META POST: My Personal Operating Stack (PersonalOS)

A decision-journal. A behind-the-scenes look into how I wrote this post. AKA a good old essay plan.

tl;dr

• This is the inner workings of my mind as I wrote about My Personal Operating Stack (PersonalOS).

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Intro to my “META POST” idea

I really love the concept of writing about how I came to a conclusion, or solution. Firstly, it helps me remember how I came to said conclusion (brain fog is real for me atm). Secondly, I find it super helpful to step out my thoughts on paper - it pushes and prompts my thinking. And, lastly, it’s a 🧧 gift 🧧 for future me. For example, say I made a bad call. Well, I can retrospectively review how I came to the decision that lead to a bad outcome. As Ray Dalio says, Pain + Reflection = Progress.

The most detailed version of this I’ve come across is the ‘decision-journal’ over at Farnam Street, but I like to keep mine a bit simpler than that.

Some posts will have mini decision-journals built into them. For example:

What are the options?

• Option 0: do nothing

  • Pros (including potential second order consequences)

  • Cons (including potential second order consequences)

• Option 1: do X

  • Pros (including potential second order consequences)

  • Cons (including potential second order consequences)

• Option 2: do Y

  • Pros (including potential second order consequences)

  • Cons (including potential second order consequences)

• Option 3: do a mix of X and Y

  • Pros (including potential second order consequences)

  • Cons (including potential second order consequences)

• Outcome = I think Option 2 is the best because:

  • Explain why it achieves your goal / aligns to your values / etc

But, most post won’t (as it will detract from the post!). Hence, I thought to publish this meta post to help me improve my writing skills. I might publish something like this again, but I might not. Let’s see how this one goes :)

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So, what is this post about?

It’s about the decisions I made as writing about My Personal Operating Stack (PersonalOS). I hope this is somewhat useful for you, as it’s going to be really useful for me 🤓.

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Decision #1: What’s the job to be done (JTBD) of this post?

This is the most important question I need to ask myself. JTBD is a great framework introduced by the late Clayton Christensen in his book, Competing Against Luck (the milkshake example still blows my mind 🤯).

So, what are my JsTBD with this post?

• Practice writing

• Be vulnerable and reintroduce myself to the world

• Document my personal operating stack so that I can "see" it more clearly, and so I can more easily nurture and improve it over time

• Share my personal operating stack with the world to see what other people do or use so that I can learn from others

• Perhaps play with generative AI to fine-tune things

Cool, now that I have this, I’ll keep coming back to them as I review my post to make sure I’m hitting the mark.

Decision #2: How should I structure my post?

Good question! I’ll go with the following:

• Pondering

  • hook?

• tl;dr

  • summarise the post

• Define what a personal operating stack is

• Why I care about my personal operating stack

• Why you should care about my personal operating stack

• Overview of my personal operating stack

  • Use a screenshot of my spreadsheet

• Share my personal operating stack

  • Type?

  • What?

  • Why?

  • How?

  • Example(s)

  • What’s working?

  • What’s not working?

  • Where are the gaps?

  • 🍚R-ICE score (I write about this here: Mental models: 🍚R-ICE Framework)

Decision #3: How should I show my PersonalOS?

I’ve put a little bit of thought into how I could show this (by no means is this an exhaustive (MECE’d) list of options):

• Lens 1 = long list, sorted arbitrarily by A to Z

• Lens 2 = top five by relevance (from my 🍚R-ICE score) with more detail, the rest with less detail

• Lens 3 = top five by enjoyment with more detail, the rest with less detail

• Lens 4 = based on amount time spent

• Lens 5 = based on amount of enjoyment

• Lens 6 = based on amount of annoyance

• Lens 7 = based on time of day

• Lens 8 = base on JTDB

• Lens 9 = some combination of the above?

To help me decide, I needed to choose one that felt right, and start documenting / writing. Initially, I landed on Lens 7 = based on time of day, but it was way too detailed…

My v1 was way too detailed…

So, I stopped and came back to the list above. I wrote some more, but due to the impeding dinner-bath-bed-cycle, I paused.

And, I’m glad I did. It allowed me to sleep on it, and it became clear to me whilst in the shower the next morning as to how to best tackle this!

Pivot #1: Realising there’s a better way to show my PersonalOS

I’ve decided I’ll do the following:

• Step 1 = go through my calendar over the past week or so and map out all the apps that I’ve used and workflows that I’ve followed in a matrix

  • I won’t fill in all the details for each

  • Rather, I’m doing this as a quick, first pass at jotting these apps/workflows down

• Step 2 = to ensure I’m capturing as many of my apps and workflows as possible, map out all the relevant things I do on a typical (ideal!) day in the same matrix, but based on Lens 7 = based on time of day

• Step 3 = reassess what to do

Results from Step 1 and 2:

Pivot #2: Realising I need to pause here and split this into smaller chunks

Before I go deep into any part of my PersonalOS, I want to pause. I think each part is super interesting on its own, and deserves its own post!

So, I’ll pause here.

Right now, I plan on doing the following:

• Step 4 = add/remove/amend any parts of my PersonalOS map

• Step 5 = apply my R-ICE Framework to each of the parts of my PersonalOS so I can rank each of the parts of my PersonalOS to see:

  • what’s most and least Relevant to my values and goals

  • what I can spend time thinking about improving

  • what I can stop/reduce doing

  • etc

Cool, that will be fun!