🚦 A Systems Thinking Approach to Life

🎯 This Week’s Focus

If someone were to look at your desk or your closet right now, what would they see? How long do you spend time looking for a specific jacket or that piece of mail you know you put somewhere on your desk? Systems create consistency, reduce chaos, and free up mental energy for high-value work and personal growth.

Whether it's a morning routine, project management tool, or recurring task automation, systems ensure that every part of your life supports your long-term vision.

Last week, we explored how to turn your vision into actionable goals using clear frameworks like SMART goals.

• How does it feel to tangibly define your aspirations?

• When you think about your definition of a great life, what other areas of your life could benefit from more clarity?

Now that we have a defined destination, let's explore how to build systems for your career, relationships, wellness, and more—so that you can make success inevitable.

💼 Career

Systematizing your Professional Success

It’s Monday morning, and as soon as you start your workday, a laundry list of “urgent” tasks demands your attention. In these moments, it’s easy to get caught up in reactive work and lose focus on your priorities or long-term goals.

To avoid this, systems creating systems leveraging things like project management tools, time-blocking, and prioritization frameworks (e.g., the Eisenhower Matrix). This will provide structure and consistency, ensuring your energy is directed toward what truly matters. These systems operate on both micro and macro levels to support your career growth.

• Micro Level (Daily Tasks): Implement a “Monday Prioritization” system to identify your top three tasks for the week and schedule them during your peak energy times. This ensures you’re tackling high-impact work when you’re most focused.

• Macro Level (Career Goals): Use a “Quarterly Connect” system to track the skills you’re developing, document accomplishments, and regularly connect with mentors. This keeps you aligned with your broader career vision and ensures progress over time.

Consider sketching a simple causal loop diagram for your top priorities. Causal loop diagrams (CLDs) map relationships between elements in a system, helping you spot areas where small changes can amplify positive results. For example, focusing on high-impact tasks during peak hours can create a reinforcing loop where success fuels motivation and productivity, driving further career growth.

By integrating these systems, you create a balance between handling daily responsibilities and making strides toward your long-term aspirations.

✅ Key Takeaway: Systems simplify prioritization, helping you focus on high-impact work and align your efforts with career growth.

🚀 Quick Win: Weekly Work Sprint

1. Spend 15 minutes every Monday planning your top three priorities for the week.

2. Dedicate focused time each day to these tasks, minimizing distractions.

3. Review your progress every Friday to refine for the next week.

📚 Essential Reading: Deep Work by Cal Newport – Learn how to structure your time for maximum focus and productivity by eliminating distractions.

📖 Further Reading: HBR: The Difference Between Urgent and Important – Learn how to distinguish between urgent and important tasks to enhance productivity.

💝 Relationships

Maintaining Connection Through Systems

Strong relationships—whether they’re friends, partners, family, coworkers, etc. —thrive on consistent effort. Challenge mental models like “I don’t have time to maintain friendships.” Replace these with systems that automate connection-building and reduce friction, such as recurring social reminders or setting designated time to check in on friends, so that you’re not relying on memory alone.

Simple tools like calendar reminders, recurring hang outs, or thoughtful touchpoints help you stay connected across all aspects of your life without added stress. For instance, you might schedule weekly board game nights, set reminders for friends’ birthdays, or plan monthly date nights with your partner.

These small but intentional actions create sustainable habits to maintain and strengthen bonds across all types of relationships.

✅ Key Takeaway: Systems make maintaining relationships effortless and sustainable, ensuring they remain a central part of your life.

🚀 Quick Win: Create a Relationship Calendar

1. Identify 5 people from different areas of your life (e.g., family, partner, friends, colleagues, mentors) you want to stay connected with.

2. Plan one intentional interaction per week, like a phone call, coffee chat, or thoughtful message. Tie this back to your vision and goals.

3. Keep track of your connections. Note when you last spent time together and personalize future interactions based on past conversations.

📚 Essential Reading: Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi – Learn strategies for building and maintaining meaningful relationships that support personal and professional growth.

