Resist Less, Not Try Harder
Personal OKRs
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Resist Less, Not Try Harder<br>It is, accidentally, the best one-line defense of a well-designed Personal OKR system!
Wolfram Hedrich and Sebastian Voss<br>May 25, 2026
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Tim Ferriss recently asked 4 guests on his podcast a deceptively narrow question*: “What are 1-3 decisions that could dramatically simplify your life in 2026?”<br>The line-up was Anne Lamott (writer, 21 books, latest one Good Writing), Claire Hughes Johnson (former COO of Stripe, author of Scaling People), David Yarrow (British fine-art photographer) and Diana Chapman (conscious-leadership coach, co-author of The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership).<br>The advice that came back was almost uniformly subtractive (as in: don’t add stuff up - rather, reduce). Yarrow recommends keeping your true close-friend count in single digits. Johnson recommends flipping from default yes to default no, then booking exercise and sleep as if they were jobs. Chapman recommends eliminating the word “should” from your vocabulary and holding two contradictory truths at once: *my work matters* and *the world would be fine without me*. Lamott, at 60, decided to stop being who her parents wanted her to be and to let the goofball back in.<br>Most of it is, on the surface, anti-productivity. Which is what makes the most quoted line in the episode quietly subversive. Lamott credits her priest friend Terry Richey with a single sentence that, she says, instantly simplified her life:<br>”The point is not to try harder but to resist less.”
Most productivity books would quietly hope you skipped that one. A book about Personal OKRs sounds, on the cover, like the exact opposite of “resist less.” Deadlines. Key Results. Quarterly cadence. The whole vocabulary reads as a doubling-down on effort.<br>Except.<br>Anyone who has actually used OKRs, at work or in their own life, knows the system is not built to amplify effort. It is built to narrow it. The Andy Grove version, popularised by John Doerr, has a hard ceiling baked in: roughly 3 Objectives, 3 to 5 Key Results each, for a fixed period. That ceiling is the entire point of the framework. If you have used OKRs to add more goals to your life, you have used them backwards. They are a fence, not a megaphone.<br>This is where Lamott and the productivity world stop being contradictions and start aligning.<br>Trying harder, in its purest form, looks like Claire Hughes Johnson described herself before therapy: a default yes to forty competing requests, because each individual yes felt fine, and the cost only showed up at the end of the month, when she had no exercise, no sleep, and a quiet identity crisis. She did not solve that by trying harder at discipline. She solved it by “building the no into the structure of her week”, so that exercise and sleep became calendar entries that argued with new requests on her behalf. She made the system carry the load.<br>Share<br>That is what a well-designed Personal OKR set does, too. You pre-decide your 2 or 3 things for the quarter. You write them down. And then, for the next 90 days, every shiny new opportunity hits a pre-built filter instead of your willpower. The sheet says no for you. You stop having to negotiate with yourself every Tuesday at 9 pm about whether the new side project is worth taking on. The negotiation already happened, on a Sunday morning at the start of the quarter, by the slightly wiser version of you who sat down with a coffee and decided.<br>This is what “resisting less” looks like in a calendar. You are not pushing harder against more things. You are letting fewer things in to push against in the first place.<br>Lamott, at 60, felt burdened because she had been carrying every plate her parents had handed her since age six. The OKR equivalent, at any age, is the running mental list of 40 things you should be doing this quarter, only 3 of which are actually yours. Putting the 3 on paper is the equivalent of starting to put plates down.<br>The reason we ended up writing a book about Personal OKRs, after 20+ years of using them inside companies, was the same reason Terry Richey’s line stops you cold: The framework, properly used, is not a way to do more. It is a way to commit, in writing, to doing less of what does not matter, so that the things that do matter get some oxygen. The deadlines exist to protect the dreams from being eaten by everything else.<br>Tim’s guests are not really arguing against ambition. They are arguing against unfocused ambition. So is the book. So, in his own way, was Terry Richey.<br>Try less. Resist less. Choose better. Then defend the choice on the calendar.
Dreams & Deadlines comes out this Tuesday the 28th. Watch this space!
Wolfram & Sebastian<br>*This piece responds to “How to Simplify Your Life in 2026: New Tips from Anne Lamott, Claire Hughes Johnson, David Yarrow, and Diana Chapman” (#864) from The Tim Ferriss Show. Listen to the episode or read the full transcript at (https://tim.blog/podcast/).*
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