Experiments

Personal operating systemEverything you are trying to run,
written down once.

A personal operating system is not a productivity method, it is the answer to a smaller question: when something arrives, where does it go, and what makes you look at it again. Most people's systems fail on the second half. Capture is easy and everybody has four apps that do it; the review cadence is what turns a pile into a system, and it is the part that has to be decided rather than felt.

Free, no sign-up. Saves in your browser, downloads as a PDF or a spreadsheet, and imports into EvyOS in one click.

The operating principles

The two or three rules you want to hold when you are tired and deciding badly.

The areas

The ongoing parts. Each one has a standard rather than a finish line.

AreaThe standard it should be held toRight now

What is live right now

The goals currently drawing on your week, and which area each serves.

GoalAreaByProgress
0%
0%
0%
0%

The routines

The scaffolding. Most of what a system does is run these without your attention.

MTWTFSSDone0/70/70/70/70/7

The review cadence

The part that makes it a system rather than a collection of documents.

What you look atThe actual slot
Daily
Weekly
Monthly
Quarterly

How things move

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✦ How to use it

Three things that make it work.

1
Start with the areas

Six to eight. The parts of your life that would still need attention if every current project finished tomorrow.

2
Give each one a standard

Not a goal — the condition it should be in. Goals end; areas do not.

3
Decide the cadence

Weekly, monthly, quarterly. A system with no scheduled looking is a filing cabinet.

This template lays out the whole thing on one page: the areas your life actually divides into, what each one is for, the goals currently live in them, the routines that hold them up, and — critically — when you look at what. It is deliberately not a method. It is a description of yours, made explicit enough to notice when it stops being true.

Fill it in once properly, then revise it a couple of times a year. The value is in having written it down, because an implicit system cannot be debugged.

✦ The limit

A plan is not a record.

This page holds what you intend. It cannot tell you what you did, because nothing on it knows whether the checkpoint on the fourteenth happened, whether the habit ran for nine days or two, or which goal has quietly not moved since March. That is the honest limit of every template, printed or otherwise, and if it has never bothered you then this one is yours for free for good.

EvyOS is the same structure with the work recorded against it. Send this sheet across and the goals, checkpoints and habits arrive as real records with their dates — then progress comes from what you tick off rather than from you remembering to come back and update a slider.

Questions

Personal operating system, answered.

A written description of how you decide what to do: where things get captured, how they get sorted, what the recurring commitments are, and when you look at each layer. It is not an app and not a method — GTD, PARA and the rest are components you might use inside one. The system is the set of rules that are yours.
A list holds tasks. This holds the areas the tasks belong to, the standards those areas are held to, and the schedule on which you look. A list tells you what is next; a system tells you what is being neglected, which is the more expensive question.
No. This page is enough to write it down, and plenty of people run theirs on paper. Where an app helps is the reviews — a weekly review is much shorter when the week's work is already recorded and you are reading rather than remembering.
Twice a year, roughly. Systems that change monthly are being tinkered with instead of used; systems that never change stop describing your actual life about eighteen months after you wrote them.
Areas become projects, live goals become goals with their dates, routines become habits with streaks, and the whole document is kept as a note. That mapping is not a coincidence — the app is shaped like this template on purpose.

Keep the plan.
And the record of doing it.

Goals, projects, tasks, habits and skills in one system, with the work logged against what it belonged to.

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