How I manage my life

For those who know me, they often hear me talking about my calendar, weekly reviews, task, etc. Usually I try to quickly explain what I mean, but often I loose them the minute I say the next phrase of explanation. This post is for the curious ones which want to know more about how I manage my life.

Tools

I use a number of different tools for managing different aspects of my life. I’ve found it’s impossible to find the one which can rule them all, although the first tool comes very close.

Doom Emacs

I’ve been using Emacs and the customization of Doom for a while now. I started using it due to it’s number of different ‘modules’ which others have made; the biggest for me is Org, and back then Org-Roam.

Org-Mode provides a easy integration of a number of concepts from David Allen’s Getting Things Done productivty methods.

But I’ve add a few other productivity methods to my system as well

August’s concept of integrating weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly reviews are something I heavily depend on for giving better context of where I’ve been and where I’m going in my life. As I once told someone, doing these kind of reviews puts me in the driver set of my life more often.

Each review iterates on the initial goals for the year you’ve set. Throughout the course of the year, you’re documenting your life and progress of these goals. You note your highs & lows which provide you with feedback on your progress like what’s been working/not, your highs of the week, etc. This basically becomes a cybernetic cycle where the review of this feedback is used to improve your method of getting your desired state, whatever it be.

I actually make these types of goals I set for myself as yearly goals, as this forces me to considered when in the year I’m going to work towards them. I usually have multiple goals I want to complete for the year, which makes them compete for time and thus forces deadlines onto them.

Projects actually become more loose in their practice.

I try make my projects directed. This can actually make the process of filling out a S.M.A.R.T goal a little annoying at times, as sometimes it’s better for me to get straight to creating rather then pasue & first do a very shallow survery. It’s useful. You should do it as it forces you to just see if someone did something like you before.

Your goals aren’t that important.

You might have assumed projects & goals would interact in some complex action, but they don’t. Often I find filled out S.M.A.R.T. goals to remain the same though-out the process. Any infection by stagnation is dealt with having a deadline set. You need something which pushes you to get it done, but also let’s you play a little.

Wait, what if the goal is something that’s gonna take my whole life?

You’d then consider that to be an Area of your life, something that you maintained through it’s course. I have a few different Areas of my life.

You can see it gets kind fluffy, but that just means your Areas can be very abstracted, general things you’ll always do (because hopefully you love it).

And all the rest.

For the actual presence of categorization of other stuff from your Areas, Finances, Classes, etc, it’s okay to have such a extension out-side of the goal to project pipeline.

But it’s still on the sames software. THAT’S RIGHT IT’S EMACS TIME. VIMLETS NEED NOT APPLY (jk I use vim a lot I’m actually writing this with it right now)

Within my Doom Emacs, I use Org-Agenda to manage everything. As Org-Mode is pretty much centered around the GTD system, most of your work is cut out for you; but, there’s more to Org-Agenda then just GTD/this system that I’ve yet to try.

Here’s what mine looks like.

image

I’m using waypaper for this gif walpaper. I grew up playing Gen 3 Pokemon(I can still hear the trumpets…the horror.

You can see the daily agenda at the top, my different things below, and each having a keyword of it’s State. Notice as well that I’d gave classes & projects a kind of state as well. These are automatically applied when their template is called: but, I’ve just realized that I can probably make them states as well (and you can too!).

Further below, you can see the use of tags. It might seem redundant, but this is so such objects can appear in their category when in Agenda view.

Nextcloud

I use Nextcloud mainly for it’s calendar & synchronized storage. I’ve in the past used things like Google Calendar which is a great product, but it just didn’t fit in with the need of storage as well. I self host the instance via docker on my home server, and have set up a reverse proxy using NGINX Proxy Manager and Cloudflare.

I don’t just use the calendar for setting appointments or for when I need to be at class,

I use it in time blocking manner, as shown below

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Nextcloud FTW

This is my whole week & everything I plan to do. I don’t always stick 100% to it, but I often due as everything is a step towards some goal in my life, or it’s shit breaking( why is shit always breaking ).

On the same page of Doom Emacs is FireflyIII

FireflyIII is a self-hosted budget/financial planner/reviewer application. I use it for, you guessed it, my finanical life!

Why FireflyIII and not other applications like x, y, or z?

Other applications often use the envelope method, which makes it so you approach a set of envelope which MUST be filled with money: often, it’s to spend. I’ve found it’s better for me to set a hard limit of what I can spend in a month based off living as cheaply as possible. Any money left over can be either used for goals (think saving for clothing (which has a monthly limit, if you choose to spend any)) or investing. You’ve likely noticed that everything has a goal, just like my life.

Your money should be going towards some goal.

Once you’ve meet that goal, you can either find a new one or just keep it there for future use.

I included a balance of my budget and payment of credit cards within my review.

This way, I’m never charged interest and I keep my credit usage active, but not fully utilized; this is important as it keeps your credit score increasing (to a point due to line of credit).