Systems: Awareness
Understand what personal systems are, what's possible, and where you stand. About 15 minutes.
Personal systems are the tools, automations, and workflows you build to handle recurring tasks and manage information. They are the infrastructure that lets you spend your attention on decisions and creative work rather than on logistics.
94% of employees regularly perform repetitive tasks that consume significant time, and around 54% believe automation could save them more than 5 hours per week. Workflow automation can reduce repetitive tasks by 60 – 95%, saving up to 77% of time on routine activities.
Without intentional systems, approximately 70% of projects fall short of their goals in timely delivery, budget, or scope. Teams that prioritise tasks effectively are 1.4 times more likely to outperform their peers.
The gap compounds over time. Systematic approaches accumulate benefits whilst ad hoc approaches accumulate costs. The best systems are invisible – they are obvious only in their absence, working quietly in the background so you can focus on what actually matters.
People pursue systems for different reasons. This site scores every systems intervention across three core values. Later, you'll set your own weighting across these three values, and the site will rank interventions by how well they deliver on the things you actually care about.
Power
Maximising what your personal systems can do – automation depth, feature richness, customisation, and the ability to handle complex workflows and edge cases. People who prioritise this value invest significant time building systems that save large amounts of time once complete, accepting complexity as a worthwhile cost.
Simplicity
Keeping personal systems as minimal, intuitive, and easy to understand as possible. Using fewer tools, avoiding over-engineering, choosing solutions that require no documentation to use, and preferring manual processes over complex automations that might break. People who prioritise this value believe the best system is one you actually use consistently, and that complexity is the enemy of sustained adoption.
Reliability
Ensuring your systems work consistently and fail gracefully, with minimal unplanned maintenance or debugging. Choosing proven tools over cutting-edge ones, building in redundancy, testing automations before depending on them, and designing systems that degrade gracefully when something breaks. People who prioritise this value accept less capability or more manual work in exchange for systems they can trust.
The Top 0.1% band represents roughly 1 in 1,000 people. To give you a sense of what that looks like for each systems value:
Chuck Keith (NetworkChuck) is a network engineer and content creator who has built comprehensive personal infrastructure including self-hosted servers, automated backups, network monitoring, smart home integrations, and custom dashboards that manage nearly every aspect of his digital life. He documents these builds publicly, demonstrating systems that handle complex conditional logic across personal and professional domains whilst remaining maintainable by a single person.
Derek Sivers is a programmer, author, and former founder of CD Baby (which he sold for $22 million). He runs his entire life from a small set of plain-text files, a custom-built personal database, and minimal tooling he wrote himself. His systems handle contacts, projects, finances, and media – all designed to be so simple that they survive moves between countries and decades of use without needing redesign.
Scott Hanselman is a software engineer, podcaster, and speaker who has maintained the same core personal productivity systems for over 20 years. He has published extensively about his setup, which prioritises proven tools, redundant backups, and graceful degradation. His systems have survived multiple job changes, technology migrations, and a Type 1 diabetes diagnosis that required integrating medical device data into his daily workflow without disrupting everything else.
Awareness means knowing your starting point. Answer each question below – some you might know off the top of your head, others might take a few minutes to reflect on.
Power
Simplicity
Reliability
Your estimated position
Percentiles are estimates based on published data on personal systems and automation adoption among adults. All items in this area are scored.
You now understand why systems matter, what different people get out of them, what's achievable, and where you currently stand. The final step is to set your personal value weightings and see which interventions are the best fit for you.
On the interventions page, adjust the sliders to reflect how much you care about power, simplicity, and reliability. The table will re-rank interventions to match your priorities.
Awareness assessment complete
You've built your foundation in Systems. Your self-assessment and value weightings are saved.
View Your Interventions