Let me introduce myself. My name is Semyon Kolosov. I will briefly tell my story so that it will become clear who I am and why I wrote this book. I live in Moscow and work at red_mad_robot. I started my career in the company as a manager, then worked as an operating director in a design laboratory and now I work at Verno by red_mad_robot in the same position. We are engaged in solving business problems through consulting and training. I have a wife, a child, an apartment, an iPhone and photos from traveling on social media. It wasn’t always like that. I was born and grew up in the small town of Novogrodovka. It is located in the east of Ukraine and has a population of 14 thousand people. My dad is a retired miner, and my mom works in the Department of Social Protection of the population. In 2006, I graduated from high school and went to Donetsk to study as a computer systems engineer at Donetsk National Technical University. In 2011, I graduated and started working. I worked as a system administrator in an auto repair shop, then provided the Internet to apartments. In 2012, I got a job as a filling machine operator at a plant for the production of infusion solutions. My future wife and I rented an apartment on the outskirts of Donetsk. She worked for an insurance company, and I had night shifts at the factory. Then a more or less stable and adult life began.

This went on for 1.5 years. Even before that, my life began to resemble Groundhog Day, and I was thinking about drastic changes. I wanted to move somewhere to completely change the situation to a more promising one. I even started to develop a relocation plan. And I mean a serious structural plan, not just a set of abstract steps. To do this, I started studying planning, which led me to the topics of time management, goal setting, thinking, risk management and etc. But there will be no beautiful story of how I ran from war to the great success. Although the aggravation of the situation made its own adjustments, and I had to step into uncertainty faster than I expected. Therefore, I know firsthand what it means to get out of the comfort zone. In 2014, I moved to Moscow. Without citizenship, connections, work experience and skills, I found the job I had always dreamed of. I learned everything myself and now I’m doing what I love in one of the most modern cities in the world. In red_mad_robot, I went from manager to COO. I launched new services, built business processes and was a mentor for managers. Today I participate in the creation of programs for pumping soft skills and building digital practices. Every day I communicate with talented and hardworking people who want to change the world. For 8 years I have been studying management, psychology, the brain and different types of thinking for my own development and training of others.

Over the years, I have built my own life management system, developed by experience and proven in practice. I treat life like a manager always and everywhere. Whether it’s going to a hike or developing a digital service. I have my own system of processes, tools and approaches. I analyzed what influenced my development and what hindered it. I have gathered the most valuable things together and I want to share them with you. This is not a silver bullet, not an authentic idea or rules for a successful life but rather a set of well-known tools grouped into a sequence of processes that provide me with clarity, flexibility, productivity and development. That is, my subjective view and experience on the organization of life. When I communicate with people, and they find out about it, they are divided into two types: some twist their finger at the temple, others ask to teach them to do the same. I am always happy to help people and share my knowledge. In the book, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

About the book

How the idea came about

It all started with the fact that I often began to hear from colleagues and friends: «Semyon, when are you going to write a book?» Where did such questions come from? Firstly, I read quite a lot: I can read several books a month. At work, I am mostly surrounded by people who also read a lot. red_mad_robot has a strong corporate culture that is focused on growth. The company is full of activities for the exchange and generation of knowledge. We often discussed books there. We argued a lot and exchanged opinions. Sometimes my point of view did not coincide with the author of the book, but was welcomed by colleagues during the discussion. Almost always such a discussion ended with a joke that it was time for me to write my own version of the book. Secondly, people often point out that I tell interesting stories. Probably, this allows me to do a broad outlook and life experience. I am only 33 at the time of writing the book, but various events and decisions allowed me to collect a good amount of experience that tested me for strength and pumped my soft skills. Thirdly, I have accumulated a lot of information about the organization of life from incoming sources that I have ever read, watched and listened to as well as the results of my research on this topic, which were transformed into notes, presentations and speeches. I shared them with people, they kept them for themselves and later gave a good feedback.

