Experiments

Personal strategy generatorStrategy is what you say no to.
Everything else is a wish list.

Most personal plans are lists of things somebody would like to be true. A strategy is different in one specific way: it says what you are not going to do. If a plan contains no sacrifice it is not a strategy, because it makes no choices — and a document that makes no choices cannot be wrong, which is exactly why it is comfortable.

Free, no sign-up. Worked out in your browser, nothing sent anywhere, and the result imports into EvyOS.

Start with where you play — the narrow space you are competing in.

Everything is worked out in this page and saved in this browser only. Nothing is sent anywhere.

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✦ How to use it

Three things that make it work.

1
Narrow where you play

"Design" is not a where. "Design systems for early-stage health companies" is, and the narrowness is the advantage.

2
Be honest about how you win

What you have that most people in that space do not. If you cannot answer, that is the finding.

3
Fill in the sacrifices

Two or three specific things you are not doing. Without them this is a wish list.

The frame here is the standard one from business strategy, applied to a person: where you play, how you win, and what capabilities that requires. It transfers well, because the underlying problem is the same — finite resources, several plausible directions, and a strong pull towards doing a bit of all of them.

The last section is the one that makes it a strategy. It is also the one people leave blank.

✦ The limit

An answer is not a record.

This works something out and then forgets it. It cannot tell you whether the number moved, because it has no memory of the last time you ran it and no idea what you did in between. Every calculator on the internet has that limit, 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 the result across and it becomes real goals, tasks or habits with their dates — then the next answer is computed from what actually happened rather than from what you remember typing.

Questions

Personal strategy generator, answered.

Sacrifice. A strategy says what you are not going to do; a plan lists what you would like to happen. A document with nothing excluded makes no choices, and one that makes no choices cannot be wrong — which is exactly why it feels comfortable and changes nothing.
The where-to-play and how-to-win frame does, because the underlying problem is identical: finite resources, several plausible directions, and a strong pull towards doing a bit of all of them. The rest of business strategy mostly does not transfer.
Usually. A one- or two-word space is a category rather than a position, and you cannot be distinctive in a field of everybody. Narrowing it is what makes an advantage possible at all.
Three or four. Eight is a job description, and the whole point of naming them is that they are what you invest in ahead of everything else — which only works if there are few of them.
Whether somebody who read it would know what to turn down on your behalf. If they would not, the sacrifices section is not doing its job.

Keep the answer.
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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