Foundational Strategy: Life is an optimization problem
For most of us the first optimization problem we face as soon as we enter this world is that of walking. You first learn how to crawl which then translates into you walking like a penguin & finally you master the art of walking. Some of you even take it one step further & master the art of running.
The process of you walking from crawling had its very own feedback loop. You may have fallen a few times while trying to stand up & sub-consciously take corrective action based on this feedback. Those who could quickly comprehend this feedback & take action thrived & might have started walking faster than those who could not.
Illustratively one can express what an optimization problem looks like below:
As we get older, we find out that life isn’t as simple as optimizing the way you walk. Depending on your personal set of beliefs & values one can have multiple departments in his or her life that will have to be tackled as one large complex optimization problem. This article seeks to provide a comprehensive strategy along with practical implementation tools to help you simplify & even succeed at this problem.
Re-imagine your life as a Fortune 500 organization
Fortune 500 companies or the best performing companies around the world are valuable because they do one or many things well. They’re profitable, organized & are innovative. They stay at the top for the simple fact that they know how to optimize to deliver the best results given the constraints that are placed on them.
They have a well defined vision that describes why they exist & what their values are. Therefore, a good first step is to start with this. For those of us who have no idea what our purpose in life is, it will become evident to you as you work your way through the rest of this article. A mission statement that I have carved out for myself would look like this:
To become a leader that builds solutions that enhance the lives of the people around me both sustainably & positively while uplifting those who help my cause reach greater heights.
This does not mean that fortune 500 firms do not have their own fair share of problems. Nobody is without fault or troubles, not even the people at the top of their game. The difference between the winners & the ones who haven’t figured out the game of winning boils down to this — Optimization Systems.
An optimization system is a framework which if executed with discipline will yield results while accounting for constraints & unexpected problems that are thrown its way.
Optimization systems can be created in a variety of ways but this article explores techniques that has encompassed my own professional life. Thinking backwards we know that a fortune 500 firm is divided into multiple departments, each of which is focused on delivering results that will benefit the organization as a whole.
Since the organization is us and you it’s chief executive, it’s important to understand the departments that matter to you & will in-turn produce the kind of results that you want out of life. The illustration below gives you an example of how life can be compartmentalized into multiple departments:
When structuring your personal organization it’s important to broadly categorize it into three sections:
- Section One: The departments that drive your life forward & guide you towards something greater than yourself. Personally, I think my family, health & my mission to become a good individual that provides service to others (spirit) are the departments that fall into this section.
- Section Two: The departments that provide intellectual & tangible benefits. A good career is complimented by life-long learning and as such when combined provide a set of financial benefits which if managed correctly will yield tangible rewards.
- Section Three: The departments that satisfy your creative needs & have the ability to rejuvenate you. This section is vital as the popular saying goes — All work & no play makes Jack a dull boy.
Choose your timeframes
Fortune 500 firms like all other companies operate based around the goals they have set for themselves across different timeframes. These timeframes can range from daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly or even long term visions of three to ten years. The key problem you’re trying to solve here is that of predictability versus ambition.
While goals on a longer timeframe serve ambition but are highly unpredictable given the high variability that comes with life, goals on a shorter timeframe must be pragmatic in nature as you have increased predictability of what is going to happen to you today or over the next month or two.
With this framework in mind, a structure for a timeframe that will serve can be built & is illustrated for you below:
The inverted structure follows the principle that the amount of operational activities or action tasks is the highest on a day to day basis and gradually decreases as the timeframe increases. This places a greater emphasis that life really is what you do on a daily basis while keeping in mind that this leads to an eventual ‘result’ that is tangible at the end of 3 years.
Integrating departments & timeframes
Actionable change starts with action. It is at this point that you will start matching the different timeframes with the different departments in your life. This is also where things get a bit more pragmatic in nature. While you could use any tool of your choice, notion is the one I would like to recommend for this purpose.
