small presentation. I’d go with these two weekly highlights:

• Create and outline your idea with a presentation
• Call and invite fellows for the kick-off meeting

Sure, there could be way more subtasks, but you don’t want to get lost in planning endlessly. For sure, you can put in subtasks such as “create a potential list of people” and then “call people.” Or “make miro board account” and then “create a miro board with your thoughts.” But this misses absolutely the point of weekly highlights.

You want to be able to check in the Monday after and ask yourself, “have I made the idea outline and created the presentation?” and “did I call and invite people for the kick-off meeting?”. Then you give yourself a score. Have you done both? You get a 1.0. Have you done just one of the two? You get a 0.5. Then you set new weekly highlights and measure them the week after. I print these highlights out and hang it next to my computer screens. So I always see what I want to check off.

I don’t go above fourteen of these highlights per week, currently working on multiple businesses, and they all move forward doing so. Feel free to reach out if you want to talk about this topic.

This topic is something I’m going to add to the webpage of OnSaPa™ —which is in the future here to help everyone achieve more.

What was good?

• The OnVentures session was excellent.
• Created a strategic pricing document
• Received shares offer from an early collaboration
• I started to pay back loans
• Proceeding to delete an old company
• Planned all holiday & OKR-Sessions for 2022
• The first agile workshop with WOP

What to look at in the future?

• Stay above 0.7 in your weekly tasks. This week was 0.5
• Get to 16+ hours on SRE, two weeks in a row were less than 16

What was shitty?

• nothing

What should stay as it is?

• How I track progress and follow through on it

What was neglected?

• WOP Meeting Preparations

I will be back next week with new updates.

Enjoy a fantastic start to this week!
Otto