Having a Structure in Your Life

The systems and tools I use to create order have changed throughout the years, as have the goals I aim for through using them. Nevertheless, there are a few foundational paradigms, that have served me well for a long time. I try not to make predictions about myself in the future but I do expect these elements to stick around in some form or another for a rather long time:

• Putting everything actionable onto a checklist
• Taking notes of everything and saving it in a ‘Braindump’
• Planning in terms of projects
• Tracking how I spend my time
• Do Weekly Reviews, plan my weekly tasks, sort my notes
• Pick a specific personal theme to focus on for every season of the year

Some of these might fluctuate in their use, for example, I am fairly light on time-tracking at the time of writing, but all of them have served a vital purpose.

So here I’ll focus on how these are used specifically and what their advantages are. This post will start by analyzing the day-to-day paradigms, up to the big-picture elements of the system.

Checklists and Notes

“The mind is for having ideas, not holding them.”

I don’t fully subscribe to David Allen’s notion of the mind for various reasons but framing the mind as a pure creation machine and optimizing your surrounding for it has freed my mind from some burden of remembering. If I fail to take a note of something or don’t have a clear task list worked out, my mind can’t fully concentrate on the current job because the metaprocess of ‘remembering’ is still running in the background

I don’t just forget stuff sometimes, I forget stuff all the time. So creating to-do lists and taking excessive notes of everything in my mind was vital for me getting through university and doing my job as well as I can.

Ideally, anything in a checklist is an actionable item with a clear ‘definition of done’. I used to be exceptionally bad at this, but one of my themes was definition of done a few years ago, which set the bar in my mind of how an element of a checklist should be formulated. Most of the time I add a time estimate to the to-do, which I can then correlate with my time tracking. Anything that takes more than 5 hours should not be a single check but split up into multiple smaller bullet-points.

Regarding note-taking, I have some quick-collect shortcuts set up on all my devices, which drop any text I write into a braindump folder. Every weekend, this folder gets sorted through, tagged, and collected into the appropriate container. Notes are anything non-task-specific. Book notes, ideas, journal entries, tutorials, installation guides, code snippets, etc. Whatever is in the mind should be in a note, amply tagged and indexed so it’s quick to find and reference in the future.

Reviewing and Planning

For some reason, daily journaling has not worked for me for any time-period longer than two weeks. The most daily planning and reflecting I can get myself to do is maintaining the checklist by planning daily tasks in the morning and cleaning up the unfinished project-related tasks and errands in the evening before I wind down.

Weekly and monthly review and planning sessions though have become ingrained in my process: Sorting through my notes and projects, cleaning up any data mess that has been collected over the week, processing all my inboxes, and writing a journal entry about the past week. The weekly and monthly reviews (the latter of which include finance review, calendar review, and monthly project goal evaluation) are defined in checklists which I reevaluate every new season.

Season reviews are different. They focus more on the meta-process of my system (the system I’m describing here), what project goals I should be working towards, what my long-term goals are and what personal changes would suit these goals best. Yearly reviews do exists, but they are more a part of the season reviews than a seperate category, as they cover mostly the same basic questions and processes.

Themes

Season reviews are also where I define my new theme, which I then focus on in my weekly journals. These themes can vary greatly in their desired result. Their task is to find the highest-value change in myself that I should be implementing to reach my long-term goals. My themes over the years include the aforementioned definition of done and other topics such as hyperfocus, stupid ideas, and sloth. The name of the theme is -obviously- the most fun to come up with; most importantly the should create a very clear image for me on what I should be working towards. Short, memorable words or phrases are very powerful when defining the theme because the resulting images are then easy to mentally carry around and remember.

Time Tracking

Finally, time tracking. Since the beginning of my checklist fanaticism, I’ve been interested in estimating the time it takes for the tasks I’ll be working on. This entails that I would also measure the actual time it takes, to get a sense - and improve - my estimation accuracy. Time tracking has some major additional benefits - you see how much time you’re actually working and how much time is wasted on unproductive things. And when you’ve tracked enough of your time, you can begin optimizing your time to align it with your long-term goals in life. It can also be a motivational factor for me, in that I’ve started a timer for a certain task so I should really be working on that specific task now.

Time Tracking requires a lot of diligence which makes it the most difficult of all the system elements in this post to recommend. For sure, switching between timers is the task I forget the most throughout the day.

Changing the System and Conclusions

Managing a life with this specific system seems over the top for many people. For the moment I believe it’s just the right amount of control and freedom for me to work on what I like, with an appropriate amount of meta-cognition regarding my tasks and resulting actions. Note, that the process I’ve described here is not permanent and details change all the time. Changing the system is part of the system. Writing weekly journal entries helps me later on in my season reviews, to reform the system to optimize towards reaching my long-term goals, making me happier and minimizing structural overhead.

I’d urge anyone without any form of system in place to at least try some form of weekly reflection and to implement a checklist for their tasks. Reducing the mental load of having to remember all that is required of you, and reflecting on your life regularly might be game-changers for the way you approach life. If they aren’t, then the weekly reflections might at least help you to hone in on what went well and what bothered you about the approach. Gathering this data is the first step to finding the screws to turn which will make your life better.