First I would like to say that this text is the last one during this year. It will be a short one.
The quality of your life depends on the quality of your systems. The problem with this fact is that you have tens or even hundreds of systems. Most of them do not even recognize. All your habits are systems. All your other behavioral routines are systems. What separates the other behavioral routines from habits is that they do not have clue-routine-reward order. Their electronic ”fingerprint” in your brain is not the same. Your life also depends on systems other people built like companies. In this text, I will focus on the personal systems you need. I will have a list of them, but I do not explain it to them very much. Most of them are self-explanatory and even obvious. Some of them you do not recognize as systems and some of them should be systems but are not in your daily use.
Let's start with the most obvious ones. You need to have systems to get enough sleep, to have high-quality nutrition, to have enough exercise, and to recover from your daily efforts at work or from the efforts in learning new things. You also need to have systems to use your hours as efficiently as possible, like using your best hours of the day in the most important things. You need to have systems for moving from one place to another, no matter what they are. As you can see, these things are not rocket science.
You need habits. You also need to have systems to change your habits and create new ones. Everyone has bad habits and you can only change them. Therefore, the former is harder than the latter. This means that they take more time and effort.
You need decision-making systems. You need to have decision-making systems for less and more important decisions. For example, you can have different systems for making decisions about small amounts of money and a large amount of money. You can also have different systems for intuitive tasks and deliberate ones.
You need to have practice systems to improve your understanding and skills in any endeavor you want to be better. One system is deliberate practice. It does not work in all skills. You need to have systems to maintain your edges in skills that are better than your competitors. You also need to have support systems to deal with your weaknesses and blind spots. You need a system that either destroys or confirms your strongest beliefs. This system has to focus on reality, not things that you believe are true. You need a system that produces constructive criticism. You may also need separate systems that measure the results of your actions and decisions. This system has to separate skill from luck or randomness.
You have to build strategies to get what you want from life. They are systems like the rest of the mentioned things. They have also subsystems but let's not get into them. You also need back up systems in the most important things.
I will update this list later.
Merry Christmas and happy new year!
-TT
