I am hitting ‘Command + F’ on my keyboard so hard my fingernails are clicking like frantic insects against the plastic. The screen is a nauseating blur of blue-and-white Jira tickets and half-rendered Confluence pages. Somewhere in the 47 tabs I currently have open-yes, exactly 47, because I am a digital hoarder who treats browser tabs like emotional safety blankets-is a document titled ‘Q1 Strategic Objectives.’ I haven’t opened it since January 7th. It is now March 27th, the dead-end of the quarter, and I have exactly 17 minutes before my performance review. I am trying to remember who I was three months ago, that optimistic version of myself who thought ‘driving 7% growth in cross-functional synergy’ was a coherent sentence rather than a desperate cry for help.
This is the Great OKR Ritual. We all do it. We spend the first few weeks of the year in windowless conference rooms, or on 107-minute Zoom calls, debating the nuance between an ‘Objective’ and a ‘Key Result.’ We use verbs like ‘leverage,’ ‘optimize,’ and ‘catalyze’ as if we are trying to summon a demon of productivity. Then, we archive the document, ignore it for 87 days, and frantically try to reverse-engineer our actual daily labor into the rigid, bureaucratic boxes we built for ourselves when we were still drunk on New Year’s resolution energy. It is a corporate cargo cult. We build the grass landing strips, we wear the wooden headphones, and we wonder why the planes of true innovation never land.
I’m distracted, though. I keep glancing at my phone because last night, in a moment of sheer, unadulterated weakness, I accidentally liked my ex’s photo from 2021-a picture of her in a sun-drenched park that I had no business scrolling back to. It was 3:07 AM. The blue light was the only thing alive in my room. That sudden, cold spike of adrenaline I felt when my thumb slipped is exactly the same feeling I have right now looking at my OKRs. It’s the feeling of being caught in a past that no longer exists, trying to justify a version of yourself that you’ve already outgrown. We haunt our own spreadsheets just like we haunt our social media histories.
Open Tabs (Distraction)
Reported Synergy Growth
[The metrics are the map, but we are driving directly into the lake.]
The Ghost of Objective Truth: Nina C.-P.
Nina C.-P. doesn’t have this problem. Nina is a building code inspector I met last week while she was failing a new residential development for 77 different minor infractions. She carries a heavy clipboard and a laser measure that she treats with more reverence than most people treat their firstborn children. Nina doesn’t have an OKR to ‘Increase structural integrity perception by 17%.’ She doesn’t have a Key Result to ‘Socialize the concept of foundational stability among stakeholders.’ She walks into a basement, points her laser at a crack in the concrete, and tells the foreman that the house is going to slide into the ravine if he doesn’t fix the drainage. It is binary. It is real. It is physical.
There is a profound, almost erotic honesty in Nina’s work. She deals in the tangible. When I told her about my job-about how I spend my days managing ‘strategic alignment’-she looked at me with the kind of pity usually reserved for three-legged dogs. She is the ghost of objective truth, a reminder that while we are busy ‘pivoting’ our KPIs, the real world is made of rebar, sweat, and gravity.
We pretend that OKRs are about clarity, but they are actually about control. They are a tax on our time that serves management’s need to feel like they are steering a ship that is actually being moved by the chaotic currents of the market. If a sudden crisis hits, or a new opportunity arises, we don’t follow the OKRs; we follow the fire. But at the end of the quarter, we still have to pretend the fire was part of the plan. We spend 57 hours a year updating scores that everyone knows are fabricated.
The Clarity of the Unmeasured Work
Look at a business like
Wilcox Brothers Lawn Sprinklers & Landscape Lighting. Their world is refreshingly devoid of the corporate hallucination. When they go out to a job site, the objective isn’t ‘to reimagine the hydration experience for suburban flora.’ The objective is to make the grass green and make the lights turn on at exactly 7:07 PM. There is a sacred simplicity in work that can be measured by the dampness of the soil.
Fabricated Achievement Score
73% (Falsified)
OKRs provide a protective layer of jargon. They allow us to feel like we are part of a grand design, even when we are just trying to keep our heads above water. They are the ‘sun-drenched park’ photo of our professional lives-a curated, filtered version of a reality that is actually messy, tired, and slightly out of focus.
The Disconnection: Living in Two Worlds
This disconnection creates a form of corporate schizophrenia. We live in two worlds: the real world where we are just trying to survive the day, and the OKR world where we are all visionary leaders hitting our targets with 97% accuracy. The distance between these two worlds is where burnout lives. It’s the friction of the lie. Nina C.-P. doesn’t have burnout; she has exhaustion. Exhaustion can be cured with a long weekend and a cold beer. Burnout is what happens when you spend 47 hours a week pretending that a spreadsheet is a reflection of your soul.
The Power of ‘Today’s Best Guess’
We need to stop the theater. We need to admit that we don’t know what we’re doing half the time. What if we replaced OKRs with ‘Today’s Best Guess’? What if we acknowledged that 7% of our goals are actually just guesses disguised as data? It would certainly save us the 37 hours of anxiety we feel every March, June, September, and December.
We could focus on doing the work-the actual, tangible, ‘making-the-sprinklers-run’ kind of work-instead of documenting the work in a language that nobody actually speaks.
The Final Scorecard
I finally found the document. It was in a folder called ‘Admin/Ignore/DoNotOpen/2024.’ I have 7 minutes left. I’m going to give myself a 0.7 for ‘Strategic Communication’ and a 1.0 for ‘Resilience.’ If anyone asks, I’ll tell them the 0.7 is because I’m ‘holding myself to a higher standard of radical candor.’ They’ll love that. They’ll probably give me a promotion for it.
Q1 Self-Assessed Results (The Theater)
0.7
Comm.
1.0
Resilience
0.4
Synergy
And tonight, I’ll go home, sit in my backyard, and watch the sprinklers. I won’t measure the water pressure. I won’t track the spray pattern. I’ll just watch the water hit the grass and be grateful for something that doesn’t require a status update.
There is a certain power in the unmeasured life, a quiet dignity in the things we do simply because they need to be done, without the need for a score or a slide deck. Nina C.-P. would probably agree, though she’d probably find 17 things wrong with my backyard fence before she did.