What are you trying to achieve at work? In your personal life? What are the goals that make you tick?

I haven't known my own goals for the longest time. I went to work and did what I was told. There were instances where I talked about explicit goals with my manager and tried to achieve them, but those were exceptions.

I still don't have explicit goals for my personal life. I'm married and have kids, so I can tick these boxes, but apart from that I don't know what I should aim for.

But I have recently set goals for my side-hustles (this blog and some other projects). You can see the result of this exercise in the photo above. 

I set myself objectives (the pink cards) and key results (the orange cards). Each key result contributes to the objective above it. Together, these are called OKRs (objectives and key results).

These cards stick to the wall next to my desk, so I look at them pretty much every day. And every time I think about what to do next, they help me decide.

If you need motivation in your work life, your personal life, or any other "project", try getting a pack of post-its, writing down your objectives, and breaking them down into key results. This is also a good team exercise if your team is struggling to find purpose.

Some rules:

• OKRs are not set in stone - they can and should change over time, because what you thought yesterday might no longer be true today.
• Make the key results as concrete and measurable as possible so that judging success is as easy as answering a "yes or no" question.
• Make the objectives challenging. You don't need Google-style OKRs à la "take over the world", but they should be at least a bit challenging to keep you motivated.
• Don't create more than a handful of objectives with a handful of key results each. Even that might be too much. You won't be able to reach them all.
• Share some of your OKRs with others. Only if other people know your goals can they help you achieve them.

(Also maybe don't take my OKRs from the photo above as examples. Money and vanity metrics like follower count are not the best success metrics...)

If you're interested in more discussion about OKRs, have a look at the book "Measure What Matters" by John Doerr.

Working in the cloud is great because we just have to pick which resources we need to run our application and then have them provisioned for us. But we don't want to do this manually.

Terraform provides one way of automating deployment of cloud resources. In this article, Pratik explains how we can use Terraform to deploy resources in the AWS cloud. No previous AWS or Terraform knowledge needed!