If you’re using Notion to run your business, then your strategic goals should also be in Notion. OKRs are a popular and powerful goal-setting framework that will help your company define a broader vision while hitting your short-term milestones, deliverables and goals. And by implementing your OKRs in Notion, you ensure that they play a key role in your day-to-day decision making.
What are OKRs?
OKRs stand for Objective and Key Results, a goal setting framework developed by Andy Grove and popularized by John Doerr. An aspirational long-term goal (your Objective) is paired with measurable short-term goals (your Key Results). Together, your Objective and Key Results provide you both with a North Star and broader vision (like the place on the map where you want to go) and a toolset to measure your actual progress (like your travelled distance in any given day).
If you want to learn more about the OKR framework, here’s how we’ve adapted OKRs at RadReads to suit our team’s growing needs.
How can you implement OKRs in Notion?
You can easily implement OKRs in Notion by downloading our free template. Here’s how to use it:
- Define Your Teams
- Determine Your Objectives
- Establish Key Results
- Connect Key Results to Objectives
- Optional: Establish Health Metrics
Let’s take a closer look:
Step 1: Define Your Teams
Start by adding your different teams or departments to the Notion template. Each of them will have their own OKRs. In addition, you may want to add company-wide OKRs.
Step 2: Determine Your Objectives
Next, document the individual objectives together with the timeframe to achieve them. Objectives are usually measured on a longer horizon. At RadReads, we usually plan on a quarterly basis.
Assign each Objective to an Owner (the person mainly responsible for achieving it) and a team (or the whole company).
Step 3: Establish Your Key Results
Now it’s time to break down each Objective into individual Key Results. What milestones can you measure that will bring you closer to turning your vision into reality?
The template comes with a built-in progress bar. You can measure any sort of desired result by simply adding the final number to the Target Result property.
Example: If your Key Result is to send 25 cold emails, then put 25 into the Target Result property.
Step 4: Connect Your Key Results To Their Objective
Onto one of the major advantages of tracking your OKRs in Notion: it’s super easy to connect information. Map each Key Result to the corresponding Objective. That way, you always have your overall objective progress at your fingertips.
Step 5 (Optional): Establish Your Health Metrics
One drawback of OKRs (and goals in general): keeping track of metrics that are hard to measure. Here’s where Health Metrics come in. Instead of trying to identify a specific number, use a simple colour-coding system (Green, Yellow, Red) to report on the status.
How to track progress towards your OKRs in Notion?
With your OKRs in Notion all set up, it’s time to establish a regular reporting routine. Once a week, the person responsible for a Key Result (or Health Metric) should enter the the current actual result into the database.
The Notion template will automatically compare the actual result agains the target result and update the progress bar accordingly.