Strategic Goal Setting: Break the Busy Habit, Boost Results
Strategic Goal Setting with No-BS OKRs with OKR Coach Sara Lobkovich
You know that exhausting feeling when everyone's incredibly busy, working harder than ever, but somehow you're not making meaningful progress on what actually matters?
You've fallen into the "busy habit"—and you're definitely not alone.
After working with thousands of OKR coaches in hundreds of organizations globally, I see this pattern everywhere: teams trapped in endless activity cycles, checking boxes and attending meetings, but never creating real change. They're busy, but they're not effective.
The problem isn't that you're not working hard enough. It's that most approaches focus on staying busy with tasks and deadlines, completely missing strategic goal setting's most important question:
When all that busyness is done, how will the world actually be different?"
This is the difference between busy work and results-focused goal setting. Breaking the busy habit transforms everything.
Why the "Busy Habit" Kills Strategic Progress
The busy habit is seductive because it feels productive. Teams stay constantly occupied with tasks, meetings, and deliverables. But this chronic busyness suffers from "completion syndrome"—the assumption that getting things done equals success.
After working with Fortune 500 companies and diverse teams globally, I've seen the same pattern repeatedly: gorgeous strategic plans sitting on digital shelves, never translating into behavior change or measurable results, while everyone stays frantically busy with activities that don't move the needle.
Here's what the busy habit creates:
Teams working incredibly hard but not creating meaningful transformation
Goals that become endless task lists rather than drivers of real change
People losing sight of why their work matters beyond staying busy
Organizations optimizing for looking productive rather than actually improving
The Real Cost? Exhausting activity that feels hollow. Teams hitting busy-work targets but not moving the needle on what matters. Individuals completing everything on their lists but not creating the impact they crave or envision.
This creates the "beautiful shelf documents" problem—impressive-looking strategies that never drive real change because organizations stay busy with planning and doing instead of focusing on the difficult work of aligning on strategic goals that create measurable transformation.
Breaking Busy Work vs. Creating Strategic Impact
After eight years developing my No-BS OKRs methodology, I've discovered a simple but powerful test that distinguishes strategic goals from activity plans:
"Is mere completion success?"
If finishing the task equals success—completing a book chapter by by Q1, launching a feature, completing a project—it belongs in project management, not your strategic goal setting structure. These are delivery plans where staying busy with completion IS the win. They need milestones; they’re not key results.
(Major initiatives may be different — sometimes an intiative is important enough to merit an objective and key results — but the tasks themselves where completion is success belong in delivery, not strategy.)
Results-focused goal setting breaks the busy habit by asking deeper questions:
Writing a chapter of a book is a task—how many people could that book actually help?
Launching a feature keeps teams occupied—how much desirable active usage will it increase?
Completing a project fills time—what measurable transformation will result?
This distinction breaks you out of the busy habit completely. Instead of staying occupied with what you think you have to do, you focus on what change you are inspired to create. Then work backward to identify outcomes and progress measures that indicate you're actually creating that change, not just being busy.
Strategic Goals as Experiments in Improvement
Strategic goal setting recognizes three fundamental truths about meaningful goals:
Stretch goals are experiments in how to improve or do better—not rigid commitments that must be achieved at all costs … that’s what mandatories are for.
Impactful goals often take you into uncertain territory—growth, innovation, and transformation can't be planned or forecast with complete certainty. Recognizing this lets us let go of trying to create certainty with plans that are… in reality, just speculation!
Failure is data, not judgment—when you're truly stretching toward something meaningful, you'll learn through multiple attempts and you may have to fail multiple times to learn or gather enough data to win.
This creates psychological safety to actually work toward stretch goals—understanding that ambitious goals are experiments where learning matters as much as achievement.
Why Breaking the Busy Habit Feels So Hard
Here's the uncomfortable truth: humans are wired to plan activities because activities feel within our control. But let’s get real: when is the last time you finished your to-do list? If activities were truly within our control, that would be a regular occurance.
The busy habit persists because completing tasks provides clear, immediate satisfaction while strategic goals take us into the discomfort of uncertain territory.
Activity thinking feels safer because:
We can (somewhat) control our actions and get the dopamine rush of checking items off lists
Completion provides immediate evidence we're "productive"
Success is defined by doing the work, not putting effort toward uncertain outcomes
We can show progress through effort—subjective progress—and busy schedules
But outcome-based goal setting feels risky because:
Success depends on multiple variables beyond our direct control
We must align and labor toward results we can't guarantee
Requires imagining and committing to a future that doesn't exist yet
Opens us up to evaluation based on measurable results, which may be more equitable than subjective evaluation, but which also may be uncomfortable for people.
Setting outcome goals requires going out on a limb—you articulate outcomes you hope to achieve that may depend on a lot of variables beyond your control.
