117. Building a Personal Operating System to Manage Information
Episode 117
The way I teach it, a personal operating system is a set of systems and routines we use to manage the information that comes at us all day long.
Whether we're students or professionals, we're constantly bombarded with information we can ignore, information about tasks we need to act on, and information we might need in the future.
And if we don't have a way to capture, track, and manage these bits of info during the day, we become overwhelmed, stressed out, and forgetful.
That's why we need a personal operating system. In this episode, I teach you the four simple components of a good personal operating system and exactly how to set yours up today.
What You Learn:
The negative impact of being bombarded all day long with information you don’t want to forget, but always do
What a personal operating system is and why exactly you need one
The negative impact of NOT having a personal operating system
The 4 components of a solid personal operating system
2 real-life scenarios of personal operating systems in action (student and professional examples)
Exactly how to set up your personal operating system and what step to begin with if you’re overwhelmed with the process
🔗 Resources + Episodes Mentioned:
⭐SchoolHabits University: (SchoolHabitsUniversity.com)
⭐The College Note-Taking Power System (CollegeNoteTakingSystem.com)
⭐Assignment Management Power System (AssignmentManagementSystem.com)
Episode 5- How to Create a Task Management System
Episode 31 - How to Take Notes at Meetings
Episode 28 - Tips for Organizing Papers
Episode 94 - How to Simplify Your Task Management System
Episode 102 - The Friday Review: A Weekly Habit for Calm Productivity
Never stop learning.
❤️Connect:
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The following transcript was autogenerated and may contain some interesting and silly errors. But in the name of efficiency and productivity, I choose not to spend my time fixing them 😉
Personal Operating System for Information Management
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[00:00:00] Well, hello and welcome to the Learn and Work Smarter podcast. I'm Katie, and this is episode 117. And today we're talking about something that I've wanted to talk about on the show for a little while. I do have a blog post that's been up for some time on this topic that's on schoolhabits.com. I'll leave the link below, but I figured actually that's been up for maybe about five years now. But I figured it's time for a more expanded conversation now that we have a podcast. Today we're talking about a personal operating system for managing information.
Now, I don't want you to think that this is something complicated or techy just because I'm calling it an operating system because it is not that. It is basically a system that we create for ourselves, so it can look a variety of different ways, we're gonna talk about that, that dictates how we intake process, manage store and access information in our lives.
And if you think about it, it's similar to a computer operating system. It kind of is just a system that [00:01:00] works in the background to make sure that all of the other functions that a computer is expected to do can happen as expected.
And it's the same with our personal operating system. It's kind of a set processes and habits and routines that we create for ourselves that once in place, which today I'm gonna show you how to do, allows the other operations that we. Expect ourselves to do, or our teachers or our bosses expect us to do can happen as expected.
So here is how I plan to structure the show today. I'm going to of course, explain what a personal operating system is. then I'm gonna get into the four key components of a personal operating system.
And then we'll wrap up with some real life scenarios and examples of a personal operating system in action in a school context, and then one in a working professional context so that you can really, truly visualize what this might look like for yourself.
It's gonna be a good episode, and my goal is that you will leave with some ideas about how to manage the information in your life so that you [00:02:00] feel more organized. And less stressed and more certain about where things are and what it is you need to be working on.
As always, all the links and resources I mentioned are in the show notes or in the description box, if you are watching this on YouTube, and if you are watching this podcast on YouTube, please subscribe to the channel and share this with someone who needs to hear it.
If you are listening in a podcast app, it would mean the world to me and to the algorithm, if you could leave a review of the show and of course, come find me on Instagram at School Habits. And now we shall begin.
okay, so I opened this episode with a [00:03:00] very basic description of a personal operating system as something that can help us manage information so that we can function as expected. But let me be a little more specific here. All day long information comes at us. And some of this information is nonsense and noise, and we can let it go, but some of it is really important, like maybe something that has to do with work or maybe if you're a student, something to do with what you're learning.
Maybe it's important because it's related to our health or to a relationship that's significant to us.
And then all day long we encounter a different kind of information that might be important, but like we're not sure, like maybe it will be important, but it's not urgent yet, so we don't need it now. So we need a place to essentially store it until we might need it in the future.
So all day long, all week long, all month long, our whole lives long, we are encountering noise information that we can let go of, important information that we need to capture, store, process, and probably act on, and then information that we [00:04:00] don't need in this moment, but potentially we'll need it in the future as maybe a reference or as a resource.
And the way that I teach a personal operating system has everything to do with what we do with this kind of information. Now, to be honest, I didn't invent the concept of a personal operating system. Recently, I read a book, you may have heard it, it's by Tiago Forte, which has been around, um, a while.
