Here are three things you could use to organize your life. Simple stack of cards, notebook,
even something digital. What all three have in common is that they run the same life operating system, a system I've refined together with over a million practitioners around the world. Hi. I'm Ryder and mentor of the Bullet Journal Method. In this video, I'll show you the five parts you need to build your own life operating system, and it can be as simple as using nothing more than pen and paper. Let's dive in.
You can have the most elegant productivity stack in the world, but if it isn't pointed at something that actually matters to you, it's going to be a distraction. So while I'm trying to figure out what the best system is, we wanna start by defining what the system is for. The first thing we're going to do is write out our intention for our LifeOS.
I like to do this at the front of my notebook. Write down what results you want from the system. What do you want it to produce and why?
For example,
I wanna be more fit so that I can be there for my kids. I wanna be more focused so I can bring my ideas to life, or I wanna be more intentional with my finances
so that I can invest in exciting experiences.
Whatever it is, it's up to you. I think that it's critical that you write this down first because it forces you to actually articulate
what it is that you want. It helps you get clear on the direction that you wanna go. Is this thing moving me towards the life that I want or away from it? From the person I wanna be or away from the person I wanna be?
With your intention in place, you have your why. Now we wanna move on to what and how you put things into your system.
If you don't know what to write down, then you might overwhelm yourself by trying to write down way too much or nothing at all. And if you don't know how to write things down, then things can get disorganized
really quickly.
So to solve for both of these problems, I developed a simple technique I call rapid logging. Rapid logging is a simple way to quickly record your life as it unfolds.
It uses nothing more than single sentence journal entries paired with a symbol.
Those symbols represent one of four categories.
Notes for recording thoughts,
actions for recording to dos, moods for recording feelings,
both emotional and physical,
and events for recording experiences.
That's it. Four bullets, one sentence each. Use these to turn your notebook into a living record of your days. Now you might be looking at this and thinking, why this seems way too simple?
And that's actually the point. Most people overcomplicate
their systems. They copy elaborate spreads or digital setups they found online
without needing
most of it or knowing how to actually use it. Other people's systems were designed to solve other people's problems,
not yours. Your system
needs to reflect only your needs.
That's why we start only with what we need and then add only when
a need is not being met.
Now if you don't know what you need, that's what the next step is for. Now if you're curious about how to actually do this, consider checking out the bullet journal foundation plan, which I built for this purpose, to help you get your record up and running as fast as possible without over complicating it. You can scan this code or check out the link below. Okay. Let's keep going.
Now there's a major difference between working your system and actually having a system that's working.
That's why a key part of any Life OS is regularly
reading your record.
That's what reflection rituals are for,
to see if our system is supporting our intention. Is our LifeOS actually working?
I say ritual instead of habit because to me, a habit seeks to make a behavior mindless.
A ritual seeks to make a behavior mindful.
And when it comes to our life, we want to be as present as possible with our behavior. Let me walk you through part of one of my reflection rituals, my weekly ritual, and the considerations that went into creating it so that you can model your own. The first consideration is taking time.
I block off regular times to reflect on my digital calendar. This way, I don't have to keep wondering about when I'm gonna do these things,
and I don't run into any kind of conflicts. Without taking this time, I've learned the hard way that I will never find the time. What makes this even easier is making the time you do take feel fun and intentional and meaningful.
For example, every Monday morning, I set up my notebook, I put out my thermos of coffee and light some incense.
I like the incense because it acts like a timer. Mine lasts about thirty minutes, which is about how long it takes me to do my weekly ritual. Also, smell of that incense reminds me of the temples that I visited in Japan
and it has this queuing effect on my system to slow down, open up, and deepen,
and see what the record of my life reflects back to me. First, I turn to a blank spread. This is gonna be my weekly log. On the left, I write down the dates of the week gone by.
On the right, the dates of the week to come.
Then I go back and read through the past few weeks of daily logs.
When I'm done, I will use this left page of my weekly log to write down up to three things that moved me towards my intention and up to three things that did not.
Again, I keep this short, and often that's more than enough information.
Reflection turns that autopilot off so it can become aware of the results of our system.
With that awareness, we can refine our system over time to align our results with our intention,
which brings us to the next step.
No system, no matter how powerful, will work if you don't work the system.
So I think that every Life OS needs to help you plan your work. For example, right after my weekly reflection,
I create my weekly action plan. I've seen a lot of Life OS's collapse under the weight of never ending to do lists.
The trick here is to be honest and realistic.
Only write down the things you'll actually get done in a window of time. In this case, a week. If you don't, you risk overwhelming yourself.
One way I prevent myself from getting overwhelmed with my LifeOS
and prevent it from getting swamped
is to rewrite my undone actions
every week. This may seem like a real headache, but it's proven to be a major feature rather than a bug of the system.
That small moment of friction has filtered out so much unnecessary
busy work. If it's too much of a bother to rewrite in that moment, then surely can't be adding a lot of value to your life.
Everything we say yes to means we're saying no to something else. Having some kind of hard filtering system can be a really powerful way
to say no to all the things that don't really matter so we have more time for what actually does.
Those are the things that we put into our weekly action plan.
The true test of how effective any life operating system is is how the system actually helps you operate in your life. We often get so caught up in the operations and the systems that we never get to the actual living part.
As the saying goes, life is what happens while you're busy making other plans.
I would argue that a good life operating system helps you get busy living because of your plans.
In my experience,
the results of your Life OS are not always obvious at first.
You need a way to record your current results to see if the Life OS is actually helping you align your actions with your values and your intentions.
When you reflect
on your new records and the results aren't aligned with your intention,
you can now look at what systems you have in place. If your intention, for example, was to go to the gym five days a week, and now that you see that you've gone zero times,
that means that you have the perfect system for going to the gym zero times a week. Through reflection,
we can start to understand the pieces of that system,
not setting an alarm clock, not having a plan, going to bed late.
Then you can refine that insight into a clear new system
where you set an alarm, commit to a workout, and go to bed on time.
Then you run that experiment and see if that works.
This is how you start to develop systems that actually align with your intentions over time.
This is why I like using notebooks.
It helps you see your life as a story unfolding page by page.
And when you've been logging your life for a few weeks, the patterns become visible.
You can see what's working and what isn't. The life operating system that are described here pretty much summarizes the bullet journal method. You set an intention and then you record,
reflect,
refine, and respond. It not only helps you organize the life that you have, but also helps you define and then build
the life that you want based on your needs,
one page at a time.
If you wanna dig deeper into this life operating system, check out this video next.
Thank you for taking the time, and I'll see you in the next one.