Hi Reader, and happy Friday!

I just sent his note to our Goal Fridays participants in prep for our first session about Key Results next week, but it's too helpful not to share more broadly.

An aside: If you'd like to join the waitlist for the next cohort of Goal Fridays, my experiment in community with other goal-focused folks, click this link and I'll note your interest.

I've been at this awhile, and I know one thing to be true:

It's way harder to create Key Results when you're thinking about creating Key Results.

When you're learning Key Results for the first time, when I ask you to ideate your Key Results, one of a few things will likely happen:

• Your mind will go blank
• You'll go straight to activities (because activities are our brains' "happy place" of being more within our direct individual control than objectively measurable outcomes, which may be beyond our control)
• You'll go to what you can measure, instead of what might be helpful to quantify.

As insurance against those results, here's a suggestion:

🗒️ Grab an index card or a piece of paper or start a notepad file, and keep it handy all quarter -- not just during the phase where you're doing your goal setting.

🤔 If / when your brain starts a thought with something like:

• I wish I / we could ...
• I wish I had data to help me make this decision ...
• You know what would be amazing, is if ...

or any variation on that theme, write down the idea or thought. (You don't need to dwell on it, or think it through, or analyze or examine it: think of it as a "brain blurt" and just write it down and then get on with your day.)

(This is also a sneaky way to practice mindful awareness, for those of us who are working on mindfulness but need alternatives to traditional meditation.)

If you do so, what you're doing is collecting the building blocks of potentially important Key Results.

That way, when you sit down to write your goals, instead of having your mind go blank, you've got helpful fodder you can look at to then ask:

1. Which of these are still important / relevant?
2. How might I create a Key Result around this idea?
3. What data, feedback, or observable behaviors might signal that I'm making progress (or not)?

And you might just get to the Key Results that are actually most helpful and important instead of falling into any of the common KR pitfalls.

I'd love to hear how that goes for you if you play with the practice, so drop me a note if so!

Otherwise, have a great weekend!

-Sara

P.S. We're one step closer to launching an actual click-to-buy system for Executive and OKR coaching time with me, as well as our small and midsize business OKR onboarding package -- and when we do, my calendar is going to fill up fast. If you'd like to connect about your Q2 OKR reset while I still have windows available during March, now's the time! Self-schedule a quick, free strategy consult with me by clicking this link, or drop me an email and I can send you some basic info about our low-cost, high-value starter engagements we can squeeze in before the start of Q2.