My new Home Screen Wallpaper (and a framework for approaching big-picture life goals)

Over the years I have developed a certain way of thinking about my life and high-level goals, a general framework that I use to organize/optimize everything I care about in life in a comprehensive and flexible way. It really helped me to figure out what I want out of life, and to strategically pursue it.

This is very personal stuff, and this post is my first attempt to describe it. Not everything will make sense to you, but I hope that you will find it interesting, and extract some general ideas that may help you come up with your own framework for organizing and pursuing life goals.

I think about my life on four levels abstraction:

• Values and drives
• “Lanes”
• Projects (Goals)
• Habits

Values and Drives

Values are the highest-level desires I want to optimize for, the most abstract metrics I want to maximize:

• I want to be clever and creative.
• I want to learn things.
• I want to generate value with my mind and be good at it.
• I want to pursue the path to mastery at my craft.
• I want to do it as well and for as long as possible (without health/money/other problems getting in my way).

Drives are other, less abstract things I want to have in life and am trying to optimize for:

• I want to have fun, engaging, and meaningful work.
• I want to be rich, healthy, safe, free.
• I want to be good at writing and comedy (just because I love them and want to max out my skills).
• I want to be good at teaching.
• I want to make impact.
• etc.

Lanes

Lanes are the general areas I focus on in order to pursue (maximize) my values and drives. I think of values/drives as a compass pointing me in the direction I want to walk towards, and lanes are the different paths I can take.

What I want is to have the fewest number of lanes that are as effective at satisfying as many of my values/drives as possible. It’s a matter of balance, too many lanes would make me unfocused and distracted, and too few can’t cover everything I care about in life.

I organize my lanes using draw.io app, it’s a constantly evolving document. I keep continuously tweaking and rearranging my lanes as I learn more about life, myself, and ways to approach my goals. It’s current version looks like this:

• Startup is the most efficient way for me to maximize my creativity, have fun/engaging/meaningful work, generate value, make money, and impact the world.
• Being good at comedy is something I really want, and deeply enjoy for the sake of itself. It has to be a separate lane because no other lane can take care of this drive.
• Learning all I can about Artificial Intelligence is a way for me to satisfy my curiosity, and potentially contribute to the most meaningful, significant, impactful thing a human being can contribute to (in my opinion).
• Writing, like comedy, is something I value for the sake of itself. It satisfies my curiosity, drive for teaching, self expression, etc.
• Lifestyle is everything related to taking care of my heatlh and general well being. Mainly, it includes staying on top of my clean diet, exercise, controlling my caffeine/nootropics addiction, improving my sleep. And also, keeping up with what I call “Info diet” — staying away from HN/Reddit and other social media, spending more time reading and less time refreshing social feeds.

Projects

Projects are the goals I pursue in order to move further down the lanes. If values are the compass, and lanes are the available paths, then projects are like milestones I’m walking towards right now. As you can see in the picture above, they’re separated into the ones of the highest priority that I pursue actively(the ones in blue color), and the alternatives that I consider, but don’t actively work on(grayed-out ones).

Just like with lanes, I actively tweak and rearrange the projects. As I complete my goals, or find more optimal ones, I tweak them so that the most important goals are staying at the top, and the old ones are removed off the board.

Since you won’t understand what each of the goals means based on the picture, I’ll describe the current active goals the best I can.

• Under Webdev/Startup, the goal number one is to complete the courses I’m currently going through so that I would have competent, complete understanding of React/Redux (which I use to build my startup). The goal number two is to develop features for my startup called Nulis.
• Under Comedy, my goal is simply to get used to consistently posting the jokes I’m writing on twitter, every day.
• For AI, my first goal is to complete a Machine Learning Mastery book about Deep Learning, and then go through the fast.ai Deep Learning course, to gain a solid fundamental understanding of this field.
• For writing, I want to keep writing my blog posts, and take well-written private notes about the things I’m learning about AI.
• For lifestyle, my goal is to get through 1.5-months-long withdrawal from caffeine and nootropics(at most 4 packs of green tea per day, at most 2.5mg of noopept). My second goal is to stay on top of my info diet(avoiding HN and Reddit as much as possible, except for the times I’ve decided it’s okay). I’m pretty happy with my diet/exercise at the moment, so I’m keeping them the same.

Habits

To continue with my metaphor (values are a compass, lanes are the available paths, projects are milestones), habits are like the engine — a set of things I do every day that take me at least one step further towards my goals, on every lane.

I’ve developed an app that helps me to track my habits, and currently they look like this:

Checkmarks represent the basic, minimal level of success, and thumbs-up icons represent more significant progress(read more about how it works here).

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  **Food**For a checkmark I need to keep up my clean diet, and drink less than 3 cups of coffee. For a thumbsup, I gotta limit caffeine consumption to no more than 4 packs of green tea.

• 
  

  **Info diet**For a checkmark I need to avoid visiting HN/Reddit/YouTube subscriptions, and limit my news consumption to an RSS feed. For a thumbsup, I need to completely avoid internet and TV until the very end of the day.

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  **Sport**For a checkmark I complete the most minimal basic exercises, for a thumbsup I go for a good long run around the lake.

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  **AI**Checkmark — reading the books and watching video lectures, Thumbsup — writing actual code.

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  **Webdev**Checkmark — watch Udemy videos, Thumbsup — implement features for my startups.

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  ComedyCheckmark — write at least 4 jokes,Thumbsup — post good ones on twitter.

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  WritingCheckmark — write Quora answers, insightful HN comments, or well-written AI-notes,Thumbsup — write good articles for my blog.

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  ReadingCheckmark — listen to audiobooks,thumbsup — read actual books (I need to read some stuff not available on audible).

Conclusion

I’m sure this framework will change and improve over time, and I will get better at using it. Meanwhile, it has really helped me to achieve clarity about the things I want out of life, and the paths I can take to get there. I was very hard to figure out and follow at first, but every time I look back over the past several months, I’m surprised at how much progress it has helped me to make.

I have no idea if this made any sense to you guys, but I hope that at least someone will find it useful. This is my solution to finding a purpose and direction in life, and if you’re struggling with something like that, I hope this will help you out.

If you’re have found this post useful/interesting, or perhaps have any feedback or questions — feel free to shoot me an email to [email protected].