Wildly Important Focus
Limit your OKRs to the wildly important. Attention and resources are finite, and the more goals a team pursues at once, the less each one gets. If everything is important, nothing is.
This is the principle everyone agrees with and almost nobody practises. The arithmetic is unforgiving: a team’s capacity for genuine, difficult change is small, far smaller than its list of good ideas. Spread that capacity across ten "priorities" and each gets a tenth of the attention, a tenth of the political air cover, a tenth of the follow-through, which is another way of saying none of them will actually happen. Focus is not a productivity tip here; it is the mechanism by which hard things get done at all.
What focus buys you
Fewer OKRs produce a cascade of second-order benefits. Resource allocation gets easier, because there are fewer claims on the same people. Execution improves, because a team working one real goal can bring its full weight to bear. Achievement rates rise, because concentrated effort crosses the threshold where change becomes self-sustaining. And communication sharpens, because a company with two priorities can say them in a sentence, while a company with twelve cannot say them at all. Focus compounds: the benefits reinforce each other.
One, maybe two, worked in serial
In practice this means one active OKR per team, two at the absolute most, and where possible worked in serial rather than parallel. Serial execution feels slower and is usually faster: a team that finishes one goal before starting the next avoids the switching costs and half-done limbo that quietly consume parallel work. This is the same logic as reading every OKR as a bet: you concentrate your stake on the wager most likely to pay, rather than scattering chips across the table.
The fastest filter
The quickest way to test whether something is wildly important is the Opposite Test: would a credible rival sensibly choose the reverse? Most items on a bloated priority list fail instantly, because they are operating imperatives everyone shares, not choices that distinguish you. Strip those out to the scorecard as business-as-usual, and what remains, the genuine choices, is usually short enough to focus on. The test does the pruning for you.
Why the price of not focusing keeps rising
There is a strategic reason this matters more every year. Under winner-takes-most dynamics, markets increasingly reward the distinctively best and squeeze the undifferentiated middle. Scattered effort produces incremental improvement across many fronts, which is precisely the profile that loses in such markets. Concentrated effort produces the distinctive advantage that wins. Focus is not just how you achieve more this quarter; it is how you stay on the right side of an economics that punishes being spread thin.
A team lists eight "priorities" for the quarter. After the Opposite Test, five are operating imperatives (move to the scorecard) and one is someone’s pet project. Two real choices remain. The team commits to one, ships it, and starts the second in week seven, having actually finished the first.
Can a company have more than two OKRs? +
A company can, across its teams, but each team should hold one or two. The company’s few strategic OKRs cascade as choices, not as a longer list every team must carry.
What do we do with all the other important work? +
Most of it is business-as-usual: track it on a KPI scorecard with thresholds and owners. Reserve OKRs for the breakthrough changes that would not happen on their own.
Isn’t one OKR per team too few? +
It feels too few and rarely is. One genuine, difficult, well-resourced goal achieved beats five half-pursued. If the team truly finishes early, it starts the next one, in serial.
From the ZOKRI OKR Handbook, the methodology we install and maintain. Written by Matt Roberts.
A UK-based strategy and OKR consultant and two-time SaaS founder with a venture-backed exit, Matt turns strategy into execution for teams scaling from tens to thousands. He co-founded ZOKRI in 2018, having previously co-founded Linkdex, a venture-backed enterprise SaaS platform he led to a trade sale. He writes the methodology behind these notes.
Focus is a decision leaders have to keep making. We help you cut the list to what is wildly important, then hold the line when new "priorities" arrive mid-quarter.