Thanks to these factors, for the first time I began to think that I had knowledge that could be recorded and shared with people. The idea took root after a dialogue with my friend Yana Djibouti. She said she didn’t have time for anything, although she had no problems with time management. She’s like Richard Branson, only the female version. She has an infinite number of interests, hobbies and projects. I told her about my task management system. She liked it and asked me to teach her. In a couple of phone calls, I explained everything to her, and she began to implement it. After a couple of weeks, she said that it became much easier for her to control everything, and she started to have more time. Although there were still many questions, and not all the tools were involved, the conversation ended with the fact that it would be cool to make a course or write a book on the topic of organizing life. We even came up with a few names. The current title of the book «System Life» was also among them. So, there was an idea. There were a lot of fears and barriers to start, but more on that later. I was also helped by the desire not only to share useful experiences, but also to show that anyone can write a book. So that people who are afraid, waiting for signs, knowledge or status, start sharing knowledge. That it is not necessary to launch rockets, own a multibillion-dollar marketplace or a unicorn startup to make your own or someone else’s life better. I coped with my barriers myself, but I spent a lot of time on it. I hope this book will be a support for you, help you organize your life and start something new.

How to read this book

I wanted to write a book that you can start reading from any chapter. I wanted it to be small, and to have everything you need. So that at any time you can turn to it, get benefits and not read other books. When I started writing, I realized that it was as impossible as to make a project quickly, cheaply and efficiently. This simply cannot happen. Life is not a goal, but a process. System life is an integrated approach in the form of a continuous cycle of six processes: analysis, planning, management, optimization, reflection and training.

The cycle of system life

The content of the approach is so large that it can be endlessly studied and experimented with details. You can even understand it in your own way and create your own approach. I tried to select a sequence of six processes in order to catch on to groups of tools and approaches within each. Each chapter is about a separate process that is interconnected with other processes. If you don’t start reading from the beginning, you won’t understand what’s going on. You will also see references to previous chapters and other books. You can always go back to the previous chapter, but it’s better not to switch to the recommended books right away. Read the book to the end, figure out how the whole approach works. Then you will be able to plan further studying of the materials more effectively for yourself. Otherwise, diving into the details of other books may take you in the wrong direction.

I’ve read a lot of non-fiction books. Somewhere I sighed that it was written beautifully in the book, but it doesn’t work that way in real life, and somewhere I found useful insights. Some motivate, others instruct, others teach life, and others show research. There will be nothing like that in this book. I’m not going to motivate you, teach you life and give a bunch of evidence that it works. I don’t see the point in giving banal advice. Everyone knows that smoking is harmful. If a person is shown studies proving the harm of smoking, then he will agree, he will be sad, but most will not quit. Therefore, I don’t see the point in stuffing the book with hundreds of footnotes that no one reads. My goal is to explain how and what processes need to be started in life in order to build a life management system that I use. To make it easier and more organic. Without a thousand proofs, psychological violence and persuasion. So that motivation starts working naturally, and not under the whiplash.

Having received the template of my approach, you will be able to string all the other knowledge and experience on it. You can attribute almost any book to one of the processes and make a list for pumping it. For the sake of this approach, many details had to be sacrificed. Therefore, we will go through some topics at the top level, and I will show you what other books you need to read to understand them. I made a choice in favor of the overall picture before diving into the details of individual fragments. So, anyone can go from the general to the particular and go deeper where necessary. Such a process seems to me more logical and clearer. At the end, you will receive a list of 60 books that will improve your life and make it more systematic.

It is best to read the book step by step from beginning to end. Mark what you already know and where there are blind spots. You can attach notes, write on pages, highlight text, fold pages and etc. Do everything that will allow you to get more benefit from this book. After reading it, take a fresh look at the approach of system life from above, update the blind spots that need to be worked out first. What processes need to be fixed, what tools can be implemented, what knowledge is missing. After reading it, you will already know what to do next. «Just repeat after me» will not work. Although I think the approach is universal, but when you start using it, it will be yours. It will evolve and adapt over time. The main thing is to understand how it works and not to lose these processes in life. Their launch in any form will have a positive impact on your life. Since the basis of my approach is common sense. And here I tried to collect it not only from my own experience and knowledge, but also from the experience of my friends, colleagues and authors of other books. When you understand the meaning and principle of the approach, you will be able to use any tools and implement new processes for yourself. I want to give you a fishing rod, not a fish. So that you can learn to think in a systematic way and be able to get any fish in any conditions. And understand what needed to be studied and implemented for a bigger catch.

I am not an omniscient teacher; I am an ordinary person who wants to share his experience to save your time and effort. I will be glad to receive any feedback about the book and make my approach even better. I am sure that there are still many approaches and knowledge that I have yet to study with you. It’s easy to find me on social media. So, press like buttons, subscribe to new videos, and let’s go!

