In this post I’m going to outline my approach. First, I’ll provide a positionality statement to give some necessary context. Then I’ll explain how I plan to look at my life as a system and redesign it in a systematic-ish, iterative way.
Positionality
I am approaching this project as a cisgender White woman who is a registered nurse and tenured professor at a comprehensive university in Eastern Canada. I grew up in a lower-middle-class home in a small town in Nova Scotia. My first job was a paper route when I was 10, and I have worked many different jobs since, including as a lifeguard, personal trainer, babysitter, personal support worker, resident assistant, tutor, and lots more. I am the first person in my family to earn a PhD and become a professor.
I am also a mom of three wonderful kids and have spent the majority of my time as a parent without a partner. I have thought a lot about household management and operations, division of labour in caregiving and at home, and, more recently, about coordination and dealing with increasingly complex family logistics.
My “go-to” theory when it comes to understanding work is the Job Demands-Resources model. Very simply, the model looks at the demands people face in their work and the resources they have available to help them manage those demands. I naturally find myself thinking about this outside of work too, because people have a whole life. Work and non-work do not happen in isolation. We have one life, with a finite amount of time, energy, attention, money, space, and other resources, and demands in one area inevitably affect the others.
That is really the starting point for this project.
Looking at my life as a system
I have tried lots of approaches to productivity, organization, minimalism, planning, and household management over the years. Some have been helpful and others, not so much. I really wanted to love Getting Things Done, for example, but I have increasingly realized that I am less interested in becoming better at managing everything than I am in questioning why there is so much to manage in the first place.
I don’t want a better system for efficiently doing unnecessary work – I want to understand where the work is coming from.
So, rather than starting with a list of habits or rules, I want to start by looking at my life as a set of interconnected systems. Home. Clothing and stuff. Food. Health and fitness. Money. Work. Family logistics. Play. Technology. Relationships. The categories may change as I go, but the basic idea is that each area of life has its own tasks, routines, objects, people, decisions, technologies, handoffs, and expectations.
Each of those systems also creates demands. Some are obvious, like money or physical effort spent. Others are less visible: remembering, noticing, planning, deciding, coordinating, searching, following up, keeping track, and switching attention from one thing to another (the mental load).
And, of course, these systems are not separate. What happens in one affects the others.
Mapping before fixing
My first step each month will be to map the area I am looking at before I try to improve it. I want to understand things like:
What actually has to happen?
Who is involved?
What needs to be remembered, decided, bought, stored, maintained, moved, scheduled, or replaced?
Where are the points of friction?
Where am I duplicating effort?
What depends on me noticing something?
What falls apart when I am tired, busy, distracted, or simply having a very normal week?
What resources are already helping?
And, importantly, what is the system actually supposed to accomplish?
That last question matters because the goal is not to make everything as efficient as possible.
Some things are absolutely worth the time, money, effort, or mess they create. Playing with my kids is not inefficient because it takes time. Cooking something I enjoy is not wasteful because there is a faster option. Reading a book does not need to be optimized.
The question is whether the demands are helping produce something I actually value.
Redesigning
Once I understand the system a little better, I’ll look for opportunities to change it. If I were designing this system from scratch today, would I design it this way? If not, how might it be different and better?
I am deliberately not creating a rigid framework for this yet because I don’t know what I am going to learn. Part of the point of the project is to figure out which principles actually hold up across different areas of life.
My current process is something like:
Map → Question → Redesign → Test → Reflect
That is probably as formal as I want it to be for now.
What I am not trying to do
This is not a project about squeezing more productivity out of every hour. It is not about owning the fewest possible things (as a busy working mom having back ups are essential, not optional in my opinion). It is not about having a perfectly organized house that looks like a Martha Stewart photoshoot (love you Martha, but let’s be real).
It is not about using AI to automate every part of life.
And it is definitely not about pretending that every problem can be solved by an individual making better choices.
A lot of the demands people experience are structural (determinants of health). Workplaces, caregiving expectations, cost of living, housing, policies, social norms, available services, and the unequal distribution of unpaid work all shape what is possible. Personal redesign does not make those things disappear.
However, despite the many broader conditions that need attention, I do think there is still value in asking where I have agency and whether the systems I have built, inherited, or simply drifted into are actually serving me.
Coming up Next…
Starting in September, I’m going to choose one area of life each month and look at it closely. The first area is going to be Clothing & Stuff. This is on my mind because I am currently moving and that process always informs you of just how much stuff you have accumulated. My kids are also constantly outgrowing things and needing new things which also makes it a highly salient area for me at this stage of life.
I’ll map how it currently works, identify the demands and resources involved, question what I am doing and why, try some changes, and see what happens.
I expect some of the experiments will work. Some will probably be ridiculous. Some will create entirely new problems. I will share those too.
The point is not to arrive at a perfectly optimized life.
The point is to see whether I can deliberately use fewer resources on the things that do not matter very much, so I have more available for the things that do 🙂
Emily Read, PhD, RN 