You ever look up from your desk, your inbox, your endless errands, and think—“Wait, how did I end up here?”
Not in a panic exactly. More like waking from a nap you didn’t mean to take. You meant to read a chapter, send an email, maybe even go for a walk. But you blink, and it’s sunset, and somehow your whole day—or week, or decade—has drifted by.
This happens more often than we like to admit. We slide into jobs that seemed fine enough at the time. We say yes to things because they’re in front of us, not because we chose them. We build routines that calcify into lives. And one day we catch ourselves wondering: Is this what I wanted, or just what happened?
I know this firsthand.
When I left Zynga, I didn’t just leave a job—I walked away from the tech industry, the identity I’d built, the hamster wheel of product launches and performance reviews. I had no grand plan. I was burnt out, yes. But I also felt… untethered. Like I’d cut loose from a dock and was bobbing out to sea, no land in sight.
That’s when I decided to try something I’d been teaching others to do for years: use OKRs to bring some intention back into my life.
My first personal OKR was simple, but it saved me.
Objective: Be financially stable, preserve health, do work I like.
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KR1: Earn $30K over three months doing work I’d gladly tackle even if it were unpaid.
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KR2: Create—and actually follow—a budget that lets me predict expenses.
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KR3: Zero acid reflux, zero back pain.
I hired a coach to hold me accountable. (Because let’s be honest: left to my own devices, I’d have just kept refreshing Twitter and calling it “research.”) And you know what? That one small act of intention—writing down what mattered, checking in every week—changed everything.
Within a year, I wasn’t just working again. I was doing work I loved. I started teaching at Stanford. I wrote more. I felt whole again.
The thing is, we’re not wired to make active decisions all the time. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky spent decades showing how our brains default to heuristics—those mental shortcuts that help us survive but can also keep us stuck. Sheena Iyengar’s research on choice overload shows that when we’re faced with too many options, we tend to shut down. We pick the default. We go with the crowd. We postpone the hard stuff.
But drifting isn’t destiny.
The good news? You don’t need a five-year plan or a vision board to take control. You just need to look at the next seven days.
Try this:
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Look at your calendar for the upcoming week.
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Ask: What really matters to me right now? What do I want more of? What do I want less of?
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Set a personal OKR for the week—just one.
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Objective: Something meaningful, not just a to-do list item.
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Key Results: 1–3 tangible things you’ll do to move toward it.
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Maybe it’s “Reconnect with my creativity.” Maybe it’s “Feel physically better.” Whatever it is, write it down. Then live like it matters—because it does.
This isn’t about hustle. It’s about waking up. It’s about choosing your life, one small, deliberate step at a time.
Don’t drift. Decide.