It's called Second Brain, and it's a book that has gotten a lot of attention. It has some diehard fans, like people who are Second Brain fans are such. I was gonna say fanatics, that sounds critical, but like really, really into it. And I read it and I immediately thought to myself, no thank you. In that book, forte shares his version.
I don't know if he calls it a personal operating system, but it's basically. Some kind of operating system that is highly complex and it collects all of the information around us and creates a way to essentially web all that information together to reveal insights about our lives and connections that maybe we wouldn't have noticed [00:05:00] were there.
And essentially organizing every single molecule of our lives into some kind of digital project or document. And to be honest. That doesn't appeal to me at all. I think life is meant to be lived, right? Not just like chronicled and categorized and labeled. But anyways, and I, I honestly don't think that that level of granularity would appeal to a lot of my listeners of this show.
But if you do wanna go into something more complex than the way I'm teaching a personal, uh, personal operating system today, that might be a book to check out. Just 'cause I read it and shook my head no the entire time does not mean you'll feel the same way. Anyways, the way that I'm describing this personal operating system has everything to do with how we collect, store, and process these various kinds of information in our lives that we feel lighter and more organized, and essentially so that we can operate more smoothly.
What I'm gonna teach today is just the way that I've created my own personal operating system, and I teach it this way to my private clients [00:06:00] and I wanna share it with you.
But as I'm always saying on this show, you need to be the scientist in the experiment. So you are always welcome and encouraged to take the strategies I share and to tweak them to fit your context and your preferences.
So that they work best for you.
Okay, so why have a personal operating system in the first place? As I said, we are constantly being confronted with information and with that information comes the decision of, do I need this? Is this important? Where do I store this? What do I do with this? And then also fast forward to when we need that information, we're left wondering where is that information?
Did I keep it? Is it in an email? Is it some sticky note at the bottom of my backpack or a work bag? Was it a screenshot I took somewhere? I thought I took a note of that. Where is it? Shoot. I should have saved that. Right?
So when you have a personal operating system that is simple enough that you use it, and that's effective enough that it yields results for you, we're essentially way less stressed. We have way fewer open loops in our minds, wondering what we need to do and where [00:07:00] things are, and essentially we become like an organized and smoothly running computer. Alright, so now that you know what a personal operating system is, kind of, don't worry, you're gonna more fully understand it as I get through the episode, but let's get into how to set one up and that starts with understanding the four components of a good personal operating system.
Again, at least that's how I am teaching it 'cause that's the way that I've created mine. Four components. I'm gonna list them and then I'm gonna go back and explain what each one is.
Number one, a capture system. Number two is a task system. Number three is information system, and number four is a review system. So that's capture, task, information, and review.
Let's start with capture. This is absolutely the most important element of any operating system. This is the concept of capturing information as it comes at us throughout the day. Whether we are sitting in school or at your office or maybe laying in bed and an idea pops into your [00:08:00] head or somebody texts you or you get an email, all of us, no matter if we're students or professionals, have information coming at us all day long that we need to make decisions about.
Is this important? Do I keep it If, if it is, and if I do need to keep it, where am I gonna store it? And if it's that important, do I need to act on it? These could be tasks. Reminders, commitments, ideas, whatever. And this is where I would say most people fall apart, right on this very first step. They're not capturing, they might get a text message and say, oh, I'll remember that.
An email comes in and they'll say, oh, I'll remember to go back to that later. And, and they don't. They might be sitting in a meeting and an action item comes from the meeting and they tell themselves, I'll remember it, but they won't. You are laying in bed and you have an idea for something and you think, I'll remember this in the morning, but we won't.
So this is important. Capturing is directly related to the concept of an inbox and not just an email inbox. That too, definitely that too. But we all have [00:09:00] various inboxes in our lives. This can be people. Yes, people can be inboxes. I'll explain. Email your student portal. Slack, Microsoft Teams. Um, a phone your own head.
These are our inboxes. And this is where information like tasks and reminders and commitments and ideas comes into. And we have to know what these inboxes are, and we need a way of regularly checking these inboxes and collecting the information that's in them and putting it somewhere where it makes sense for us to see it altogether, for us to come back to when we need it, to make decisions about it and to act on it.
We will get to this in a bit. Okay. But the fourth component, I know I'm jumping ahead right now, but I just bear with me. The fourth component of a personal operating system was review. Right? That's important. That's gonna come into play here with the capture system because in which is, you know, the first component.
