How I Use OKRs to make Creative Work More Meaningful

Doing creative work in parallel to my day job fills that gap I miss from working in a corporate office five days a week. It helps me with my thought process and makes me pay attention to the world around me. The world I tend to ignore when I'm ultra-focused on solving a problem. However, I've often asked myself, "Where do I want to go with this? Am I okay with just putting things out there for the sake of putting them out there, or do I want to do more?" To help answer these questions, I resorted to a framework I use for my job and personal goals: OKRs. Here’s how I use them.

First, let me define OKRs in just a sentence: The OKR (Objectives and Key Results) framework helps organizations define goals and actions to achieve them.

Let’s continue.

Finding My Creative Direction

Let’s revisit the first question: "Where do I want to go with this?" Honestly, no framework could answer this for me. I had to do a lot of introspection through deep thinking sessions and making lists of things I enjoy doing that can also be interesting for other people. It’s a lot of trial and error, and I don’t consider this process ever finished. I just needed the first step—knowing that I wanted to combine and share product management tools and frameworks for creative work.

And so the first layer of the onion materializes itself:

1. Layer 1 - The Vision: Combine and share product management tools and frameworks for creative work

Once I knew the overall "vision," things started getting clearer. I could peel the next layer of the onion. Given that "sharing" is part of my vision, I inferred that reach would be important. I also wanted to keep it manageable, so I started small and aimed to reduce uncertainty as I went along. Here’s what the layers look like after some refinement:

1. Layer 1 - The Vision: Easy-to-understand product insights for creatives

   1. Layer 2 - The Goal: Reach creatives who want to bring structure to their work

Moving to Actionable Steps

The next layer of the onion is less abstract and more concrete. I asked myself: How do you find these people, and how do you make yourself visible to them so you can help? I came up with two actions:

1. Interact with people providing similar value.

2. Document my journey to make my work more visible.

Here’s the updated onion peel:

1. Layer 1 - The Vision: Easy-to-understand product insights for creatives

   1. Layer 2 - The Goal: Reach creatives who want to bring structure to their work

   2. Layer 3 - The Actions:

      1. Interact with a number of like-minded professionals.

      2. Document the journey through social media and web.

This is where the onion ends for me—for now. I don't want to make it more complex since it's a work in progress, but I want to start—perfect is the enemy of done. The final step was defining concrete numbers for layer 3: how many accounts I want to interact with and how often, and how many posts I want to make and their frequency.

Sharing My Journey

This is the OKR process I follow within my creative journey, and I’m sharing it for anyone interested or facing similar questions. Again, this is an ongoing process and it’s not perfect. It’s essential to track progress and confirm if these actions are helping the goal. I review layer 3 every week, layer 2 every quarter, and layer 1 is my overall vision for now so I don’t come back to that at all. All of these can change. I’ll continue sharing my journey as I go through it.