In order for personal structure to work, you have to trust your systems. You have to trust that everything you need, be it notes, reminders, calendar invites or mathematic formulas, are in the right place. That’s why we build systems in the first place.
A challenge that I’ve managed to condition out of myself, is that we tend to flex these systems.
Most of us have a preferred place to take notes. If you don’t have one, you should. But when you’re in a meeting and forgot your computer, you’re gonna grab a pen and pencil to take notes. When you later on need those notes, you don’t instantly go to the notebook, you go to the app where you usually take your notes.
All of a sudden, you can’t trust the system to contain all your notes anymore, and the system is going to fail.
What you need to do is be ruthless with these rules for yourself. If you end up taking notes on a notepad once, you need to instantly convert those notes into your regular system.
The same goes for all the systems you build for yourself to become more structured. … mer