How To Organize Your Life With An Optimized Values Plan

00:00:00.000 | So thanks for that question, Andrew.

00:00:02.120 | That does help clarify things.

00:00:04.400 | All right, let's do one more, Jesse.

00:00:05.240 | What do we got?

00:00:06.200 | - All right, final question is from Allison.

00:00:08.040 | She's a 29 year old software developer in Washington, DC.

00:00:11.640 | She says, "Hi Cal, in your previous podcast,

00:00:14.880 | "you talked about how you organize your life

00:00:16.960 | "and your core documents.

00:00:18.680 | "How did you create your values document?

00:00:20.660 | "How do you know what values are important to you?"

00:00:23.320 | - Well, first of all, I'll say I'm distracted

00:00:27.720 | by our tablet here with the Reich animation

00:00:31.520 | I'm looking at right now.

00:00:32.960 | My Lord, there's a histogram, a stacked histogram

00:00:37.960 | of task completion per person,

00:00:41.140 | stacked by the different categories of tasks

00:00:44.120 | moving up and down.

00:00:45.260 | Man, okay, sorry, Allison.

00:00:47.960 | I'm entranced by the visual complexity

00:00:50.320 | that is these project management tools.

00:00:53.080 | Wait till they see our whiteboard, Jesse.

00:00:56.280 | We're too simple.

00:00:57.180 | We have a whiteboard and Google Docs.

00:00:59.680 | - Dropbox.

00:01:01.680 | - We do use Dropbox, yeah.

00:01:03.600 | No stacked histograms.

00:01:05.200 | All right, Allison, I'm sorry.

00:01:06.040 | This is an important question.

00:01:06.860 | Okay, how'd you come up with your values document?

00:01:08.880 | Here's the key thing about values documents,

00:01:10.800 | which again, for people who didn't hear episode 211,

00:01:13.980 | my suggestion is you have a document

00:01:16.680 | that has your core values

00:01:17.840 | that you review on a regular basis.

00:01:19.500 | It becomes the foundation for everything else you do.

00:01:21.480 | So when you write your strategic plans

00:01:23.080 | for like what am I doing for the next semester,

00:01:25.200 | all this stuff comes back to,

00:01:26.680 | am I serving my core values?

00:01:28.480 | The key point about that

00:01:29.720 | is there's not a single right answer to that

00:01:32.080 | that you have to get just right

00:01:33.960 | before the document can be used.

00:01:36.580 | Your notion of what your values were

00:01:38.120 | will evolve over time with experience and exposure

00:01:42.440 | to other systems of thought.

00:01:45.400 | What's important is that you have something that makes sense

00:01:48.360 | and aligns with your experience intuition at the moment

00:01:51.440 | and that you're using it.

00:01:52.920 | This gives you intention and direction with your life.

00:01:55.800 | Even if that direction shifts over time,

00:01:59.040 | you're still always better moving at any one moment

00:02:02.260 | in an intentional direction

00:02:03.240 | as opposed to just wandering around.

00:02:04.640 | So otherwise I'm gonna try to say here,

00:02:06.040 | Alison is lower the stakes here.

00:02:08.440 | I wrote my original values document,

00:02:10.240 | I was in my twenties as a grad student.

00:02:12.560 | For some reason I remember this.

00:02:14.760 | I have a weird memory for certain things.

00:02:16.880 | I wrote in my Moleskine

00:02:19.040 | and it was, we were waiting to go to sit Shiva

00:02:22.120 | with a friend of ours,

00:02:23.160 | a friend of ours who was at Harvard, a grad student,

00:02:25.480 | whose dad had died.

00:02:26.480 | So his dad had died young

00:02:28.520 | and we were gonna go sit Shiva

00:02:31.440 | and it gets you thinking about things.

00:02:33.600 | And I remember that's when the very first draft

00:02:35.600 | and I'm sure I have that Moleskine somewhere.

00:02:37.000 | I have a stack this high of these old Moleskines

00:02:39.760 | where I keep track of ideas about my values

00:02:41.880 | and living the deep life.

00:02:44.080 | That's why I worked out my first value plan

00:02:45.560 | and this has evolved since then.

00:02:47.200 | Getting married changed that.

00:02:50.320 | I mean, I was married at that point already.

00:02:51.880 | Having kids changed the values plan.

00:02:54.680 | Career shifting changed the values plan.

00:02:57.240 | If you encounter or discover systems of,

00:02:59.640 | organized systems of moralistic thinking,

00:03:03.080 | be it philosophical or theological,

00:03:05.520 | now you're tapping into really ancient wisdom,

00:03:07.240 | gonna affect your value plan.

