An Operating System For Life

I was talking to a visiting friend a few months ago about their 'systems for life', and when they said they didn't have a to-do system I stopped making dinner to talk at them at length about it (until CM asked me pointedly whether I was going to put the broccoli on). After continuing the conversation I realised that the topic might be more easily articulated in a blog post, which I had as a half-finished draft for ages.

I can't remember exactly where I got all this stuff. A lot of it originates in GTD but some of it is parsed through others and some of it is my own homebrew stuff and a lot of it is bits and bobs that have accreted over many years of reading blog posts like this.

I also think I jumped at this because I love talking about this shit and honestly a dream job for me would be helping people to organise their life-systems and stuff. If someone ever offers us millions for BDCo and I find myself with lots of free time I'm setting up as a personal systems coach or something.

It's a bit difficult to know where to start here because this is all quite mutually dependent, but I'll give it a go: what you should be trying to build, at least in theory, is a system that can absorb the complexity of everything the world throws at you and translate it into some kind of comprehensible order and keep you going and feeling ok while you're doing so. This is obviously my one, for me, and some or much of this stuff might not work for you specifically. Try it and see!

M.E.D.S.

All the stuff about to-do lists or whatever is grand, but it's all underpinned by making sure that you're not neglecting any of the obvious stuff that might be causing you any issues. I know this might seem like a bit of a diversion, but in the past I've spent ages fussing over minutiae without realising that I was short-changing myself on sleep or eating like crap.

M.E.D.S. stands for Meditation, Exercise, Diet and Sleep, which are four things, organised in (I'd say) reverse order of importance (but S.D.E.M. isn't as catchy an acronym) that are pretty necessary for hitting a certain baseline of feeling good and healthy.

Sleep: you should be getting around 8 hours or so; more for some, less for others. Try and make sure your room is cool and there's a bit of fresh air (crack a window if it's not too cold), close the curtains, see if you can not have lights in your room if  at all possible, don't use screens (e-ink displays are OK) for at least half an hour before bed, make sure you don't have caffeine past lunchtime, etc. It's astonishing the level to which bad sleep messes me up. If you can be consistent about your rise time and work out what's the easiest way to wake up--I have my smart bulbs set to slowly brighten from 5:30-6:00 which I find wakes me up pretty consistently.

Diet: This is probably the one I'm least good at, and therefore the one I feel least qualified to offer advice on as you likely have it sorted better than me, That said: you should probably try and eat three meals, not snack, eat plenty of veg, try not to eat too much that's less nutritious, maybe try some intermittent fasting if you're into that? (The one thing I can recommend that really helped me is understanding how insulin works in the body.)

One strategy that helps me with this is that I try to standardise my meals—I have a pretty consistent breakfast of porridge made with pinmeal oats, flaxseed, hempseed, chia seeds, creatine, peanut butter, a spoonful of maple syrup mixed in, cinnamon dusted over the top and trail mix and a sliced banana scattered on top. I'm cool, what can I say. I have this most days; I can make it up the dry ingredients in little boxes for the week—it just makes things a bit simpler—and soak the oats in no-sugar soymilk (highest protein non-dairy milk) the night before.

Exercise: I am absolutely one of those people who hated almost all exercise during school, and it took me a while to realise that actually it is--or can be--good. The easiest things to try are lifting--join one of the 24-hour chain gyms, they're cheap as anything, and try Stronglifts 5x5--or jogging, which is free, and try couch to 5k. With weightlifting especially, if you've never done it before you can double, triple your strength in a few months. Really, really low-hanging fruit on that one, and it makes you feel great too. I'd also recommend trying something with other people—I do BJJ and it's really good fun, even if it does seem to frequently involve me being put in armbars.

Meditation: This is maybe a bit more of a hard sell if you're not already bought in because it's a bit more 'out there' but it isn't part of some religious practice, at its simplest it's literally just paying attention to your breath, and it's really, really helpful for keeping your brain ticking over nicely. It's one of the few things that reliably helps me focus outside of my ADHD meds. I hate to say it, but the Sam Harris Waking Up app really is a good way in.

If you get the above stuff sorted, you're going to be in a good position to try and implement some of the systems below. Confounding factors here are conditions like depression or anxiety—they will really throw you off with all this stuff, so it's best to get them under control first.

Habits and Routines

Habits

Habits are things you do or try to do so regularly that they sit outside of task management—you probably won't want to put brushing your teeth on your tasks list (unless you have a really bad habit of forgetting to do that!). If you have enough habits, or feel like you do better when you keep track of them, Streaks is an app that can be helpful. Taken together they tend to form routines.

Routines

We all have 'routines' around various things, of course, but I'm talking about stuff like having a defined "morning routine". Mine is:

• Wake up, drink some water, wander around on the balcony in the fresh air for a minute or two.
• Have a stretch
• Shower and shave
• Do my morning pages (a certain amount of unstructured writing to clear my head)
• Meditate for ~15 minutes.
• Do the NYT mini crossword and Wordle
• Have my breakfast (and tablets) while watching the highlights of the Mariners or Cards game from the previous night.
• Make some tea for my partner and see how she's doing

This gets me to a state where I'm somewhat 'in my body' and able to make a start on anything I've got to do. I similarly have an 'afternoon routine':

• Have some kimchi or something else fermented
• Do whatever today's exercise is (gym Monday/Friday, jogging Tues/Thurs/Sat, BJJ Wednesday)
• Read the paper and clear out feeds
• Take a few minutes to write down everything you're worried about
• Do some writing
• Read a bit of a book

which ideally ensures I make time for things that I value but sometimes don't always actually do, and an 'evening routine'

• Check weather forecast and prep clothes for tomorrow
• Prep breakfast for tomorrow
• Fill up water bottle
• Brush teeth
• Journal
• Meditate
• Pray
• Say goodnight to my partner

which chills me out and gets me ready to sleep. These are the 'default' versions of these routines; they can be expanded (e.g. if I've woken up early and have more time I'll try and get some reading in, if I'm a bit pushed I might skip morning pages.