This resistance is especially strong for people who've been harmed by environments with unclear expectations or moving goal posts. The busy habit becomes a defense mechanism—if I stay occupied with concrete tasks, I can't be criticized for missing ambiguous targets.
Thinking that activity-based planning is within your control is actually an illusion. Without outcome-focused goals, you execute activities to completion regardless of results, missing opportunities to pivot when those activities aren't producing the change you need.
Breaking the Busy Habit with "What & Why" Focus
The busy habit thrives on "what will we do?" thinking. Results-focused goal setting asks:
"What's most important?”
“Why does it matter?" and
“How will we objectively quantify progress and success?”
No-BS OKRs break the answers down into objectives and key results—but you don’t even have to go that far for the answers to be useful in setting strategic goals.
Busy Habit Goal: "Launch new customer portal by Q2"
Strategic Goal: "Improve customer self-service experience to reduce customer attrition by 20%"
Busy Habit Goal: "Hire 50 engineers this year"
Strategic Goal: "Achieve an engineering productivity rating of 70% (up from 45%) to align with industry averages and support progress toward improving our competitive position"
The "What + Why + How much" structure breaks the busy habit by providing direction, a shared purpose, and a target—essential for goals that require sustained effort and behavior change rather than just task completion.
Two Types of Goals That Serve Different Purposes
Effective strategic goal setting recognizes that not all goals serve the same purpose. I distinguish between:
Mandatory Goals (Must-Achieves):
Goals where failure isn't acceptable. Revenue targets that keep the business viable. Safety standards that protect people. Compliance requirements that avoid legal trouble. For these, you aim for 100% completion and build in whatever capacity and support systems are necessary.
Strategic Goals (Aspirational):
Experiments in how your organization might improve, grow, transform, or innovate. These represent stretch targets that take you into uncertain territory. For these goals, you're safe to try and even fail while learning.
Critical Point:
Not distinguishing between the two is one of the biggest issues I see in terms of eroding psychological safety and trust in the workplace. Never blend these without clear distinctions. When mandatory and aspirational goals get mixed together, people either set easy goals they know they can achieve (leaving performance on the table) or experience negative consequences when they stretch toward aspirational goals and don’t achieve “enough.”
Making Strategic Goals Work for Your Context
For Large Organizations:
Focus on multi-level alignment using the Connected Strategic Stack, and rationally localized OKRs. Create clear cascading from organizational OKRs and mandatories, to team-level OKRs, mandatories, and work plans while maintaining strategic focus at each level.
For Small Organizations: Use strategic goals as your primary strategy vehicle, with a Connected Strategic Stack, and a relaxed version of OKRs. Well-crafted strategic themes, objectives, and outcome goals can serve as both strategy and execution framework without extensive planning overhead.
The Science Behind Strategic Goals That Create Change
This approach isn't just intuitive—it's grounded in motivation science research. Peak performance comes from goals set at a difficult but achievable level. Goals need to be challenging enough to inspire optimum effort but realistic enough to avoid demotivation.
Strategic goals also recognize that everyone has different relationships with goal creation. Some approach everything with vision then work backward. Others prefer making plans and working forward. Both approaches work—the key is creating shared language around strategic objectives so teams can align on what success means without forcing everyone into identical approaches.
Next Steps for More Strategic Goals
The ultimate test isn't whether you write “better” goals—it's whether those goals help you break the busy habit and create the change you envision.
This requires building systems that:
Focus on the few things that matter most rather than trying to stay busy improving everything simultaneously
Create regular opportunities to course-correct based on learning, not just busy-work completion
Celebrate both achievement and productive failure that advances understanding
Connect daily work to longer-term vision so people stay motivated through inevitable challenges
Strategic goal setting recognizes that objectives aren't for staying busy—they're for creating change. When you approach goals as experiments in how to do better, you break the busy habit and create conditions for breakthrough performance rather than just task completion.
Ready to break the busy habit and move to results-focused goal setting practices that drive real change?
Start with the "What + Why" structure and the "mere completion" test. Ask yourself: What's genuinely most important for your organization to improve, grow, transform, or innovate? Why does it matter enough to warrant strategic focus rather than just staying busy with related tasks?
Pick up a copy of my book, “You Are a Strategist: Use No-BS OKRs to Get Big Things Done,” via shop.saralobkovich.com and I’ll send you a bonus copy of the No-BS OKRs Workbook PDF.
Or, download my free Strategic One-Sheet template and start consolidating your strategic inputs into goals that actually drive the behavior change your strategy envisions.
For over eight years, I've been helping organizations move strategy from documents into measurable behavior change through my No-BS OKRs methodology and Connected Strategic Framework. If you're ready to stop creating beautiful strategic plans and start achieving measurable strategic results, learn more about working with me here.
