What motivated me to try it#

I somehow recently accidentally stumbled across the Pillars, Pipelines, and Vaults (PPV) system by August Bradley. In a nutshell, this system is a way to align your daily efforts to the pursuit of goals that contribute to core areas of your life (the pillars). As a husband and the father of a toddler and an infant, the free time that I previously had in excess has been scarce. My routines and schedules were extremely disrupted as I transitioned from my life as a PhD student to working a 9-5 and raising a family (my first child was born exactly one week after my dissertation defense). These routines never truly recovered. As a result, when I do come across some free time I find that I often don’t know what to do with it. I also am guilty of jumping from project to project without focus, leaving things half finished or skills incompletely developed.

I’ve tried a few different methods for improving focus and alignment, but nothing ever really stuck.#

I’ve been learning about the PPV system and have noticed some positive effects already. Primarily around self-reflection, ensuring daily tasks are aligned to what is important, and ensuring that my effort towards things important to me is getting tracked. I’m halfway through the PPV playlist and have started building out my personal PPV system. So far I recommend it. I definitely think that it needs per-user customization as I am not August Bradley, and his priorities won’t directly translate to me. But some of the overarching concepts I find extremely useful:

  • You should define a small set of “pillars” that hold up your life (e.g. career, family, learning, personal projects, etc…)
  • Ensure that your daily actions and goals are aligned to those pillars
  • The action zone concept is fairly genius and has certainly led to improved focus for me.

I, of course, am not actually implementing these systems in Notion directly#

Instead, I found a FOSS alternative called anytype. I tried some other FOSS options like AppFlowy and AFFiNE. AFFiNE struggled from:

  • UI that was cramming in their AI service everywhere, and it couldn’t be disabled.
  • Some concerns about how their telemetry works, see this github issue

AppFlowy was pretty clean but I wasn’t able to get the self-hosted AppFlowy-Cloud setup. I’ve yet to self-host a node for anytype. It uses a P2P protocol to synchronize spaces between devices which seems to make the self-hosting more complex. I plan to upload an additional guide if I find it difficult to set-up.

Conclusion#

If you haven’t heard about PPV, definitely check it out here! It isn’t for everyone, but I’ve seen the benefits already in my limited time using it. I may do a dive into my personal flavor of PPV and how I deviated from the original once it is fully completed. Hopefully this is helpful to someone!