📖 Further Reading: The Power of Rituals: How Small Habits Can Strengthen Your Relationship – Explore how small, meaningful rituals can deepen connections and strengthen your relationships.

🧘 Wellbeing

Implementing Your Wellness Routine

Building wellness routines ensure your wellbeing goals aren’t left to chance. Whether it’s a morning walk, meal prepping, or journaling before bed, designing simple systems helps you stay on track without decision fatigue. For example, pairing habits like meditating while your coffee brews creates automatic routines that reinforce wellness without extra effort.

A different way to think about it is figuring out what you can do to make the good habits easier to do, and the bad habits harder to do. Think about all the different reasons you might not do something and find solutions to proactively address them. For example, this might look like picking your workout outfit the night before, setting your shoes and keys right by the door, and finding a friend to go with so you reduce the “friction” to exercising.

You can also identify feedback loops in your wellness routines. Feedback loops show how small actions can lead to reinforcing cycles of improvement. For instance, regular exercise boosts energy, which enhances productivity, leading to greater satisfaction and motivation to continue exercising—a positive reinforcing cycle.

Creating these systems makes healthy choices a natural part of your day.

✅ Key Takeaway: Wellbeing systems automate healthy habits, helping you achieve lasting improvements with minimal effort.

🚀 Quick Win: Design a Morning Energy System

1. Choose one energizing habit to your mornings (e.g., stretching, hydration).

2. Link it with an existing habit (e.g., drink water after brushing your teeth).

3. Monitor your habit for one week and adjust as needed. Experiment as you notice differences and see what helps your body to feel better!

📚 Essential Reading: Atomic Habits by James Clear – Learn how to build small habits that compound into significant results.

🎧️ Further Listening: How to Use Tiny Habits to Change Your Life – Discover practical insights from BJ Fogg on how small changes can create big transformations in your habits and routines.

💰 Finances

Automating Financial Success

Whether it’s stress, anxiety or excitement, money often has a lot emotion tied to it. This often ties back to our relationship with money — what we learned about it growing up, how we felt as we spent it, etc — which can make it difficult to make logical, consistent decisions to achieve our “rich life”.

Use the Iceberg Model to analyze financial habits. This model encourages you to look beyond visible events, such as impulse purchases, to identify deeper patterns, structures, or mental models driving these behaviors. For example, emotional spending may stem from stress or a lack of planning, highlighting systemic issues that can be addressed with better budgeting systems or emotional coping strategies.

Once you have an understanding of your existing habits, you can start to create financial systems that can automate recurring tasks like savings, investments, and bill payments eliminates decision fatigue, ensuring you stay on track to achieve your financial goals without constant effort. For higher-value decisions, such as planning for retirement or purchasing a home, consider aligning your financial framework with your vision and values.

By automating the basics, you free up mental energy for strategic planning that moves you closer to your "rich life."

✅ Key Takeaway: Systems make financial success nearly automatic, allowing you to focus on long-term goals and meaningful financial milestones.

🚀 Quick Win: Monthly Financial Check-In

1. Automate essentials by setting up recurring transfers to savings or investments. Tie this back to your vision for a “rich life” and your specific financial goals.

2. Review Progress. Schedule time monthly to review your budget and progress towards financial goals.

3. Identify one small change you can make to your financial systems to better align with your goals. For example, waiting for 72 hours before purchasing things in your shopping cart.

📚 Essential Reading: I Will Teach You to Be Rich by Ramit Sethi – Learn practical strategies for automating finances and aligning spending with your values.

📖 Further Reading: Conscious Spending Plan: Budget by Looking Into the Future – Introduces a budgeting approach that focuses on intentional spending aligned with your values to achieve financial freedom.

🎨 Hobbies & Interests

Focusing More on What Sparks Joy

Hobbies are often dismissed or deprioritized because they’re viewed as a “nice to have.” Inevitably, when our weeks get busy, planning for a hiking trip or finding friends who are free to play a pick up game often gets put on the bottom of our to-do lists only to be forgotten. To make it easier to follow through on your hobbies, simplify decisions that often create resistance or hesitation.

