My real organization system

I was lost. And calling it anything else would downplay the mental chaos I had going on. Nothing was clear to me, and I did not have a fixed goal, so I looked like a dog chasing its tail all day, in circles and with a thousand detours just to get anywhere. There was always something new or half-started, an idea that caught my eye and off I went after it. Or a new routine that this time, for sure, was going to be the one that helped me actually get somewhere.

I was in full autopilot mode, so I spent a lot of time chasing vague stuff, making almost no progress, with this constant feeling that I was never building anything important. More noise than focus, and more energy burned than actually used well (for the hours I was putting in, that is saying something hahaha). And since I like everything, I am interested in almost anything, and I can always see the point in what other people are passionate about, I ended up with way too many fronts open and very little clarity on which ones actually mattered to me. And this was true for everything, both in programming with new technologies, frameworks, and languages, and in my free time: painting, video editing, woodworking, restoration, electrical circuits, mechanics, photography...

I was never still, always tired, and definitely not headed anywhere. I was doing things, sure, but many times with that feeling of never landing anything concrete and not moving toward the right place. I was becoming a skillstacking master, but with zero concrete goals.

And over time I realized I was not missing projects, ideas, more work, or studying (well, okay, that is always needed, you know what I mean). What I was missing was being way more honest with myself and also something to keep me grounded: a structure that helped me choose, land things, and not get dragged around by my chaotic mind. Not a perfect dashboard, not an app that does everything for me, not rigid perfect routines that feel like boot camp, but something more organic and real: a system to live and work with clarity, without turning into a bored civil servant in my own life. Because I have seen this plenty of times, and lived it a couple too: you build this beautiful organization setup and end up working for it, not with it.

The 3 personalities

The first and hardest part (at least for me): sitting down to think about who I actually want to be and how I want to see myself, what parts of me I want to build. It did not come out right on the first try, and it was not pleasant. Between self-sabotage, mental noise, outside noise, and a whole stack of years messing around with myself, getting there took more than I would have liked.

After distilling the whole thing down a lot, I landed on three ways to orient myself: three personalities. To this day they are the center of everything else, and I do not say that as pretty theory to explain myself better, but because without them I would genuinely be lost again many days, mixing everything back together.

The first one is Product Architect. It is not just about coding, or designing, or just getting work done. It is about thinking in products, building things that are useful, and shaping meaningful ideas. The developer side is in there, of course, but so is the conception side, the design side, listening to needs, and finding a coherent solution. I am not interested in just executing something, I am interested in understanding the whole and building something with structure, usefulness, and care behind it.

The second one is Athlete. Years ago this would not even have crossed my mind. I was out of shape, I treated my body badly, and my health was in rough shape too. Sports felt super far away. I was lazy about it, I thought it was for other kinds of people, and for a long time I even saw it as a waste of time for me. Then I started because of health, discovered padel, and something important happened there: I started noticing I was improving, my body was responding, things I thought were impossible maybe were not so impossible after all. And then, boom, my mind opened and a whole new world opened up: I went back to skating, swimming, I started hiking way more (yes, walking around and eating massive sandwiches hahaha), and I want to start surfing in summer. I do not see it as something foreign to me anymore, but as an important part of how I want to live.

And the third one, Disciplined. This one may sound simpler, but it is the most important. Because no matter how many ideas, values, or desire to build a better life you have, if you do not do it, and also do it when it is time, everything else is smoke. Useless. There are many things you do not feel like doing. The brain is sneaky and will try to dodge effort, build convincing excuses, and dress up pure hard resistance as tiredness. So this personality is there for that: to execute, to sustain, and to not quit at the first curve. Nothing epic about it, but without it nothing works.

These three make up my main personality block, my three selves: ADD, Architect, Athlete, Disciplined. I like it because they add up instead of canceling each other out. They are not designed to punish me or lock me in a mental jail, but to remind me which parts of me I want to develop and put in charge. And this is where my system really starts. Without this first part, everything else would just be another pretty layer on top of the same crap.

My battle kit

Once I had that clearer, the next step was to stop looking for one tool that did everything. That was one of the mistakes I repeated the most: trying to put thinking, time, tasks, memory, and review in the same box, as if having everything together would make everything clearer. It did not. Everything ended up very tidy and very pretty at first glance, but underneath my head was still a mess and, worse, it was incredibly hard to maintain over time.

My notebook is my first tool and the simplest one. Right after I wake up, that is where I map out my day. On paper I can sort through my thoughts better, I go slower, and I notice sooner when an idea makes sense and when I am just bouncing stuff around.

Every day I set a minimum for each of my three personalities. Something small, even ridiculous if needed, but doable even on a bad day. That helps me not break the thread and not fall into that trap of thinking that if the day is not perfect then nothing counts, because even if I only do a little, I am still moving forward. I do not write these minimums down, they are fixed things I count as progress.

• Architect: write a note, sketch a component, comment some code, organize a few files...
• Athlete: go out for a few steps, do some squats, some push-ups...
• Disciplined: do the other two personalities, write the day dump...

But besides those minimums, I also set goals by personality. Not random tasks, but the important goal of the day on each front. Minimums are there to not break the thread. Goals, on the other hand, are there to give the day direction.

Then Google Tasks comes in first, and after that Google Calendar. Tasks is for the concrete tasks of the day: send a package, talk to someone, run an errand, clean something... Things I need to do, but can execute at any moment or gap in the day. Then Google Calendar comes in. That is where the immovable stuff goes, what has to live in a specific time block: my work schedule, gym slots, padel matches, doctor appointments, meetings... Separating this helps me a ton: first I distill what I need to do into tasks, then I look at the day in the calendar and see whether I still need to fit something in.

At night, before dinner, Obsidian and my Second Brain come into play. Here I close the day, a raw dump of everything I did, in my own words, so I can see my wins more clearly, my mistakes, what repeats, and what is still pending. I do not use it as an agenda or task list. I use it as memory and map. As the place where things are not just stored, but start connecting to each other. I could say a lot more about this, but that is a whole other article.

And lastly, but not least, right before sleeping (or before I start reading), I go back to my notebook. There I check the goals I set in the morning and write down the tasks and things I want to do the next day, exactly so I do not go to bed with all that spinning in my head and so I wake up with more clarity. If I do not do that, I go to bed with tomorrow already sitting on my chest.

The important thing is not organizing everything, but living with less noise

And I say this because little by little I have become a bit of an organization obsessive, and I have to slow myself down to get back on track. That is why I have been building all this, not just to be more productive or to feel like I am now some ultra-optimized version of myself. I built it to live with less noise, more clarity, and less friction between who I want to be and what I do every day. Which is not nothing. Because if getting better organized only served to pack my day even more, honestly, what a load of crap.

I am also very clear that the more I try to digitize everything and stay more connected, the worse I think. The more I mix rest, capture, work, and review in the same gadget and almost in the same gesture, the worse I disconnect. That is why I think disconnection is not separate from the system, it is part of the system itself. Paper helps me think and focus for real. The daily close helps me let go of weight. The separation between tools helps me avoid having my head stuck all day in the same digital ass.

I am not saying I found a perfect system, and I do not believe much in that idea anyway. But what I do feel is that I finally have something that truly adapts to me. One where my three main personalities do not compete so much with each other, where each tool has a concrete function, and where organizing myself looks less like building a pretty prison and more like something that does not feel like a drag and that I actually want to do.

By itself it has not fixed my life, but it has definitely removed a huge amount of noise and made me enjoy it way more. I do not know if it will take me exactly where I want to go or how long it will take, but now I am moving with much more clarity and much less noise. And that already changes the whole movie for me.