Well, it’s finally time my friends!

After marinating in my own ideas, building my own systems, and generally feeling like an increasingly self-actualized guinea pig for the past 10 years I’m finally ready to start putting my thoughts out into the world. So welcome to curiOS, my newsletter where I’ll be diving into:

• The intersection of wellness and productivity

• How to build systems that work for your life

• Sparkly things intriguing me from the worlds of personal development, knowledge management, productivity, wellness and beyond.

So why now? Well, the boringly common combination of overthinking everything, believing that I had nothing original to say, and doubting whether anyone else shared my interests led me to 10 years of consuming other people’s content in silence and isolation. I was the definition of a fly on the wall in online spaces, but if you know me in person you know there’s nothing that brings me greater joy than talking about whatever system and tool has my current affections (seriously, if you see me, ask me about my Notion clothing database). Then, Anne-Laure Le Cunff of Ness Labs held a meetup in NYC and all of a sudden I was in a room full of people who cared about the same things I did! Seeing really is believing, and after passionate conversations about tools like Readwise and Snipd, hearing about other people’s personal projects, and connecting with so many people I decided it was time. Time to take myself off the back burner, put myself out there, and press publish! So here we are, the first issue of my bi-weekly newsletter on building systems for living well, published every other Tuesday. Now that the introduction is over, let’s dive in.

Peak productivity

All this productivity, but to what end? Often it feels like we are doing productivity for the sake of productivity; we find ourselves trapped on a hamster wheel scrabbling to make every aspect of our lives more efficient so that we have more time and then we fill that time with more things to do and the vicious cycle continues with no pause for us to really ask “what is all this for?’” It’s not surprising that this is how productivity feels; we’ve taken a concept that’s evolved in the context of economics and have applied in to ourselves as individuals. So how do we take this highly industrial concept and bring some humanity into it? We center wellness! When wellness becomes foundational to productivity—when we view it as something that tracks alongside every step of the productivity cycle instead of something that is waiting at the end like a magical pot of gold—then the hamster wheel evolves into a hamster ball. No longer spinning around a single point in perpetuity, we can move our hamster ball in any direction we want, pivoting with the speed our dexterous paws afford us and using our senses to guide us deeper into known adventures or whisk us off to new ones.

I’m not the first person to say that there is a connection between wellness and productivity; it’s being talked about more and more. But I’ve noticed that the emphasis is largely on productivity first with wellbeing practices being brought in later, mostly as a way to avoid burnout and stay productive. What if we turned this on it’s head? Wellbeing should be the precursor to productivity, and if we shift towards a mindset of intentionality and self-reflection then we can harness the power of productivity strategies and techniques to make sure that we are outputting the things that we think are valuable for ourselves and our communities.

Bringing our little hamster back into it for a second, productivity can easily feel like I’m just jamming more seeds, cereals, and fruits into my cheek pouches just for the sake of it. With all those different flavours and textures jammed in there it’s easy to forget about the importance of each individual component; we literally can’t see the forest for the trees, or in this case we can’t taste the strawberries because of the Cheerios and sunflower seeds. But if instead we lead the loop with wellbeing, and the productivity follows, then we can be considerate about what we are stuffing into our cheeks and leave more room for the things that bring us joy. Of course this means that we actually have to figure out what brings us joy. If I’m no longer using productivity as an excuse to stay busy, what do I want to with the time that productivity allows me to free up? Do I want to connect more with people, pursue my creative passions, or involve myself deeper in my community? It takes building another skill to figure that out: self-reflection. Learning to do this is essential to designing a life that works for you.

This is just the tip of the iceberg—self-reflection is a big topic that we will explore more in the next issue. I want this newsletter to be a conversation between us, and spark conversations within and around you. It’s not going to be a bunch of “5 Ways to be Awesome, Fix your Life, and Love Every Minute” articles. My goal is to talk you through my own processes for building systems and routines; to discuss the decisions that I’ve made and the tactics I’ve tried. I’m going to lay bare my own process for how I’ve built my systems so that you can learn not only things you can try, but you can also develop your own self-reflection skills that will help you in your process of building and testing your own system. My system won’t work 100% for you, yours won’t work 100% for me, and most importantly no system works 100% of the time. Like everything else in life, systems need to evolve and adapt to our changing needs, there is no silver bullet.

To get started on bulking up that self-reflection muscle, take 10 minutes this week, grab a glass of something refreshing, your favourite way to write things down, and find a cozy spot because I’ve got a journalling prompt for you: think back on the last week and ask yourself ‘what 5 things, big or small, brought me the most joy?’

Now go pet a dog,
xx Alex