OKRs for one person
Write down a personal objective and three key results, honestly, and then check one thing: can you put a number on each key result, today, without inventing a measurement?
Usually not. "Get healthier" produces "exercise more", "eat better", "sleep properly", and none of those is a result. They are three more objectives in smaller handwriting, and a quarter later you cannot say whether you did them, which is precisely the failure OKRs were invented to prevent.
Every key result is a number with a source
The rule is narrow and it does all the work: a key result is a number, a target, and where the number comes from.
"20 productivity posts live (now: 14), measured by the blog index." You can check that in nine seconds and nobody can argue about it. Compare with "publish more", which is a feeling, and which is what most personal OKRs are made of.
The "now" matters as much as the target. Without a starting number you cannot tell progress from noise, and at the end of the quarter you will argue with yourself about whether it was already like that in October.
Three, and one objective
One objective per quarter, for one person. Two objectives is a way of avoiding the choice, and the choice is the point: a quarter has room for one thing that matters and a lot of maintenance.
Three key results, because two lets you cherry-pick and four dilutes.
The weekly line
Once a week, write this week's number beside each key result, and one line naming what moved it. That is the whole ritual and it takes four minutes.
The second half is the honest half: if nothing moved it, write "nothing this week" rather than skipping. Four of those in a row is not a discipline problem, it is a signal that the objective is not real, and the useful response is to change the objective rather than to feel bad about it.
Why an outline suits this and a spreadsheet does not
Because the key result is a bullet, so the work that moves it can live underneath it. The number is not in a separate file from the projects that change it: the project IS a child of the result it serves, and a project that is not under any key result is visibly not serving the quarter.
That last effect is the one people notice. Half of what was on the list turns out to belong to nothing, which is a fine thing to learn in week one rather than in week twelve.
Take the shape
Open the template, press "Show in my Pando", and write one objective with three numbered results. If you cannot put a number on all three, keep the two you can and delete the third. Two real results beat three wishes.