Because it involves, the review part involves creating routines of checking and processing these [00:10:00] inboxes, of going into inboxes and collecting the information that's in there and saying, okay, well, like this is junk and this is noise and I can get rid of it. Or, this is valuable and I need to store it in my task management system, which is number two, we'll get there.
Okay. Or this is important information that I don't need to act on right now, but I might need it and I need a place to put it. So that would be information. And that's step three. That's the third component. Right, so you can, which we'll get to. So you can see that all four of these components of a personal operating system really are connected to this first one capture.
We have to collect the information that's coming at us. Now, I definitely did not invent the concept of capture, this whole idea of capturing information that comes at us that has been around, that was first brought into the popular productivity conversation with David Allen's Getting Things Done Movement.
If you're an OG productivity person, you probably know all about it, and I hope you're not thinking like Katie saying she invented capture. Definitely not. I actually think he coined the [00:11:00] term capture. he talks about this concept of inboxes too. But he wrote getting things done back in a time where most people were just at a desk and most things were analog and we didn't have this digital complexity or this hybrid digital analog complexity that we're dealing with now with phones and emails and, and things.
So I'm kind of, I'm putting a spin on this. Okay. But capture is the perfect word for the idea of collecting all of the tasks and all of the information from our inboxes so that we can do something with it. Because at the core of this is, this is it. This is so important. We don't store this stuff in our heads.
We don't let it sit in our heads.
Okay, so practically speaking, there are a few different ways that we can capture information when it comes at us to make sure that we're not leaving it in our heads. And that we have the raw material to process and store it when we need it, which is gonna be the next few steps.
I'm just gonna run through a few examples, but you know, depending on your own life, you might have your own versions of inboxes, but let's say you [00:12:00] are out and about and you get a text message from somebody asking you to do something, and you don't wanna forget that that's something that you need to act on, but you can't act in the moment, like let's say that you're driving or something.
Okay. you could leave your text message unread, or if you do tap it open to read it, you can go back and mark it as unread. You could use the Voice memos app on your phone. That's what I do. If I ever have an idea, like when I'm driving or maybe when I'm working out, not in the shower, 'cause I don't bring my phone in there. But definitely when I'm driving, definitely when I'm working out, I have the voice memo app on my lock screen, so I don't even have to open my screen.
I used to have the flashlight thing there, but I had my son change it to the voice memo Now, all I have to do is just tap that and record my idea the moment it occurs to me, and I know that I have created routine where I'm gonna go back and process those voice memos so that I can do something with them later.
Your meeting notes could be an inbox. So let's say you're taking notes at a meeting and an action item comes up the meeting that you're gonna be responsible for. All right, well put a star in your notes around that action item. And again, we would create a [00:13:00] routine. As part of this personal operating system that involves going in and pulling those tasks from your meeting notes and putting them into a task manager.
A good old fashioned paper tray on your desk could be an inbox, write for paper and analog things, and so could your backpack and your folders and you stuff things into all day long. Messages that come via email, you could just leave the email unread knowing again that you have a trusted process for checking your inboxes and extracting tasks and information from them.
That's just part of a good email management system. You could have a notes app on your phone where you're writing things down, regardless of whether it's an idea or something you need to do or something you wanna remember for the future. So remember, this capture phase, it is not about processing anything or acting on it or making decisions about if, if it's important or not.
It is just collecting information the moment it comes in and not relying on our heads. Guys, we have gut to get rid of this silly nonsense story. [00:14:00] It such a compelling story though that we tell ourselves that I'll just remember it. No, we won't. And no, we don't. Now if we're talking on the phone with someone and they tell us something, an inbox can be writing down whatever they're saying on a napkin. Like that's, capture doesn't have to be fancy. So many different ways to make this capture process work for you, depending on where you are in the moment that the information comes in, um, whether you're a student, a professional, the setting, whatever.
I, like I said, I am a huge fan of this Voice Memo app lately. That has been a game changer for me. Um, also when I'm working with clients at the office, I keep a large sticky note. I forget the dimensions, but like, it's much bigger than your little square. I really like it and I keep that on my, near my computer and anytime something pops up during a session with a student where I'm not facing my desk, I'm like facing the student, like my computer's behind me, where I'm like, oh, okay.
They're reading, they mentioned they're reading a new book and I need to make sure I get my hands on it or like. Um, they tell me like a date that they can't come or something, or if it occurs to me that I need to [00:15:00] email their parent, right? I just quickly swivel around in my chair and I write down that memo or that, you know, whatever thought or task the moment it comes up, I write it on the sticky note. And then I proceed with the session because I'm not gonna take out my entire planner and flip it open to the right page and tell the student, hold on, let me just write these things down. No, I wanna make it as smooth and as frictionless as possible.