Introduction

Perhaps the world is a trash can

into which a burning lighter is thrown…

A. Nikonov

After 2014, two thoughts became ingrained in me. The first is that the world is unstable, and anything can happen. The second – tomorrow may not come. I automatically accepted that there is no safe place anywhere, there are no guarantees, and no one knows what will happen next.

How can this be described? In the 1990s, Stefan Garros, a doctor of behavioral sciences, described an unstable, constantly changing model of combat operations with the concept of VUCA. This acronym combines four concepts: «volatility», «uncertainty», «complexity» and «ambiguity». In the 2000s, this concept gradually moved into the business sphere, and over the last decade we have seen that these four words are a description of our world. People began to understand and accept the VUCA world. Even books and approaches for survival in it began to appear. But the pandemic has made its own adjustments to the level of instability. Today we are dealing with an even more complex world than VUCA. The writer and futurist James Cascio described our world with the abbreviation BANI: «brittle», «anxious», «nonlinear» and «incomprehensible». As soon as we began to get used to the fact that everything was changing quickly, life switched to a new level of complexity. Impermanence has become fragile. Any system can break down, even if it looks reliable at first glance. Uncertainty has given rise to anxiety. The endless stream of changes, information and discoveries drives us into chronic anxiety. No one is sure of the correctness of their decisions and there are no guarantees. Complexity has been enriched by non-linearity. Cause-and-effect relationships stop working. There is no point in predicting the future. Look at what is happening with forecasts in the economy and in politics. The ambiguous became incomprehensible. More and more discoveries are being made that refute many years of knowledge. We’re learning more and more that we actually don’t know anything. The most interesting thing is that you can’t get off our planet. All that’s left for us to do is only to accept that there is no stable world anymore. Outside the window is a stressful and constantly changing world, which tomorrow may be called a new abbreviation. The only way to live is to adapt! Learn to live in a new dynamic system, rebuild the management of life and accept this uncertainty. Such a peace gradually came for everyone. And each person must adapt to their current situation. Everyone should learn how to plan their movement, react to changes and change plans along the way. We all took off on a rocket that is being completed during the flight. Therefore, today it is very important what and how you will do. Today, you can’t forget everything and lie on the couch looking for your destiny for half your life. You can’t go with the flow and think you’re going to be lucky. This approach will throw you overboard very quickly today. Everyone decides for himself: take responsibility for his life or play Russian roulette with uncertainty.

In the current reality, just time management no longer works. A more comprehensive approach is needed. Structural, flexible, selective and conscious.

«The world is not so sunny and friendly. This is a very dangerous, tough place. And if you just give up, it will knock you over with such force that you will not get up anymore. Neither you nor I, no one in the world beats as hard as life. It doesn’t matter at all how you hit, but it matters what kind of punch you hold, how you move forward…»

Rocky Balboa

This book is about such an approach. When you do the right things in an organized way, and do not hold punches that can be avoided. It is written to help you take control of your life as much as possible. It consists of six chapters. Each chapter is devoted to one of the processes that are going into a cycle and help ensure system life. The book is primarily about thinking, not about tools. At first it will seem that there is too much information. But as you read, the design will add up to a single picture. In the end, when you can look at the whole approach, everything will fall into place, systematize and become simple. Each person can set up this way of thinking and follow an understandable path to the result. If you know how to drive, then remember yourself in the first lessons with an instructor. If you don’t know how, then imagine that you are studying. Remember or imagine the same feeling and fear when you don’t know what to grab and where to look, threats seem to be everywhere, and stress turns off your brain. The purpose of this book is to make sure that behind the wheel of your life there is a confident driver who does everything automatically, confidently drives a car and guarantees the safety of himself and passengers on any new route.

Review of the book

Chapter 1. Analysis

Before you start moving, you need to analyze the current situation. In this chapter, we will figure out how to do this, what resources, barriers and opportunities you have. What goals seem important, and how to understand which ones are really important. Let’s analyze self-realization, values, skills, root causes of problems, and what you lack to achieve your goals. When we analyze the current situation, it is important to treat it correctly and tune in to the start. To do this, let’s figure out how motivation works, how to properly prepare and strengthen confidence.