As a first step lets work on creating a mental model of what this would look like for the timeframe of 3 years.
Taking this system into Notion, we have a file structure as illustrated below:
Each of the sections can have pages that include a list of goals, visual representation of your goals and/or a progress tracker that will allow you to track individual goals that are fundamentally categorized by the different departments in your life.
Achieving goals the agile way
An agile framework is based around the fact that goals & tasks can change based on feedback & better opportunities that come your way. The key idea behind the agile framework that I am about to suggest revolves around the concept of hours.
While companies may use a result driven approach towards projects, I prioritize the hour system of goal setting to achieve goals. There are multiple reasons why this framework works:
- Each day that you live life is divided into 24 hours & compartmentalizing that into distinct blocks makes sense.
- Fulfilling an hour requirement takes only discipline to execute deep & focused work into the hours you are working which takes away the pressure of the result.
- However, keeping the result in mind while working helps ensures that the hour based approach works.
The key idea is to remove any pressure associated which achieving the result but to re-apply the focus on the number of hours that you must log to fulfill a task or goal while keeping the end result in mind. This system is illustrated for you in the image below:
Some of the key components that will catch your eye are:
- The number of hours. This is the number of hours that you must log in the month in order to flag the task as successful. However, the key caveat here is that you must consider the task successful if you have achieved the desired the result well before the allocated hours.
- The department the task belongs to.
- The number of points allocated for the task. This is a scale from 1 to 5 with the latter having the highest priority or importance.
The over-arching goal is to move each card from Not Started to Completed.
The optimization framework
Timeframes and an hourly agile framework serve the purpose of getting tasks accomplished. However, the real challenge most of us face is knowing exactly what to do with those hours. This is where an optimization framework will serve you well. The basic structure of the optimization framework is illustrated for you below:
For the purpose of this example I will consider the framework for health. We have three components:
- Strategy: This page must outline a general plan of action that you will take to accomplish your goal. Depending on a timeframe that you choose, a strategy that fully encompasses this timeframe is optimal.
- Analytics: Think of the variables that contribute to the success of your health. This could be the number of calories that you intake, your resting heart rate or your weight/body fat percentage. Understanding if the metrics that you value are improving over time is the purpose of analytics.
- Decision Feedback: This is the most important aspect of the optimization framework. When you create a strategy you make decisions to take a set of actions that you expect will contribute to your success. However, that’s not always the case. The ability to develop a keen understanding of how your decisions are affecting you & learning from the decisions that do not work for you is key to achieving rapid success.
This three way system ensures that you are constantly refining your strategy & thinking about the best way to carry out your plans.
Life is lived today, not tomorrow
Planning & frameworks are important but without execution it does not have a lot of meaning. This is where I would like to introduce you to the famous quote:
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit
So our success, apart from meticulous planning & optimization also depends on our ability to execute the positive habits that our plans tell us to do. We need two tools to make this work — A calendar & a system that tracks our habits.
The Calendar
The concept of dividing my time into chunks is something I enjoy. This works because you might have a couple of work related calls & meetings in the afternoon & therefore you can chunk that block of time for just that while blocking a chunk of time in the morning for deep work. A simple representation of how this would look like is illustrated below:
Any meetings/calls with people can then be added into any of the blocks that seem logical as you deem fit. The purpose of dividing time into blocks is to give you clarity over what you should be doing with your time at every hour of the day while making the blocks large enough for you to get a considerable amount of work/relaxation done.
The Habit Tracker
Habit tracking is tricky because different people respond to different cues. The science of how to form good habits can be studied from two of my favorite books — The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg & Atomic Habits by James Clear.
The habit tracker of my choice is — HabitMinder. The use of a simple application on your smartphone to enforce positive habits feels satisfying & keeps you accountable.
Tying it all together
Let’s go over the entire process of solving this highly complex optimization problem that we call life with the help of an infographic that will make a be-fitting conclusion to this post.