And I know that at the end of the day, every day, most, well, most days, if I'm being honest, I take what's on that sticky note and I process it. And that is actually what takes us to the second component of a personal operating system, which is tasks. So this is basically task management. I talk a ton about task management on this show, probably more than any other topic is like time is the most precious thing that we have, right?
And like what we, so therefore, what we do with our time matters. And that's task management. But task management is essential for getting things done in the least stressful way possible, [00:16:00] and not even just getting things done. But working on the right things in the first place in the least stressful way possible. I'm all about that.
So the core concept here is that we need one central location where we're keeping all of the information from all of our various inboxes in the capture component. So all day long we are capturing things in email and voice memos and sticky notes and text messages and phone calls and our student portals and whatever it is, meetings.
And then we need to bring all of those separate tasks and put them into one central location. Now, sometimes capture and tasks, so those two components, kind of happen at the same time. Like if I am sitting at my desk and my planner is open and an email comes in for something for me to do, and I'm not gonna do it in that moment, but I don't wanna like forget it's in the email, then I will quickly write it in my planner.
Right? But like I said, again, maybe you are driving or you're in the middle of a meeting or you have an idea when you're out for a run, you're capturing that stuff somewhere else. And now is [00:17:00] the time where you go into those inboxes, your meeting notes, your voice memos, your school portal, the email, the note you wrote to yourself on a napkin standing in the kitchen, and you're making decisions about this information and you're putting it somewhere.
You're saying to yourself, is this a task I need to do? Okay, cool. It goes in your task management system. Is it some kind of information that I don't need right now, but I might need to reference it in the future? Cool. That would go in your information system, which is your third component. We haven't talked about that, so don't worry about that yet.
I, I will in a minute. Is it an appointment or something that's time sensitive? Okay. Well that goes in your calendar. If we don't have one centralized location where we store all of this information, I strongly suggest that you set one up and once you set this up, you realize how much smoother everything else about your life just is.
I have a podcast episode where I talk about the basics of setting up a simple task management system. That is episode five, and then episode 94, I talk about how to simplify [00:18:00] that task management system, and that is like a q and a episode. That's kind of a cool one. If you're a student. I have the assignment management power system, which honestly is the best $47 you could possibly spend.
I made it $47 so that it's like super accessible, It's a full program. It's the best money you could spend to essentially get your whole school life in order. That's assignmentmanagementsystem.com. I'll put the link in the show notes, but in that program, I don't tell you what tool to use.
I don't say it needs to be digital or analog. I mean, I do in the program, give you a ton of templates that you could use either way digitally or print 'em out, whatever. But it's more about how to create the system itself and manage what you put in there. Again, I'll leave that link in the show notes. You don't need anything fancy. So it's not about tools. I use a paper planner. Some people like apps, but the core idea is that it should be easy to process, not a lot of friction. All right, so not five login screens and a two factor authentication process. that you have to go through every single time and some cap [00:19:00] thing where you're, I don't even know if I said that right, where you're trying to identify the streetlights.
Oh my gosh, I failed four of those today. I could not identify a bus like is an rv, a bus, I don't know. Apparently it's not, but it has to be something simple. Then you essentially look at and open and touch every day.
Now, a key part of this task component here is you gotta find some time to go into the capture systems, and we're gonna talk more about this as we, you know, get to the fourth layer, that review part.
But just keep in mind that depending on what your life looks like and how many things you're responsible for, you may have to go into your inboxes once or twice a day to pull the things out of them and put them in your task system. other people might be able to manage, I don't know, twice a week.
That's something that you're gonna have to figure for yourself.
Practically speaking, I will give you an example of what this part of the process looks like for me, if that's helpful. I'm gonna speak for my own life.
As I said, I'm a big fan lately of voice memos on my phone, and I have been also texting myself things lately, [00:20:00] and I mean, obviously if I'm sitting down, I'm writing it on paper, but if I'm out and about, I'm going to use a voice memo or text myself.
And I do also have that big sticky note on my desk too at my private practice. And of course I have emails,
so I try to make a habit of sitting down for about five minutes. Nothing, nothing, bananas at the end of every workday and going into my various Inboxes and pulling that information to put into my planner that I have right there at my desk. I'm not acting on it. I'm not doing that at 10 o'clock at night.
I'm not solving problems. I'm not making any big decisions other than is this a to-do list item or is this like a calendar thing that needs to go in my calendar? Or is this information which needs to go into my information system? Which again, we're gonna talk about. So I'm just literally going into my email.
