Our lives are complex things. As we go about our lives this manifests itself as chaos. We have so many things happening around us. We have so many choices to make and places to be. The world seems to pass us by. Its a wonder how we keep anything straight. Our minds were never meant to handle this complexity. In a way you could say we cope with shortcuts, explaining away things or commenting about who we are. Staying sane among the chaos seems to be our main goal. The world is colliding with itself everywhere we turn. So many things happening, with all that information flowing to us. Anything we want to know can be accessed within seconds. Events creating new events that create new events. We try to keep up but in the end we take in more than we will ever know. Our minds go to work while we sleep to decode it all, only to be bombarded first thing in the morning. It always seems that what was learned yesterday is now out of date. We overload ourselves to exhaustion living in our world, yet we constantly tell ourselves we should be doing more. Our lives are a mess because we tell ourselves to do impossible tasks.
Thinking of Systems
It is simple, we must manage the complexity. We do this by creating systems that handle the complexity for us. A system of our own design in which we can set its aims. Knowing you need to implement a system is much different from creating one. First we need to understand the purpose of our systems. The primary purpose of a system is to manage complexity. That means if the system makes your life more complicated or if it is cumbersome to implement in your life then it is useless to you. Now we come to thinking of a new system. This starts with identifying an area of your life where you are having issues. See if there is a larger theme present that seems to be the cause. Then identify what the end behavior the system should promote. For example, I have an issue of when I should do something myself and when I should pay someone else to do it. While this may look like an issue that only occurs at certain times, it was really an issue knowing the value of my resources. I wanted to be able to reliably know when I should spend my time and when I should spend my money. This is how I would go about coming up with a resource system to help manage the complexity of the resources I use. Doing this whenever you run into issues in your life will help you to see the complexity and look to manage it.
Organizing Your Systems
This is how you create order in your life, by creating systems that help make your life simpler. Some systems will effect your life more than others. These will be your cornerstone systems and will be the ones you want to pay the most attention to. As you create more systems you will need systems to manage those systems. You go about this the same way you did with the systems that they are made up of. This is the organization that is needed as you deal with your complex life. Managing the chaos will take work as it is always changing. The systems will stay structurally remain the same but will need tweaks here and there.
Creating New Systems
Creating the systems is not that simple however. This is where you will need to really think about what you want out of life. Systems are simply thinking of formulas on how to handle situations. Ultimately what your system will look like is completely up to you. Generally creating a system has to do with handling the input. Using the example of the resource system, I found the similar qualities that resources would share. I then gave each quality a weight of how much importance it should have in the system. After that I added a multiplier to take into account that resources could come in different amounts. This was my formula for calculating which resource I should use. Anytime I added a new resource I just needed to define its qualities and it could be compared. Not every system will look like this as it is just an example. Once you do this, you should try to automate the systems using whatever technology you have access to. Find a way to use tools or create some yourself to make this easier on you. The system is only good if you actually use it.
Living Your Life
This approach makes life simpler and more consistent. It helps you off load a lot of things that weren’t helping you anyways. Everyones will look different but the end goal is always the same, to help you live a better life. This approach as any has its drawbacks. It can get you stuck in doing the same thing over and over. You should also be mindful on its effect on you. If maintaining it is becoming too stressful than you should reevaluate using it. At the end of the day, you have to adjust this to fit to your life.
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