Nobody is on top of their game all the time, but in fast-paced environments, it’s important to reliably deliver high-quality results. It’s also considerably less fun to spend a whole chunk of time on something that needs to be done when what you want to be doing is just out of reach. It’s really not rocket science, but we often forget that simple habits, rituals, personalised hacks, processes and automations can help us free up time and mental space for what matters and even help us create solid outputs even when we’re not.
Acknowledging my humanness
Here’s the thing: I find myself more likely to cut corners when I’m not invested in a task, in a rush, tired or juggling too many things at the same time. The more reluctant, distracted or reactive I become, the more my discipline wanes. As humans we tend to have:
A finite amount of willpower, motivation, and discipline,
A tendency to get distracted by whatever seems more fun at the time, and, you know,
Just varying amounts of grid and mental capacity, because, life.
This then poses two questions:
How do we hack the stuff we don't want to or often forget to think about to make bandwidth for the things we do want to think about?
How do we build systems that help our worst-day-selves benefit from our best-day-selves?
Personal operating systems
The developer community has a set of ground rules that help translate complex code into easy-to-use software. Applying this principle to the human experience, we get to personal operating systems:
It’s about unpacking and simplifying patterns and dynamics of what generally works for us to be happier, more calm, productive, energetic [keep inserting wished for outcome] and create repeatable, easy-to-follow processes, tools, and habits.
Essentially, I try to make my personal OS so accessible that even the half-asleep or completely uninspired version of myself can more consistently do things at high quality. That way, whatever energy and creative juices are still flowing on even my worst day can be focussed on what’s important to me.
The principle I’m following here is summed up in this quote from James Clear:
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
Doing something more than twice? Care about it being done well? Find a way to make it easier, faster, take up less brainpower. This goes for anything from mundane but important things like breakfast and getting dressed to exercise, life balance, and, for me personally, especially for mistakes I make, things I keep forgetting or feedback I receive more than once. Why waste time solving the same problem over and over?
I’ll keep adding to this list as I get around to writing up my systems, but here are some first examples of what that can look like for me:
Custom keyboard shortcut templates
Time needed for setup: 4 minutes | Effort: ⭐★★★★
It’s so simple, it’s almost silly but it saves me time and has ensured my coming better prepped into my days. I’ve set up a lot of different custom keyboard shortcuts with templates I can populate:
Filling in a template takes up less brainpower than recreating a process every time.
Hitting a quick keyboard shortcut like “&priorities“ also takes less time than finding a document somewhere every time.
Baking in prompts into these templates helps me ask important questions that make me better at whatever role I need to play in a given situation.
Outcome Framework
Time needed for setup: 20 minutes | Effort: ⭐⭐⭐★★
Something else I’ve found super useful are the Job-to-be-done the outcome frameworks commonly used in marketing disciplines. They’re now the start of each project, no matter how big or small, and help me and my team to be diligent in doing the foundational thinking on what we’re trying to achieve upfront.
Main questions to ask:
Who are we creating this for and why?
What do I want our stakeholders/audiences/users to do, feel, think and know