And clicking on some of the emails that I got that day, and let's say one is a question from a student Inside School Habits University about one of the lessons. Okay. Well, as I kind of just said, my workday ends at 10:00 PM sometimes later, so I'm not replying to the email then. But I am opening up my planner in that moment [00:21:00] and I am writing on the next day's slot to reply to so and so first thing in the morning.
And then I'm going into that big sticky note that I have on my desk's. Not that big. It's like. Six by four or something. It's not like one of those giant wall ones. It's whatever, just larger than a square. And I am transferring whatever I wrote down into my planner. I'm quickly opening my phone to check for text messages and putting those in my planner.
So everything that came in that day is in one central location. Again, I'm not making decisions on it, I'm not acting on it. I'm just putting them in one spot.
Okay, so now we have capture, which is, you know, knowing what our inboxes are and making sure that we're not leaving anything in our heads. And then we've got tasks, which is collecting all those things from our various inboxes and putting them in one location. And now we're moving onto the third component.
Information. So our personal operating system is about having a way to manage all of that information that comes at us. I feel like I keep saying that and Right, and as I said earlier too, not all of this information is something that we [00:22:00] need to act on. It's not urgent. It's not like finish lab reports or prepare for the meeting tomorrow.
Sometimes it's just information that we're gonna need to reference at some point in the future, like, or either we know for certain we'll need it or we suspect we might. And this is stuff that we have to store somewhere in a logical place, somewhere that our future cells will know logically where to check when we need it.
So let me give you some examples. Of what this kind of information looks like in real life. I, 'cause I think that this is the component that most people sort of underestimate and they don't think about. But honestly, once you build it out, it is such a relief. So just give some examples. Think about your class syllabi, right?
If you're a student, that syllabus is is not a task. You're not gonna sit down and do your syllabus, but three weeks into the semester when you're trying to remember how your Professor waits participation or maybe whether late work is accepted or not. Or maybe when the final exam is, you're gonna want that thing.
It needs a home. Think about contact information, a professor's email and office hours, [00:23:00] your doctor's phone number, your insurance ID number, the landlord's phone number. These aren't tasks, but when you need them, you typically need those kinds of things fast. And the last thing you want to do. B is searching through six months of emails trying to find the one where someone sent you that information.
Passwords. Okay. Password managers typically handle most of this, but that is an information system, so that is you acknowledging that you already have an information set up for passwords where you're giving those passwords a home, and you know that's the place you go into to access that kind of information. So that's like a task system that's already set up for you. Medical information, your medications, your vaccination records, your kids' doctors you're a parent, you don't think about this stuff until you're sitting in urgent care, being asked questions, that you can't answer. Build a home for this now before you need it. Tax documents, same idea. You don't need your tax return from two years ago, right now, but come tax season. Maybe you do, right?
Maybe you're being audited and if it's in a labeled folder, physical, digital, doesn't matter. You're [00:24:00] not panicking because you know exactly where it is. And then there is, this is more of the fun stuff. This is what I think of as kind of like the life lists.
Which sounds less important, but I, I'd argue it creates just as much sort of mental like noise when it doesn't have a home. So maybe books you wanna read, books you've read and want to remember that you've read them. Restaurants you wanna try movies, somebody recommended, shows, somebody recommended if, if you wear makeup, maybe your foundation shade.
The paint colors you used on your walls, things that worked for you, things that didn't work. This where you got your bathroom vanity. Am I pulling things from my real life? Yes I am. This is all information that we encountered at some point and that we made a choice in that moment that we wanna keep it and our future self is gonna thank us for storing that information somewhere logical.
So, where does this stuff live? You got a few options for physical documents. There's, um, tax, paperwork, medical records, school documents, anything that comes to you on actual paper. You can use a filing cabinet, [00:25:00] right, for physical documents. Maybe a simple accordion folder with labeled sections can do the job just fine.
The labeling's, the key part and the naming convention that you use. You need to be able to find it when you're not in the mood to search for it. I have an episode all about paper organization that is episode
6 Tips for Organizing Paper. If you want nitty gritty strategies about that, that will be linked in, um, the show notes. For digital information, I personally use Google Keep. It's free. It syncs across all my devices. It's searchable, which is huge. I can be standing in a store and pull up exactly what I need in five seconds.
I have notes in there organized by category. It is not fancy. It's probably a bazillion typos, like I don't even care. It works and I use it, which is the entire point. Some people swear by notion, some people use Apple Notes, Evernote. Honestly, the tool does not matter. What matters is that you're not just dumping everything into one giant chaotic note and hoping, you know, for the best. Create some kind of structure, maybe just a few [00:26:00] categories.