This might look like setting aside specific times and days for your hobbies, making them as non-negotiable as work meetings or other responsibilities. For example, participating in a class or league can be a great strategy—it provides a consistent schedule and group of people, eliminating the need to constantly coordinate or plan.

Creating structure helps you focus less on logistics and more on the joy and fulfillment that hobbies bring.

✅ Key Takeaway: Scheduling time for hobbies makes creative fulfillment a consistent part of your routine.

🚀 Quick Win: Dedicate a Hobby Hour

1. Set a Weekly Time Block. Choose one hour each week for a hobby or creative project.

2. Plan ahead and decide what you’ll do in advance (e.g., painting, cooking, journaling). Tie this back to your vision and goals - it should be something you’re excited about!

3. Treat this time as sacred—no rescheduling or multitasking allowed.

📚 Essential Reading: The Science of Hobbies – Explore the mental and emotional benefits of engaging in creative pursuits and how hobbies can improve overall well-being.

📖 Further Reading: How to Reclaim Your Playful Self and Find More Joy – Discover the importance of play in adulthood and practical tips for rediscovering joy through hobbies and activities.

🗂 Life Administration

Streamlining Daily Tasks

Creating systems can even extend into our everyday life admin tasks, such as organizing schedules, managing errands, or meal planning. These things often become draining because we don’t plan for them and when we need to do them, they take us away from things we would rather be doing. Similar to Finances, you can use the Iceberg Model here as well to explore the root causes of recurring challenges. Are they due to lack of preparation, unclear priorities, or another systemic issue?

Ali Abdaal, in his book Feel Good Productivity, emphasizes the importance of creating systems that not only save time but also reduce stress and add a sense of ease to daily routines. For example, automating small decisions like setting recurring grocery deliveries or using pre-designed templates for recurring tasks can minimize effort and maximize focus.

By aligning your administrative systems with your broader vision and values, you ensure that these often-overlooked tasks support your long-term goals instead of detracting from them.

✅ Key Takeaway: Creating life admin systems that align with your values reduces overwhelm and creates mental clarity to focus on what truly matters.

🚀 Quick Win: Build a Simplified Admin System

1. Automate Small Decisions by using apps to simplify recurring tasks (e.g., grocery lists) or designating tasks to specific days of the week (e.g., laundry day).

2. Create “Templates” for recurring tasks. This might look like establishing a daily, weekly, and monthly reset to keep your space clean or like creating a routine to grocery shopping and handle shopping returns after exercising.

3. Identify one new system you can implement to make life admin easier this week.

4. Bonus: Find something to reward yourself as you’re doing your life admin tasks to make it even more enjoyable. This might look like treating yourself to your favorite drink while grocery shopping or watching your favorite show while folding laundry.

📚 Essential Reading: Feel Good Productivity by Ali Abdaal – Learn how to build systems that make daily tasks manageable while enhancing your productivity and well-being.

📖 Further Reading: How to Be More Productive with Time-Blocking – Discover how time-blocking can help you manage administrative tasks efficiently and reduce decision fatigue.

📝 This Week’s Challenge

🎯 Goal: Simplify one recurring decision in your life by creating a system or using a framework.

Steps:

1. Identify a Pain Point: Think of a recurring decision that feels draining (e.g., planning meals, managing emails, choosing workouts).

2. Choose a Solution: Use a framework or system to simplify the process (e.g., meal planning on Sundays, batching emails).

3. Test It Out: Implement your system for one week and assess the results.

Example: If meal planning feels overwhelming, set up a Sunday routine to plan dinners for the week and create a grocery list. This reduces daily decision-making and frees up mental energy.

📅 Next Week’s Preview

Next week, we’ll focus on aligning your energy with your goals. Learn how to manage your energy for peak performance, build sustainable routines, and use creative pursuits to recharge and stay motivated.

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About Kevin

Kevin Earl Tan helps people to design their lives through evidence-based coaching and systems thinking. He is pursuing his International Coaching Federation (ICF) Associate Certified Coach (ACC) certification. Kevin combines academic insights from his Masters in Human Resources from the University of Southern California along with practical application from 10+ years in change management and leadership to make behavior change simple and approachable.