Tasks, Notes and Events

A basic split for stuff that might come your way is tasks, notes and events. Tasks, perhaps obviously, are things that need doing; notes are things that you want to remember, keep track of, use for something, return to in future etc; events are things that will happen at a certain time, particularly those involving other people. I generally think that these things should be kept track of separately.

Tasks

Tasks can live a notebook or an app in such a way as their status can easily be kept track of, anything that needs to be done on a specific day/at a specific time has that noted, any important info they need accompanies them, etc. I currently use Things for this.

I don't necessarily advocate using Things specifically but apps are (for me) better than pen and paper because they allow me to set things to recur on a cycle in a non-manual way. I don't have to remember that I'm washing colours on Friday, bedsheets on Saturday, whites on Monday, towels on Wednesday etc etc—they just arrive in my 'today' list on those days. The reason they're tasks, not events, is that they don't need doing at a specific time in the same way, they don't involve anyone else and if I don't end up doing them on the day I was meant to, I do still want to do them and they'll roll over to the next day.

The point here, for me, is to take as much of the "remembering to do things" out of the equation as possible. I generally will not remember, so whenever something occurs to me as thing I should do, I create a task for it in the app. When I'm going to do it will come later (unless it's gonna be more effort to note it down than it is to just do)—I'll periodically process the 'inbox', where unsorted tasks are added.

Tasks are sorted in two ways: by time (is this a task for today, this evening, a specific time in the future, a nonspecific time in the future or "someday" (that last usually being for things that are more notional or not possible at present)) and by area. I split things up into "life areas" that I also use as part of my planning process (see below for more on that!)

Events

As I've said, events might be action items but they do not live in my task management system, instead living in one of my calendars. They are generally things that require only that I be in a certain place (or on a Zoom call) at a certain time (and maybe do a certain thing while there—but if there were any prep involved that'd be a task!) I have different Google calendars for different aspects of my life:

• My personal calendar
• A shared calendar with my partner for things we're doing together
• A 'food' calendar where we plan meals
• A 'friends and family' calendar to keep track of birthdays
• My work calendar for meetings etc.

I also have my partner's personal calendar and colleagues' work calendars shared with me so I don't end up double-booking anyone.

Notes

Notes can live in a notebook or an app in such as way as they can easily be found again when needed for reference and, ideally, can easily be grouped, clustered, cross-referenced etc with other notes in similar topic areas.

I currently use Obsidian for this, and particularly the "daily notes" feature. Pretty much anything interesting or useful that occurs to me; any links I find, anything I might want to look at later etc, goes in my daily note and then gets reviewed in my weekly review at the end of the week (one of those recurring tasks that I was talking about) and sorted if necessary.

I don't really have as much of a philosophy of organising my notes—for whatever reason I have a good memory for the kind of details that help me to find the things I'm looking for, and for things I worry about not being able to differentiate between I tag stuff but it's all pretty unsystematic.

A lot of other systems I use integrate with Obsidian—so if I highlight something on Readwise or save something on Pinboard, it'll be copied into Obsidian in such a way that it'll be searchable later.

Planning & Reviews

For many years now I've done an annual review initially based on, though slowly drifting away from, Alex Vermeer's template here. Annual review is still useful but I'm moving away from year goals since I think years are just a bit big for me to be useful. I think for a year you want to be setting priority areas and intentions, and then set big goals quarterly, with monthly milestones where relevant.

I tend to try and pick a few of my life areas (3-5, but the fewer the better really) to prioritise each year, with things that are generally going OK being on 'maintenance mode' with less goals etc. Current life areas are:

• Household & Home
• Physical & Mental Health
• Structure & Organisation
• Fun & Adventures
• Love & Relationship
• Family & Relations
• Social & Community
• Learning & Intellect
• Creativity & Communication
• Career & Work
• Activism & Impact
• Worldview & Purpose

some of which are clearly slightly forced in terms of the 'x & y' naming format. These have drifted over time but they still cover the same stuff.

Annual reviews are, as I say, for big picture stuff; quarterly reviews are for significant goals, monthly are for progress and general situational stuff, while weekly reviews are mostly about organising things that've come in that week. This is the most currently-in-flux bit of my system, which is why it's a bit light on detail relative to the rest of it.

It's difficult to take myself out of all this enough to tell whether this is clear or whether there are still things on which it depends that I've left out because they didn't occur to me to include. I've also intentionally left out stuff that's work-specific or relationship-specific (I would like to do a blog post on our weekly relationship check-ins but I stole the idea pretty much wholesale from Rob Heaton, who wrote about it himself already). Hopefully this is still some kind of useful for the folk I was thinking of when writing it.