Whatever makes it findable for your future. You, and then of course, as I said, you're gonna want a naming convention. And just know your information system does not have to be all digital or all physical. Mine is totally a mix. That's fine. I think, you know, physical folders for paper documents, obviously I use Google Keep for the stuff I want accessible on my phone.
I use a digital folder system for work-related files. The goal isn't for everything to be uniform and aesthetic and pretty. The goal is that every piece of information that matters to us, has a designated home, and we know where that home is because that is the entire point of this component, this third component. When information comes at us and it's not something we need to act on, it's just something that we need to keep instead of leaving it in our email or screenshotting it losing it in your camera roll or just trusting that you'll remember it, which you won't, You'll have a place for it. A logical, findable place. So that when you need it, which you will, there's no hunting or stressing or starting over from scratch.
Okay. We are moving [00:27:00] on to our fourth and final component of a good personal operating system, and that's review.
If you remember, I said that capture was the most important part of this entire thing because without, without capturing what's coming at us, we don't even have any information to begin with. But honestly, the review part is what keeps the entire system going and scaling with us as we move through school or career.
So there are a couple different ways to make sure that this review, this habit layer happens. it could be maybe once a week where you sit down or maybe a Sunday planning routine and you're doing a good, thick, juicy sweep of all the inboxes and making sure that nothing got left behind from the week.
Obviously capturing and putting things into your task management system should happen fairly regularly, but at least once a week, it can be good to just go in and scrape it all out. Go through the text messages, make sure you got everything open your emails, make sure that you have extracted everything important in there.
This is where we do a more thorough sweep. It's not just a quick grab, but a like a [00:28:00] real like, look around. Did anything get neglected? Is there an email that we flagged but we never actually processed? Maybe a voice memo that we recorded, you know, three days ago that's just sitting there, that sticky note on your desk that somehow didn't make it into your task management system, maybe a screenshot on your phone that I do this all the time. I'm like, oh, I, I need that, and I screenshot it and you've never come back to it. That's an area, just saying this out loud, that that's an inbox that I don't have a lot of organization around.
but it's an inbox, so I should treat it like an inbox.
And the weekly review is for that. Now, beyond the weekly review, there's also like a shorter, lighter version of this that I'd encourage you to build into your daily routine. I've already gone over this once a little when I described to you what I personally try to do at the end of every workday, right?
Like at 10 o'clock at night, I'm taking five minutes just to go through my emails and my texts, and that's a really fast and this daily routine, it doesn't have to be a big production. Mine certainly isn't. Maybe it is five or 10 minutes at the end of your workday or your school. What some people call a shutdown [00:29:00] routine.
I think Cal Newport calls it a shutdown routine, which I love. I love the idea of that where you just quickly check, did I capture everything that came in today? Is my task list up to date? Is my calendar status what it should be? Do I know what I'm walking into tomorrow? That's it. It is quick. It is simple and it's low friction.
Everything that we implement, every system we build has gotta be low friction, so think of it kind of like two speeds of review. You've got the daily review, which is light and fast, more of just a maintenance sort of pass. And then the weekly review, which is deeper, a more of a full audit of the inboxes and our task system just to make sure nothing got missed, right, and that we're all set up for the week ahead.
I do have a whole episode about weekly planning where I do talk about this review going into your task system. I can't remember. I usually do my research before I record these to get the show, um, the episode numbers that I wanna, uh, refer you guys to. But this one just occurred to me in the spot, but it's a weekly planning routine.
I don't remember the number off the top of my head 'cause I just thought of it now. I'll leave it linked in the show notes. Now, here is why I wanna [00:30:00] emphasize this fourth component so strongly. We can have the most beautiful capture systems in the world. We can have a task management system that would make a productivity geek weep with joy.
That would be me. We can have your information organized into perfectly labeled folders, but if we're not building in regular time to actually review and process all of that stuff, the whole dang thing can just fall apart. Our inbox can overflow, our task list can get super stale. We start missing stuff and forgetting stuff, and then we lose trust in our own systems, which that right there is, is the real problem.
Because the the moment we stop trusting our system, we go right back to where we started. So the review component is really the thing that keeps the whole machine running. It's, it's that maintenance layer. And it doesn't have to take a lot of time. It doesn't have to be an hour long. Don't be afraid of it. It just has to happen consistently.
