Lesson: Decision Making & Happiness with Kevin Fishner

Step #3 Balance: Break down each goal into 6-8 key results, which could then be broken down to smaller tasks

Things outside of work, I'll only focus on one. Otherwise I just don't have enough bandwidth to accomplish something properly. So that gets back to idea of we only have so much cognitive ability throughout the day and throughout a month, so by focusing on one thing I know I can do it well versus doing three to four things kind of mediocre.

Over the past six months I've been focusing on improving my chess game, so that's certainly very broad. There's so much you can read and there’s so much you can learn and of course you’re playing, but it's focused enough that I know exactly how I can be improving. Then recently I've been improving at design, so learning sketch and learning product design so I can really take an idea, visualize it and then actually build a code at the end.

So that's what I consider an achievable goal, it's still broad. I guess that's something that I could focus down on, but based on the goal setting this is am objective that I want to get better on and now I can split it down into weekly tasks or monthly tasks.

For work, we will focus on as a team one objective. Usually that's a revenue goal because it's easily quantifiable, it's relevant to the business, but we'll split that down to between six and eight key results. Those all wrap up or roll up to the objective. So let's say we need to increase revenue by 50%, that means we need to increase the volume of clients we have as well as increase pricing. So then we can take, okay, how do we increase volume? Let's improve outreach, let's improve our conversations.

How do we increase price? Well, one is we improve the product or we allow a bidding system to increase the price. So it's this process of larger goal, split it up into key results and those, again, can be broken down into smaller tasks. So it's always the decision tree of larger tasks being split up into smaller and smaller tasks until it can be done by one or two people.

For setting team goals it's a collaborative experience, and similar to what we talked about before where you get all the ideas and all the different inspiration points on the table as everybody expresses their interests and what they think the goals should be and we lay it all out on the table and then prioritize from there. So it allows all the right information to be in place and then we can combine and remix and set a final goal there.

The goal this quarter is a percentage revenue increase, which is very, very obvious but it still goes through a collaborative process of these are the things to hit that goal that I think we can be doing and then it's being assigned out to the relevant decision makers there.