How do they get started when building a house? How do they get started when building a software?
They start with building a blueprint, the architecture.
Here is my take on high level architecture for personal achievement.
Life projects
Define your life projects you want to develop yourself and achieve results. Mine are customers, family, finances, professional development, soft skill development, blogging, and few more. Everything that falls beyond these categories (life projects) does not deserve your attention, energy, and time.
Goals
Each life project must have specific achievable goals. Customer X is highly satisfied, customer Y received all deliverables on time, get home at 5 o’clock 3 times a week, write 4 posts a week. Something that can be achieved and most important – measurable.
Time allocation
Allocate proactively time for each of your life projects. “If I only had time…” never works. Never! Make sure you have time for your life projects. Allocate it proactively daily, weekly, monthly, yearly. I only mastered daily, weekly, and monthly time allocation. Working now on yearly and life time allocation now.
Pipeline management
Streamline task pipeline management in each life project. Reduce friction to set a task, find it, and prioritize it. The most important is being goal oriented rather task oriented. Do your feel the difference? Doing a lot does not mean achieving a lot.
Prioritization
To be goal oriented one needs simple prioritization system. Prioritizing one goal over another, or prioritizing one task over another. Focus your energy on highest ROI.
“Architecture is the art of how to waste space.” - Philip Johnson
Life Architecture is the art of spending your life time - Alik Levin.
What do they do when the architecture is done?
They build the design that describes how to implement the architecture. That is exactly what I am going to describe in my next posts.
6 comments ↓
gautam Chaudhury
The things that fits them all together for me in life are my passions. They are the linkage between each of the components in life and they affect EVERYTHING.
I’m totally on board with the ‘architect’ model, (i.e. define goals and work from there. goal - not task - oriented). This is one of the problems I have with GTD since it seems too bottom-up for me. I think GTD is great - ONCE you define your goals and values.
@Mike – I think this should answer particularly your question about time sharing and resources, check out my guest post on steve-olson.com http://www.steve-olson.com/how-to-engineer-yourself-for-peak-performance/ I am going to delve in each topic on my blog soon. Performance is a non-functional requirement that overlooked way too often – both in software and our life. My quest is reverse engineer software performance practices and apply it in my life, I already do it and will be sharing happily here. Taking into account performance during architecture and design phases should help all parts operate more smoothly with less exceptions (errors).
@blogrdoc – pipeline is the key for me – check out my post on email processing here http://practicethis.com/2008/01/07/keep-your-inbox-clean-stay-focused-and-productive-my-4-simple-rules/. It is one of the examples how pipeline works. There are more, like working on tasks, scheduling, goal setting etc. These are all pipelines of similar tasks to process. You put it all in the line and then hit it one-by-one like robot, mechanically, fast – check out JD’s revelation why it works and why GTD works http://practicethis.com/2008/01/02/the-secret-behind-gtd-getting-things-done-revealed/ . BTW, I also think many people take GTD to wrong direction of task orientation. That kills GTD. Haha – death by GTD, cool
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