How to slay your objectives

... and the way to master KPIs

Setting new goals is important, for your personal life and your professional life, it is what makes you better everyday.

I have had a lot of goals in my life, some quite small and easy like "Not to go to fast food three times a week" (and it was not that easy) and some that were pretty challenging like "Waking up earlier and go to the gym".

If you are like me, the kind to drop your New Year's resolution within a week, you won't be surprised if I tell you that I did not achieve the former two goals (though my diet improved a lot !) …

And yet over time I realized I could achieve some hard goals but still dropping easier ones.

If the difficulty of the goal is not what makes it easy to meet then what is ?

Set a SMART goal

It stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-boxed.

Let's see what it means with two examples :

• Losing weight, which is a pretty common objective.

• And being a better developer, after all this blog is about IT, might as well talk about it.

Specific

Your goal should be crystal clear.

• You want to lose weight ? Too vague. Think about a way to lose weight. Work out more often or improve your diet.

• You want to be a better developer ? Too vague. Again : be more specific. Work some katas, read blog articles (like my previous article).

Measurable

Here is the perfect example to work on your KPIs, which I will discuss a bit further.

You want to know how close you are to your goal.

• How much weight do you want to lose per week or month ?

• How many katas do you want to do ? How many articles/books do you want to read or even how long do you want to read each week ?

Having milestones along your way is a good habit to stay motivated. Break your goal into smaller steps that you will do repeatedly.

Achievable

Often to achieve a goal you have some requirements. Be sure that all these requirements are met beforehand else your goal is doomed to be impossible.

• Losing weight when you are not the one responsible for what you eat or don't have access to a gym is quite difficult.

• It's hard to be a better developer when you don't have access to a computer.

Realistic

Set a goal for yourself that is within your reach although a challenging one is often a good idea, a goal that is to easy to achieve will undermine your motivation and how rewarding it will be when accomplished.

• Running a marathon when you can't breathe after a five-kilometer run might be too challenging for now.

• Working as a developer when you don't have any experience with coding is not realistic, start with building your coding skills.

Time-bound

One crucial aspect of a goal that is often left aside is that you must have a time limit.

Without this you will likely be less motivated to work on your goal.

• Lose ten kilograms within the next six months

• Watch all videos from a conference within the next three months

Yeah I already know all that, you are not the first one to Google "How to achieve my goals", don't you have any specific advice ?

Actually I do !

Following the SMART pattern is really helpful, another thing that is useful is to iterate over your goal.

Every given amount of time, like every two weeks, think about your goal and ask yourself if it is still relevant, if the way your measure your achievement is right.

Do not be afraid to be too optimistic, split it into smaller goals.

KPIs to know how good you are, or not

KPI, or Key Performance Indicator, is a metric you follow to know how good you are performing.

It is a metric …

KPIs are something impartial, it either go up or go down.

They can be quite challenging to find depending of your goal.

You must at least find one or else you will not know how close you are to your goal but three is a good number to go.

If I used the previous examples it could be :

• Losing weight : The lost weight obviously but sometimes even if you followed your plan your weight will not budge. This is where other KPIs are useful like how long you worked out or how much calories you ingested during a day, they are essential to keep you motivated.

• Better developer : Trickier as they are no obvious KPI that proves that you improved. It might be how many articles you read each day or many videos you watched.

… you need to follow

That means that whatever your KPIs are, they are only useful over a period of time. A specific value for your KPI does not mean much, what matters is the evolution of your KPI.

It is important that you keep track of your KPI, by using a spreadsheet for example, you could easily transform it to a graph.

Visualizing your goal is the best way to achieve it !

Be careful of vanity

When talking about KPI, you should be warned against what is called vanity metrics.

These are metrics that look great on paper but do not make a lot of sense regarding your real goal.

Let's take another example. You launched your tech blog some time ago and you wish to know how well it does. One common idea is to check the number of visit. It sounds like a good idea, I mean, obviously if a lot of people come to your blog then that must mean it is great, right ?

Think about it.

If your goal is to attract as many people as you can then indeed that is a good KPI but if your goal is to make a useful blog, one you can be proud of then do you think it is still that good of an idea ?

To know if people are interested in your blog you could instead check the session time, the rebound rate or if they returned to your blog.

I hope you enjoyed this article and that it will help you dealing with your everyday goals and with your next New Year's resolution.

If you like it and would like more details feel free to reach out to me on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Cheers.