00:03:08.320 | So the thing will evolve,

00:03:09.520 | but you do, you gotta start.

00:03:12.480 | You wanna have something.

00:03:13.440 | So that's the way to think about it, Alison.

00:03:14.840 | Having something is better than not.

00:03:17.200 | Don't sweat if you have the right thing

00:03:19.360 | because that will evolve with your life experience.

00:03:23.120 | - So you keep all your Moleskines?

00:03:25.640 | - Yeah.

00:03:26.640 | - For century 20s?

00:03:28.640 | - Yeah.

00:03:30.160 | I keep Moleskines.

00:03:31.600 | - I guess if you go back and look,

00:03:32.600 | you can kind of see it's like a diary.

00:03:34.760 | - I keep a lot, not all of them.

00:03:36.160 | I also have a lot of time blocking.

00:03:39.080 | So I have a lot of these old planners

00:03:40.560 | and then the ones I was a lot of black and reds from before.

00:03:43.120 | I don't keep all of those.

00:03:43.960 | I realized like I don't need all these,

00:03:46.280 | but I have a fair number of those.

00:03:47.680 | Yeah, but the Moleskines I keep.

00:03:48.720 | I've gone back through before.

00:03:50.400 | There's some, I've done blog posts from now and then

00:03:52.200 | or email newsletter articles every once in a while

00:03:55.240 | where I'll take a picture of like the teetering stack.

00:03:58.840 | - Yeah.

00:03:59.680 | - I last went through them for digital minimalism.

00:04:02.160 | This, I was writing about journaling

00:04:04.200 | in digital minimalism.

00:04:06.440 | And so I actually went back and cited a bunch of things

00:04:09.720 | from old Moleskines.

00:04:10.680 | It's kind of cool to go back.

00:04:12.160 | - Yeah.

00:04:13.000 | - Go back and read.

00:04:14.760 | I mean, you, you get older, your thoughts mature

00:04:17.600 | is what I would say.

00:04:18.520 | That's my, that's my experience going back

00:04:20.200 | and reading my 20, 21 year old Moleskines.

00:04:23.840 | But there's cool things.

00:04:24.680 | I mean, the coolest thing I found was the transition

00:04:26.960 | in my writing life when I was leaving student writing

00:04:29.880 | and trying to make that decision

00:04:32.400 | because I'd written three books for students.

00:04:36.920 | My newsletter slash blog was called study hacks

00:04:39.160 | and it was just for students.

00:04:40.120 | It had traction.

00:04:42.000 | I was probably one of the top people writing on that topic.

00:04:44.680 | I was like, I can just own this topic.

00:04:46.520 | Like I'm owning it now.

00:04:48.440 | I brought some new things into that world.

00:04:51.760 | I was working.

00:04:52.960 | And then also I was thinking,

00:04:54.120 | I can't just do this for the rest of my life though.

00:04:55.680 | Like I'm not gonna be a student forever.

00:04:57.520 | And like, do I want to just keep doing this?

00:04:59.400 | And I worked a lot of that out in my Moleskine.

00:05:02.120 | And I have a weird, my wife knows this.

00:05:04.280 | I don't have a fully memetic memory, right?

00:05:06.760 | Like I don't have photographic memory

00:05:08.520 | but I do for certain things like books.

00:05:11.040 | I can remember like almost every book where I read it

00:05:13.880 | where I was anytime I'm writing or reading.

00:05:16.560 | So I have a very clear memory.

00:05:18.080 | And this must have been God, 2008.

00:05:22.280 | Very clear memory, Coolidge Corner,

00:05:25.240 | movie theater, Brookline, Massachusetts.

00:05:28.360 | Because my wife and I used to see every movie,

00:05:30.600 | literally every movie.

00:05:32.000 | And we were there to see,

00:05:32.960 | it was a Disney nature documentary

00:05:36.440 | about lions and lion cubs.

00:05:38.720 | 'Cause we just saw it.

00:05:39.560 | We've seen everything what's playing, right?

00:05:41.160 | And I remember being in the main theater

00:05:43.560 | at Coolidge Corner, the main, the nice one

00:05:45.280 | that has the old-fashioned theater

00:05:48.880 | with the curtains or whatever.

00:05:49.760 | And we were watching that movie.

00:05:50.600 | And I remember sitting there with my Moleskine

00:05:52.440 | and working through.

00:05:53.680 | So if I see those notes,

00:05:54.560 | I can remember where I was when I took them.

00:05:57.240 | - That's great.

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How To Organize Your Life With An Optimized Values Plan

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