Chapter 2. Planning

When it becomes clear what we have in the current situation, and there is the right attitude, you need to plan your route. This chapter will be about how to set goals correctly and plan their step-by-step achievement. How to prioritize, set tasks and assess risks. Let’s analyze what to do in conditions of uncertainty and how to apply Agile approaches in life.

Chapter 3. Management

When the movement along the route has begun, it is important to manage yourself correctly and use time effectively. In this chapter, we will set up our digital self-organization system. We will analyze the most effective tools and techniques of time management, learn how to make decisions, relax properly and make useful habits.

Chapter 4. Optimization

There will be obstacles, mistakes and time wasters along the way. In this chapter we will talk about how to optimize processes, automate routine, configure tools and space for rational usage of resources. I will share my experience and approaches that allow you to optimize anything.

Chapter 5. Reflection

After each iteration, you need to consciously stop and summarize everything. In this chapter we will talk about the benefits of retrospective reflection. How to properly reflect and draw the right conclusions to improve your path and yourself in the future.

Chapter 6. Training

When you get to this chapter, you will already know what you should learn and in which direction to develop. Here you will learn why learning is just beginning, how to study properly and what skills to develop in order to always be flexible and in demand.

Chapter 1. Analysis

Prologue

Do what you can with what you

have and there where you are…

Theodore Roosevelt

Why do we start with analysis if we can start doing it right away? After all, they shout from every corner: stop thinking, don’t be a coward, take it and do it. They say that all the boundaries are in our head, they advise us to believe and visualize. To answer this question, read two tasks:

1. Two planes were flying at the same speed. One plane was in the air for 2 hours, and the other for 4 hours and flew 1400 km more than the first one. How many km did each plane fly?

2. Imagine that you have come up with a teleport at an affordable price. Anyone can get anywhere in the world instantly. What work do governments need to do because of such changes?

The first task is standard. If you have been studying at school for a long time, then it will even seem like a difficult task for you, but for a student with a portable speaker, it is simple. The main thing is that the problem has a clear «given», accurate input data, there is an exact answer and an algorithm for solving using specific formulas. You take it and decide. The second task is non – standard and abstract. There is not a single correct answer in it. There are many alternatives, components and uncertainties in it. It is immediately unclear how to approach her.

The same about ambitious goal and the whole life. Life is a constant process of replacing some goals with others with increasing complexity. This ensures movement along the path of life without a destination. Growing from goal to goal gives pleasure from this process and makes you happy. There is a starting point «A» (your current situation) and a final point «B» (your goal). When you set yourself a goal and know what you need to do to achieve it, then this is a simple task. You don’t even have to read books for her. You just need to do it. Apply the well-known formula, as in the problem about airplanes. When you set an ambitious goal that you have not previously achieved and do not know how to do it, then this is a complex abstract task. Difficult goals give a strong result. The path to a difficult goal is always working with the future and what you do not know, do not know how, do not expect. Therefore, you can’t just take a step from point «A» to point «B» because you start going with what you have in the current situation. Neither with a case of money, nor with extra hours in the day, nor with someone’s help. Just what you have – and go ahead. Analysis is the starting action in any process that will allow you to build a reliable foundation for a bridge from point «A» to «B». If we do not know how to get to point «B», then this does not mean that we will read the tea leaves and learn to believe in the great success. We will analyze and try to get our «given» in a difficult task. This will help you plan not in a vacuum and build on real data. The main task of the analysis is to understand where we want to go, and what is there for this. Analysis gives awareness and reduces rapid irrational reactions to events. This allows you to plan the shortest route. And also see the possibilities that can simplify and speed it up.

«The main thing in chess is not how many moves ahead you think, but how you analyze the current situation…»

Garry Kasparov

For myself, I have identified important groups of resources and opportunities that are important to analyze at the beginning. These include: the spheres of life, environment, skills, motivation and mindset. I noticed that the changes in these groups began to have a positive effect on my life. And I have also repeatedly seen how problems in these groups prevented people from changing their lives for the better. Then we’ll talk about each group in more detail. Fasten your seat belts, we’re starting.

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System life. How to organize life to cope with uncertainty and achieve results without burnout

Introduction

About the author

About the book

How the idea came about

How to read this book

Introduction

Review of the book

Chapter 1. Analysis

Prologue

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