How To Use The Moonshot Planner
How To Use The Moonshot Planner
The Moonshot Planner is a personal and business productivity planner that’s based on the OKR-goal setting framework (Not sure what OKRs are - check out this little OKR primer).
OKRs (which stand for Objective Key Results) are super effective and they’ve helped many of the world’s best companies (like Google, Amazon, Spotify etc) reach and exceed their organizational goals.
There is lots of OKR software out there, mostly geared towards helping businesses. Not too many planners...in fact none. We like planners, so we built The Moonshot Planner, the world’s first (we think) OKR-based planner.
Getting Started
At a high level, the goal of The Moonshot Planner (and OKRs in general) is to help you create a crystal clear roadmap to achieve your bigger, hairier objectives. If you are familiar with OKRs, then what you’ll see in The Moonshot Planner won’t be new to you. If you’re not familiar with OKRs, you might learn something new.
Set Your Objectives
As a refresher, objectives are what we want to achieve. They are intended to be aspirational and qualitative and choosing the right objectives is arguably the most important part of this whole thing. Your quarterly objectives should be aligned to your year-long goals and your overall mission and vision.
No one is an expert the first (or second, or third) time they do this so don’t stress too hard about it. If you want to read up on how to set up objectives - check this, this or this out.
The Moonshot Planner has 5 different objectives, each intended to last a quarter.
Here is an example of an objective:
Define Your Key Results
Now that you set objectives, it’s time to set specific key results.
If objectives tell us what we want to achieve - key results will tell us how to get there. Key results are not tasks - they are metrics that quantify our objectives. They should be straightforward, ambitious, quantifiable and measurable.
With KRs, The Moonshot Planner has “Summary Action Plans” - a high-level summary of your approach, tactics or projects that need to happen to successfully meet your key results.
As a rule of thumb, keep it to a few key results, like 3-4. Focus is important, though it’s better to diversify your key results, rather than having a singular 1. Make them challenging and achieve and not impossible.
Plan Your Week
With weekly planning you can set an action plan for that week against each of your objectives. With a weekly plan, you bring your objectives with you and build the scaffolding of your week with projects, tactics, initiatives or tasks for each one of your objectives.
Check-In At The End of the Week
Weekly check-ins are important to stay aligned with your objectives. They help you reflect on the previous week so you can think about what worked, areas that need improvement and things you change to perform better the next week.
Take your time with weekly check-ins. Real progress comes through thoughtful reflection. It’s your opportunity to learn, plan and change it up a bit.
Take Control Of Your Day
The daily planner gives you all the tools you need to take control of your busy day while staying aligned with your weekly plan.
Set your top three priorities, list and complete tasks, schedule your day and take notes.
Grading Your OKRs
Grading your key results and objectives is a critical part of determining whether or not you were successful in achieving your goals.
OKRs are often graded on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0, 1.0 meaning the objective was fully achieved.
Grading can be binary, meaning 1.0 if you achieved your objective or 0.0 if you didn’t, or on a sliding scale that’s based on the progress you’ve made.
The scale below is helpful if your grading key results based on progress.
With the Moonshot Planner, you can grade each monthly key result. This allows you to keep track of progress over the course of a quarter. It also makes it easier to grade each objective at the end of month 3.
Grading your objectives is simple. You just average the score of your month 3 key results.
