Set cycle time
In Vis, the length of the cycle is calculated from the start date and the end date. It starts at 00:00:00 on the start date and ends at 23:59:59 on the end date, including the end date.
As a business user, the length of the OKR cycle is often set to 1 quarter or 1 year. As an individual user, depending on your actual situation, the cycle length can be set to two weeks or 1 month. The difference in cycle length is as follows:
A short cycle can be used for goals that are uncertain and require a short time for rapid trial and error to verify their effectiveness.
A short cycle can reflect your efficiency and execution capability during this period more quickly, allowing for rapid testing and adjustment.
A long cycle is usually more challenging, with major directions already determined, but the short time (referring to a few days or a week) may be completely trial and error, unable to contribute key results.
A long cycle may also be when the goals and key results have already been proven to be stable and effective, simply requiring continued execution to achieve the desired results.
weight
In Vis, all objectives and key results in a cycle include their weights. Therefore, you can assign corresponding weights (totaling 100) based on the urgency and importance of your objectives and key results.
Target diversity
Unlike machines that only need to complete a task within a certain period of time—executing according to set procedures without needing rest, humans not only need to work within a certain time frame but also need to live; enterprises require both technology development and product sales. Therefore, within a cycle of a Vision, you may not only need to quantify your most urgent and important goals, but you should also quantify goals that are somewhat less urgent and important.
For example, learning / working and health. These two seem to be completely different directions, but for a person, theoretically speaking, they are equally important. However, modern individuals not only pursue a healthy life, but they also want to achieve success in academics or careers while planning to develop several interesting hobbies. Therefore, a cycle often becomes a collection of goals in completely different directions, and assigning corresponding scores based on their weight is an important method to distinguish the significance and urgency of the goals.
Cycle progress
The progress of the cycle depends on the number of key results completed so far, combined with their weight to calculate.
In theory, key results can only determine whether they are completed at the end of the cycle, as key results quantify the final outcome rather than the process; however, some key results can achieve a corresponding number of outcomes before the end of the cycle, and this corresponding number is used to calculate the current cycle's progress. (More details will be elaborated in the 'Key Results' section).
On the other hand, since key results always quantify outcomes and many key results cannot yield results before the end of the cycle, for example:
Key Result: Lose 10 pounds
You cannot determine how much weight you have lost during the cycle, because even if you lose 10 pounds in the first few days of the cycle, there is still a possibility of bouncing back 20 pounds by the end of the cycle. Therefore, this type of key result cannot be judged for completion during the cycle, meaning it has no progress.