Creating Systems for Your Life

If you’re anything like me, you have a lot of things that you want to accomplish. You have big goals, little tasks, and a mental image of who you want to be. But it can be bewildering to break those aspirations into manageable goals and follow through with them consistently. Over time, I realized that the answer is creating systems for your life.

Goals vs. Systems

A system is a pattern for making decisions. Systems are often made up of a series of habits – I have a system for getting ready for bed that involves brushing my teeth and taking out my contacts. I don’t think about it, I just do it – the decisions for what to do and in what order have already been made. If I want to add a new habit to that system (say, washing my face), I would decide ahead of time where in the order I would do it, so that I don’t have to revisit the decision every night.

Goals, on the other hand, are an end result. If you’re writing your goals correctly (AKA if you’re following my guidelines for well-written goals), you know when you’ll be done with it. Not so with systems. Systems are ongoing and don’t have a defined end date.

The way I like to think about it is: goals are for what you want to accomplish, systems are for who you want to be.

After all…

“You are what you do every day.”

Jon Chu

Often, goals and systems go hand-in-hand. I have a goal of founding a Blink-182 acoustic cover band with my brother (no joke). To do that, I need to learn how to play piano well enough to accompany myself. That’s a goal. The system I’m using to get there is: playing at least 20 minutes daily, working through an all-in-one adult piano course.

Why You Should Be Creating Systems for Your Life

Now, I’m all about setting goals, don’t get me wrong. But if you set goals for every aspect of your life, you WILL get overwhelmed and feel like you’ll never live up to your own aspirations.

But some of your goals are likely lifestyle aspirations – health, fitness, weekly meal planning, etc. Instead of setting goals for those, you’ll find peace of mind if you develop some systems to incorporate those behaviors into your life. Systems make it easy to make the decision you want to make. And if you’ve pre-made those decisions, you’re left with more decision-making energy for the big goals in your life.

Let me give you an example.

I have always aspired to be well-dressed, but it doesn’t come naturally to me. The other women in my family somehow pull together simple, coordinated outfits daily – and enjoy it! Left to my own devices, I find myself wanting to wear fun outfits, but having no motivation to put them together. My first job out of university was casual, so I could (and did) wear jeans daily. But when I started a more traditional corporate job, I agonized over what to wear every morning. Since I don’t enjoy spending time putting together outfits, something had to change.

So I developed a system.

Before I describe my system, I will preface it with: this is going to sound insane. But most systems do! The best systems are personalized and are fit for one person’s life. I mean, look at Ben Franklin’s system for personal improvement – I could apply his virtues to my life, but I’m probably going to define frugality differently than he does.

But back to my clothing system. I can assure you that doing a little bit of planning ahead of time has allowed me to wear varied, coordinated outfits daily.

Ok, here’s my system:

I assigned a type of outfit to each day of the week.

Mondays and Wednesdays, I would wear outfits with pants.

Tuesdays and Thursdays, I would wear outfits with either a skirt or a dress.

Fridays, I would wear outfits with jeans.

I skipped over the need to decide what kind of clothes to wear, making getting dressed easier.

It also helped me with clothes shopping: if I didn’t have a balance of skirts/dresses and blouses to wear with pants, I could go shopping for that kind of garment. And it kept me from buying one-off pieces of clothing that don’t fit with my existing closet!

The craziest thing about this systems is that ABSOLUTELY NOBODY NOTICED.

Seriously. I shared with some close coworkers after a couple years, and not a single person had ever paid enough attention to my outfits to realize that I wore skirts exclusively on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

(Well, until the icebreaker in a big meeting was, “What item of clothing do you choose first when you get dressed?” and my answer started with, “Well, it depends on what day of the week it is…”)

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So…How Do You Start Creating Systems for Your Life?

Over time, I’ve created a lot of systems for my life – budgeting, shopping for clothes, learning a foreign language…the list goes on. This blog is going to be a way to document the systems I’ve developed for my life and also serve as an accountability buddy for new systems that I’m developing!

With any system that I build/use, the process is the same:

1. Decide what the system should do
2. Figure out a process
3. Do the process for a period of time
4. Evaluate how it went and define improvements
5. Repeat steps 3 & 4 until I’ve smoothed out all the kinks in the system

I’ve done it before with implementing scrum in my personal life, but I’m gearing up to build a new system in my life, and I’m going to document it here, starting 21 September, 2020!

Ultimately, I’m fascinated by how people develop systems in their life, consciously or unconsciously. I love reading about systems and I love playing around with them in my life. I love helping people implement them in their own lives. That’s the crux of what I’m doing here – consistently creating systems for my life in order to make time for the fun stuff.