Systems to support intentional living

We exist in a world governed by chaos. We don't get to choose the things that happen to us, and oftentimes life comes barging at us with no warning. We face curveballs, sickness, trauma and grief, but as human beings we are resilient and we go with the flow.

For the majority of my life, I have been swept along by the current of time without truly breaking free of the surface of experience to take a breath and readjust. Most people live their lives like this. Yes, I have journaled, and yes, I have done weekly, monthly and annual reviews. I have made plans, I have curated goals. I have built complicated digital systems that were meant to support my day-to-day but never felt right. I have kept a daily diary for most of my life. But these things, while individually valuable, only make up small pieces of a larger whole that lets us truly take a step back while taking a step inwards.

I decided that I don't want to spend the rest of my life sleep-walking through existence. I was pleasantly surprised and felt very seen when I expressed this to Beth and she told me she felt similarly. We decided that we wanted to intentionally live moment to moment, absorb our lives to the fullest, and use our documented experiences to make informed decisions about our futures. Over the course of our many chats and phone calls, we realised we had accidentally (but with lots of intention) designed a philosophical map of ideas that does just this, and so, so much more.

How this project started

This project is very much a labour of love, and is born from an ongoing process of joint self- discovery. Beth and I have been building this system alongside building our friendship, which has been a truly unique experience. We have learnt so much from and about each other over the countless hours of sharing ideas and discussing our life philosophies. Turns out, we both want the same things;

• to help us remember things and experiences that are important to us to help us make meaning from chaos

• to help us stay grounded through experience (and subsequently grounded in our day-to-day lives)

• to place ourselves in history

• to help us follow our curiosities, freely dive down rabbit holes, and engage more fully with the world around us

• To learn from the past and use that knowledge to act with intention in the present 

The project

Project title pending

Our goal with this project is to help you create systems that support intentional living.

We want to give you the tools to build systems that take the individual elements of existing life- documenting practices you might have (like note taking, journaling, writing, planning, list- making, researching, etc.) and use them to build a system that holds and supports you throughout the entirety of your life, that grows and adapts to you and your needs. We're interested in digital phenomenology and how (largely) digital systems can help us navigate our subjective human experiences. There is a lot of work about digital phenomenology in online spaces, but we're considering the personal side, through personal systems. In reality, these systems can't be one-size-fits-all, rigid frameworks that work out of the box. While that might be the easiest path to take, it certainly isn't the most rewarding one.

Over the course of our discussions, Beth and I have built a tangible system based on life philosophy, and our set of values. Rather than building a philosophy to fit a system, we have opted to go the other way around. We started with sharing and solidifying our philosophical ideas, which then allowed us clarity in designing our systems. It's interesting, as we will share, that while Beth and I started building our systems together, using the principles we discovered, our systems look different. There are overlapping elements (hello, Capacities, howdy, Raycast), but we have also adapted our individual systems to be unique to us, while staying true to the life practice and life philosophy we created together.

We have designed these ideas to be like a menu; you can take what resonates and leave what doesn’t. The systems you build on the back of these ideas and this philosophy will be completely unique to you; as they should be. We truly believe that the systems you build for yourself will be the ones that can follow you throughout the course of your life, and adapt to your needs as you grow. Personal, tailored systems don’t necessarily mean complicated or simple ones; they just mean systems that reflect your needs. 

Who this is for

This is for anyone. Genuinely. There is no set criteria you have to meet in order to benefit from our work. You don't have to be a knowledge worker, or a tech bro. You don't have to know what PKM means (as upon reflection, PKM doesn't really mean anything - but more on this later). You can be a mother, a teacher, a student, a lawyer, an engineer, an artist, a baker. Whatever. Your life as it is now is a perfect starting point.

As long as you are wanting to make more meaning from your experiences, and you're looking for digital and philosophical ideas that support that, you're in the right place.

So, what next?

Over the course of the next coming weeks and months, Beth and I will slowly start sharing our discoveries. This project is deeply personal to us, and is entirely enmeshed in the core of who we are as people. Sharing feels vulnerable, and hard. As such, we aren't limiting ourselves to a timeline or deadline in which to share. We want everything we share to be the best it can be, which is hard when we are still solidifying some ideas that feel fragile and raw.

But we can promise that what we do share, whenever we do, will be good. We trust in our ideas, and in our excellence, and over time we hope that you can come to trust in them too.