For as long as I can remember, I’ve been trying to build a productivity model that can wrangle everything I’m preoccupied with at any given moment: health, travel, career, relationships, and so on.
I’ve tried Evernote, Wunderlist, paper planners and Obsidian daily notes, and have considered countless other apps. Nothing stuck. Nothing met me where I was. I also hesitate to hand over parts of my life to companies that can change how they use and store my data.
What I need is a single pane of glass into my life, on infrastructure that I own, that helps me:
- recall what I already know and have done so I can be better informed about what to do next
- track progress so I can manage my life better based on the data
- absorb new information easily so I can keep up with the ever-changing world around me
I haven’t found an all-in-one solution that fits my needs. But over the years, I’ve developed a note-taking standard that I now want to grow into a more robust system. I call it OrionOs. It’s a loose implementation of GTD and PARA, and it has been especially helpful for planning travel, navigating my career, and tracking projects at work.
The three Jobs OrionOs exists to do are defined in the North Star.
Doc map
| Doc | Serves | Status |
|---|---|---|
| North Star | — | Reference |
| Retrieval Layer | Job A | Proceed |
| Metrics Status and Tracking | Job B (current focus) | Proceed |
| Mobile Requirements | Principle 5, later O-B | Parked |
| Capacity Layer | Kernel capacity layer, gated on S8 | Parked |