Okay. At the top of this episode, I told you that I'd walk you through some examples of what this might look like for a student and then for a professional. So I'm gonna give you some hypothetical scenarios for each of these and walk through the four components of [00:31:00] this personal operating system just to help you visualize what it could look like in each context and so that you can match it to your own.
Also, I am aware that as I'm explaining this, it might sound more complicated than it is, and it's not. And hopefully these, uh, examples that I'm gonna walk you through now, we'll help, drive home the point that they're actually quite simple, but the complication comes when we don't do this.
Okay, let's say that you're a college student and you wake up on a Wednesday. Throughout your day, a lot of information comes at you. You know you've got emails coming in, a friend is texting you about a project. You see something that has been posted to your student portal.
Your mom leaves you a voicemail. The professor made a few announcements in, I don't know, one of your classes. You took a screenshot of something that you thought might be useful for your research paper. Maybe when you're walking from one class to another, you had an idea that you want to bring up to the TA at your next office hours.
So you open your voice memo app and you record your idea, okay? And all of this is happening throughout the day. Now it is Wednesday evening and you sit down to do your work and you're feeling overwhelmed. A lot [00:32:00] happened that day. You've been feeling scattered and stressed. So what do you do? Well, you've already done the capture.
You didn't tell yourself, you know when your idea popped into your head when you were walking from class to class, that you would remember it? No. You left that voice memo. You did the capture. So now we're moving on to the second component, which is process and task management. So at this point we're going into, and you're still a student on a Wednesday evening, you're going into all those inboxes from the day.
And trust me, the more you do this, the more you'll remember what your inboxes are. Most of us. I'd say have between five and 10 places that information comes at us. So five and 10 inboxes. So you're opening up your voice memos, your photos app, your learning management portal, your email, all those things, and you're asking yourself, is this something that I need to do or is this information that I need to store for later?
If it's something you need to do, you're writing it in your task manager. Yes, even your assignments, that's what the assignment Management System teaches you. I'm going to plug that program until the cows come home because the payoff from [00:33:00] implementing that strategy is just like you don't even know anyways.
If it's something that you think you might need in the future, but you don't need to like act on it now, that goes in your information system. And that takes us to the third component. Remember, it's still Wednesday evening and you're still sitting at your desk, and now you're saying, well, okay, I took notes in chemistry and they're all over the place, so I need to make sure that those notes are in the right folder.
I need to make sure I know where my study materials are. The thing that I wrote in my notes in class that the professor announced, that's actually a task. I need to put that into my task. Manager. The voicemail that your mom left you, maybe it was a reminder about some, I don't know, upcoming family event that would go in your calendar.
And again, all this is happening pretty quickly, maybe five, 10 minutes, because you're not doing any of these things, right? You're not taking action. You're just collecting them and putting 'em in one spot.
Now, moving on to our fourth component review. Technically, what you're doing in the evening could be considered your daily review, but maybe also on Fridays, maybe on Sundays you implement more of a deeply weekly review where you're going into [00:34:00] these inboxes and you're really sweeping 'em out to make sure that you've got all of it. The review component here is what keeps the whole system operating. And that's why this hypothetical student on Wednesday night is no longer stressed because they have total clarity on what all of the things are and that clarity compounds.
Right? Now, let's imagine you're a professional at work. Maybe you're a project manager, a teacher, someone working in an office environment, and absolutely if you're not an office worker and your job is more like boots on the ground and bodies and trucks, you can a hundred percent adapt the system to your life.
Same four steps. But again, let's say that it's Wednesday morning and you're driving to work and you get an email, then you can see is from an important client. But obviously you're driving so you're not gonna do anything with an email right now. So you get to work and you already have five emails in your inbox.
A whole bunch of slacker teams messages waiting for you. Sometime before lunch, you have a quick conversation in the hallway with a colleague who says, oh, yeah, like, remind me to send you that whatever report. Okay? So, so that's a task. So as [00:35:00] you walk away from that colleague in the hallway, you take out your voice memo and you leave yourself a note because yes, you'll forget to remind your colleague of that thing by the time you walk back to your desk.
And you know that your voice memo app is one of your inboxes that you use to capture information. Throughout the day. Maybe you're taking phone calls and you have a little notepad where you're taking notes during these calls and after lunch you have a meeting, and during the meeting someone says, Hey, can you follow up?
With that client. So you put a little star next to that task in your meeting notes. If you're wondering how to take meeting notes, I do have a podcast episode all about the best strategy for taking notes at meetings. Episode 31. Um, maybe too, as you're walking to the break room, you have an idea that you want to bring up to your boss.
