Creating a Strategy for Life: from Cal Newport

Go from organized chaos to effective, systematic productivity

Cal Newport is a successful distributed computing theoretician and productivity writer.

Recently, I have been reading his work on how to build a system to organize your career and life.

Here’s what I learned:

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First, build a root document that contains explanations of how your systems work, that clearly and concisely states what each of the other documents does. The following documents mentioned here all live in this root document (create links to the other documents in your too document; I use the app Notion to achieve this).

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Next, create a document that contains your Values in life for each of the roles you play. All these combine to provide alignment for who you are. For example:

• The principles you live by at your job

• The principles you live by at your side hustles

• The principles you live by as a member of your family

• The principles you live by as a teacher

• Note: are meant to guide planning and for you to come into a closer proximity with you who you want to be.

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Build a document that contains your overarching Strategy for your career and life plans, and link it to your root document.

• This document can lead to additional strategy documents that need their own space to run.

  • Example additional strategy documents:

    • A strategy for how to grow at your company.

    • A strategy for building your side hustle.

• The strategy document is meant to guide your quarterly, weekly, and daily plans.

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Build a document that contains your principles and infrastructure for Planning on a quarterly, weekly, and daily basis.

This Planning document will guide the methodology through which you set up your plans, and it will be guided by your Values and Strategies documents.

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Now, solve the short term task list.

Create a list of every single task you have to do in life and divide them into 6 Categories.

Note, Newport says that the initial build of this task list can take a very long time (at least a few hours), simply because these tasks have accumulated over time, and they are still not very organized.

• Ready: an unambiguous task you know you have to do and that is a priority

• Back-burner: something you know you have to do, but that can wait

• Waiting: something that is waiting on something else to happen before you can complete it

• To Discuss: a task that needs to be discussed with someone before it can be completed

• Clarify: a task that you need to talk to someone about to better understand what it is

• Scheduled: something that has already been put into the calendar

After this has been done, cross-check this tasks with your Values and Strategy documents, and figure out what you really have to do. There might be tasks that you just throw out the window because you’ve realized that you don’t actually don’t have to do them.

Integrate this task list with your daily and weekly plans.

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Be consistent about reviewing your Strategy and Values documents periodically, and be very consistent about your daily and weekly planning.

Stay organized, stay productive, and I’ll see you next time on the next edition of Matti’s Mind!