So thanks for that question, Andrew. That does help clarify things. All right, let's do one more, Jesse. What do we got? - All right, final question is from Allison. She's a 29 year old software developer in Washington, DC. She says, "Hi Cal, in your previous podcast, "you talked about how you organize your life "and your core documents.

"How did you create your values document? "How do you know what values are important to you?" - Well, first of all, I'll say I'm distracted by our tablet here with the Reich animation I'm looking at right now. My Lord, there's a histogram, a stacked histogram of task completion per person, stacked by the different categories of tasks moving up and down.

Man, okay, sorry, Allison. I'm entranced by the visual complexity that is these project management tools. Wait till they see our whiteboard, Jesse. We're too simple. We have a whiteboard and Google Docs. - Dropbox. - We do use Dropbox, yeah. No stacked histograms. All right, Allison, I'm sorry. This is an important question.

Okay, how'd you come up with your values document? Here's the key thing about values documents, which again, for people who didn't hear episode 211, my suggestion is you have a document that has your core values that you review on a regular basis. It becomes the foundation for everything else you do.

So when you write your strategic plans for like what am I doing for the next semester, all this stuff comes back to, am I serving my core values? The key point about that is there's not a single right answer to that that you have to get just right before the document can be used.

Your notion of what your values were will evolve over time with experience and exposure to other systems of thought. What's important is that you have something that makes sense and aligns with your experience intuition at the moment and that you're using it. This gives you intention and direction with your life.

Even if that direction shifts over time, you're still always better moving at any one moment in an intentional direction as opposed to just wandering around. So otherwise I'm gonna try to say here, Alison is lower the stakes here. I wrote my original values document, I was in my twenties as a grad student.

For some reason I remember this. I have a weird memory for certain things. I wrote in my Moleskine and it was, we were waiting to go to sit Shiva with a friend of ours, a friend of ours who was at Harvard, a grad student, whose dad had died. So his dad had died young and we were gonna go sit Shiva and it gets you thinking about things.

And I remember that's when the very first draft and I'm sure I have that Moleskine somewhere. I have a stack this high of these old Moleskines where I keep track of ideas about my values and living the deep life. That's why I worked out my first value plan and this has evolved since then.

Getting married changed that. I mean, I was married at that point already. Having kids changed the values plan. Career shifting changed the values plan. If you encounter or discover systems of, organized systems of moralistic thinking, be it philosophical or theological, now you're tapping into really ancient wisdom, gonna affect your value plan.

So the thing will evolve, but you do, you gotta start. You wanna have something. So that's the way to think about it, Alison. Having something is better than not. Don't sweat if you have the right thing because that will evolve with your life experience. - So you keep all your Moleskines?

- Yeah. - For century 20s? - Yeah. I keep Moleskines. - I guess if you go back and look, you can kind of see it's like a diary. - I keep a lot, not all of them. I also have a lot of time blocking. So I have a lot of these old planners and then the ones I was a lot of black and reds from before.

I don't keep all of those. I realized like I don't need all these, but I have a fair number of those. Yeah, but the Moleskines I keep. I've gone back through before. There's some, I've done blog posts from now and then or email newsletter articles every once in a while where I'll take a picture of like the teetering stack.

- Yeah. - I last went through them for digital minimalism. This, I was writing about journaling in digital minimalism. And so I actually went back and cited a bunch of things from old Moleskines. It's kind of cool to go back. - Yeah. - Go back and read. I mean, you, you get older, your thoughts mature is what I would say.

That's my, that's my experience going back and reading my 20, 21 year old Moleskines. But there's cool things. I mean, the coolest thing I found was the transition in my writing life when I was leaving student writing and trying to make that decision because I'd written three books for students.

My newsletter slash blog was called study hacks and it was just for students. It had traction. I was probably one of the top people writing on that topic. I was like, I can just own this topic. Like I'm owning it now. I brought some new things into that world.

I was working. And then also I was thinking, I can't just do this for the rest of my life though. Like I'm not gonna be a student forever. And like, do I want to just keep doing this? And I worked a lot of that out in my Moleskine. And I have a weird, my wife knows this.

I don't have a fully memetic memory, right? Like I don't have photographic memory but I do for certain things like books. I can remember like almost every book where I read it where I was anytime I'm writing or reading. So I have a very clear memory. And this must have been God, 2008.

Very clear memory, Coolidge Corner, movie theater, Brookline, Massachusetts. Because my wife and I used to see every movie, literally every movie. And we were there to see, it was a Disney nature documentary about lions and lion cubs. 'Cause we just saw it. We've seen everything what's playing, right? And I remember being in the main theater at Coolidge Corner, the main, the nice one that has the old-fashioned theater with the curtains or whatever.

And we were watching that movie. And I remember sitting there with my Moleskine and working through. So if I see those notes, I can remember where I was when I took them. - That's great. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)