Okay, well then you take out your voice memo app again, or you text it to yourself and you record your idea. All right, so all of that was captur Now we need to move on to the second component, which is task management. So sometime before you leave the office for the day, you give yourself five to 10 minutes for a shutdown routine in which you're going into these inboxes and collecting [00:36:00] anything that's left over from the day.
Obviously any emails that came in that were urgent, you probably handled them on the spot, but this is when you open up, open up the inbox, and you're scrolling through the unprocessed emails that came in that day and you're pulling information from them and putting 'em in your task management system.
You're looking at the phone little notepad thing that you have on your desk, and if there's any tasks you wrote down, they go into your task system, the voice memo, you left yourself in the hallway. Okay? Well, that if it's a task, goes into your task management system.
Any teams or slacks messages that went unresponded that contain action items in your task management system.
If there's any deadlines or meeting invites came up, they would go on your calendar.
Okay, and you're going into every single one of your inboxes. Again, maybe you have somewhere between five and 10, you know what they are, and you're pulling all of that information and putting it in one central location if they're tasks. If they're deadlines or time-based, they can go in your calendar.
And this comes to our third part, which is information. Remember, you're the professional on a Wednesday, right? That's the context I'm talking about. So if any of the stuff that came in that day was information you don't need in the [00:37:00] moment, or even in the near future, you would put it in your information management system.
So maybe you got a bunch of details during one of your phone calls and you took notes on that, and some of 'em were tasks which you handled, but now it's, it's, you know, some of it's information that's related to the client, but you don't need to do anything with it yet. That would just go in your client's file.
Or notes you took at the meeting that are related to a project that you and your team are working on, but it's just information you'll need to reference, um, at some point in the future, put that wherever you're storing those project details. We don't leave information sitting in the various inboxes. We put it where it needs to go, or we turn it into a task to put it where it needs to go at some later date.
And we write that task in our task management system. And then finally, again, on Wednesday night as a professional, we come to the fourth component of the personal operating system, which is review. So just like in the student example, review is what keeps the entire system going smoothly. Remember, capture and task management and information systems only work if we actually go back in to check them regularly.
And in the professional example, that short shutdown routine at the end of the [00:38:00] day could actually function as the daily review.
But just like with a student example, you might also want a slightly deeper weekly review. Maybe that's on Friday afternoon before you log off for the weekend. Maybe it's Monday morning before the week really begins. During that review, we're stepping back and we're looking at the bigger picture. We're making sure that there aren't any loose ends sitting in the inboxes.
You are checking your task list and your calendar for the week ahead, confirming that the information you're storing for projects or clients is organized in a way that your future self will understand. And this is really the habit that keeps that whole personal operating system alive because when we're consistently reviewing our systems, we all have all the information we're ever gonna need at our fingertips.
You don't, forget things. We know where things are when we need them,
and we're able to do what we say we're gonna do when we said we're gonna do it.
And, ah, the piece that comes with that, invaluable.
All right. Let me bring this whole thing together because we covered a lot of ground today. The personal operating system, is just a set of processes you put in place to manage the information coming at you so that you [00:39:00] can function at school, at work, in your life without carrying it all in your head.
It has four components. Capture. So you're collecting information the moment it comes in, we have typically five to 10 inboxes, task management, so that we have one central place where all of these things need to come together and where they actually live, an information system so the stuff that we don't need to act on, but we will still need to find later, has a logical home, and then review so that we are regularly processing and sweeping and making sure that the whole thing stays functional.
We don't have to build all four of these at once. If you are new to this, my suggestion is to start with capture. Just start by noticing how information comes at you every day. Like can you even identify what your inboxes are? Are there any that you don't even consider inboxes, but that are actually sources of incoming information?
For example, my kids. They tell me all day long like, oh, I need this for school. Like, I'm going to so-and-so's next week. They're little human inboxes that just spew information at me constantly. [00:40:00] I need to capture it. So what are your inboxes? And think about how you're currently handling capture or not handling it yet.
And from there, you can work on creating a central task management system to store all this information. As I always say, you're the scientist and the experiment. Take what I've shared today, apply it to your life, tweak it, and make it yours. The goal isn't a perfect system. The goal is a system that is simple enough that you want to use it, and it's effective enough that you feel less stressed and way more in control of what's on your plate.
And what's in your head? All right, my friends, that's a wrap. If you found this helpful, please share it with someone who could use a little more order in their life. And if you're a student who wants serious help getting your assignment management system off the ground, head to assignmentmanagementsystem.com.
I'll put that link in the show notes. Keep showing up. Keep doing the hard work, keep asking the hard questions, and never stop learning.
