I’m almost 40, and over the last twenty plus years of my adulthood I’ve been slowly developing my life/work system – basically how I know what is the next thing I should do, but much more, as I will expand on today. I get asked about various parts of it a lot and I love talking about it of course, since I’ve put countless hours into optimizing, improving, trying new tools and writing my own tools. This blog post will explain the various parts of my life/work system for curious people, so that I will have a place to point people interested and so that I’ll have some documentation of it for myself and my LLM agents. I might update this once in a while. In case you need more context about me, click here.

I’ll start by describing the day to day parts of the system, then the main self improvement loop and the yearly review and then tools I use and software set up.

Day to day loop

Kids are in kindergarten, wife working, coffee in hand, I sit down and log in to my computer. The first thing I open is Trello where all my work and life tasks live. I used to have two boards for work todos and life todos, but now I use one main board for both, with specific projects sometimes getting their own Trello board or a list in the ongoing projects Trello.

Trello structure, lists from left to right

1. First list is Projects/themes. It has the monthly themes card which are a few things that I should push forward during the current calendar month. It usually includes a mix of bigger picture life tasks (“Rethink all insurance I have and need”) and some work things (“Start X project and make meaningful progress”). I try to look at this list when I need some direction in the day or when I’m done with the tasks for the day and need inspiration. I recently also added smallish projects and ideas there for when I need something random to hack on.
2. The next 7 lists are one for each day of the week. On each day I work on the recurring tasks and the assigned tasks. Previous days become empty as the week progresses (although sometimes I assign tasks there to remember them next week).
3. Accompanying these there are the Week and Weekend lists that are floating – they are always to the right of the current day list and I move cards from these to the current day list when I need more things to work. I also have a tampermonkey script that adds a “random” button to the each list that chooses a random card for me to work on.
4. Next week list for things that specifically need to be moved to week list at the end of the week.
5. Backlog list – new things I don’t have time to triage are added there for later triaging to other lists.
6. Month lists – I usually only plan a few months forward.
7. Year list – basically just this year for rest of things and next year for whatever is deferred.
8. Then there are some lists that contain aspirational tasks that I go over once in a while and see if their time has come:
   1. “Learning and self development” – things that I would like to learn but have no concrete plan for now.
   2. “Monthly habits” – Once a month I try to pick a (usually smallish) habit and persist it for at least a month.
   3. “Travel and events” – places I want to go, events I want to join (mostly long distance biking events)
   4. “Info” – random bits of information that should really live somewhere else
9. Finally – a list of shopping lists for different categories – deli groceries, books, board games, AliExpress, etc. I update them as I need something to not forget when months later I’m in the board game shop.

So I take a sip of coffee (I like drinking my coffee over at least an hour) and the first task is usually writing or finishing yesterday’s log. Usually all I need to do is to fill in when I went to sleep, what I did at night and the high and low point of the day. See the self improvement loop for more about this habit. Then I bunch my tasks by “computer tasks” like coding, documenting, research and “physical tasks” like cleaning, going outside, etc. When I go outside I try to look at the label “outside” and see if there are things I can knock off along the way, and also look for hobby related things around where I’m going like geocaches, outdoor libraries and fruit trees.

A lot of my tasks are related to specific projects I’m working on or researching, and some of their specific todos live in OneNote or in a different Trello board.

I document my life and my “brain” in OneNote. It stores lots of data for me:

1. General facts about my life and family – important notes about people (who ever remembers blood type?), gift ideas, car/house maintenance history, etc. This also includes restaurants visited and dishes I specifically liked, books and a short review of each, etc.
2. Project documentation – I usually have a list of requirements, documentation of architecture, “Development stories” that are step-by-step lists of things I did, problems I’ve overcame or worked around, things to remember, etc. These stories are useful as documentation later and now with AI doing most of the work it seems like I’m doing this less and less.
3. Self developments – some OneNote sections support my self development loops like having the weekly/yearly summaries, themes, goals, etc. Learning documentation falls under here.
4. Checklists – pre-prepared for various forms of travel (abroad, camping, day trip, etc), getting back to work after losing my focus, escape rooms, etc.
5. Archive – I rarely archive things, but I definitely don’t delete, so this is where archived things live.

Self improvement loop

1. Every day I write a summary of things that happened that day, finishing it the day after by adding last things I’ve done and filling in the highlight, lowpoint and specific things I’m tracking like my monthly habits. I’ve been doing this for decades and have thousands of these, but there are definitely days I miss it and that’s fine. There are also months where I neglect it and I’m not happy about that.
2. Every week (sometimes life events make it once every two weeks) I have a weekly reflection where I go over documentation about last week and think of what happened, summarise what went well and less and major conversations I had with family and friends. Here are the things I look through for this weekly:
   • Last week notes
   • Daily summary emails
   • My home spun “timeline” email that contains trello tasks I finished, phone calls, photos from my phone, gps locations, people I talked to on whatsapp. These emails are great!
   • I look over my RescueTime dashboard to see where time on the computer went.
   • I look at my calendar to see where real world time went.
   • I have a few more dashboard like trello stats, whatsapp stats, investments stats that I look at. It is so easy to build these internal tools now with LLM coding agents. Interesting is trello tasks I finished, but also trello tasks that I’ve moved from one day to another meaning I need to look into why it is not being done.
   • Photos on my phone – lots of times I take a photo of something as a reminder, but it is also nice to reminisce.
   • I go over the monthly theme and yearly/multi year goal and see if I’m moving towards them somewhat. If not I add todos to correct this.
   • I also just think and remember what happened and what I might have forgotten to document.
   • Then after reading all of these I’m usually left with a list of ten or more todos which I move to the trello backlog and then cull the backlog moving issues to the other lists.
3. Before month end I have a task to prepare next month, which includes:
   1. Thinking of new month themes
   2. Populating the month Trello list by going over remains of current month, planned for the next month and sometimes the year list.
4. Once a year I think about life. This is less systemized, so not much to say.

Supporting Tools

Here are tools that I use a lot and are relevant to the processes:

1. I use wallabag as a “read it later” – interesting articles go there for reading in busses and other boring places.
2. PocketCasts – podcasts go there. If a podcast has ads it should instead be fed to the (private for now) ad blocker and that feed should be subscribed to.
3. Google Calendar is where meeting and reminders go.
4. Monica – I’m evaluating it to keep track of contacts.
5. Sveder Dashboard – my homespun “life dashboard”. It has a lot of random tools:
   1. Credit card reports and personal finance
   2. Trello statistics and reports (burndown for example)

Servers

1. I have a home server that runs self hosted tools and streaming labs.
2. I have the sveder.com server that runs various projects and also run some self-hosted services that need to be accessed from outside my home network:
   1. Sveder.com – about and blog
   2. Bdlr.sveder.com – My mom’s illustration of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal.