The Weekly Circle #38
Welcome to the thirty-eighth episode of The Weekly Circle! A free Circles in Time post released every Sunday.
Hey everybody,
I’m thinking very carefully about the next step for Circles in Time at the moment.
What I am gravitating towards is the idea, that at its core, what the Circles in Time initiative is fundamentally about is freedom.
What do I mean by freedom?
My programmes, community conversations, and research have unearthed a set of modern struggles that are keeping individuals locked into systems that constrain their ability to create the space necessary for playful exploration, inquiry, reflection, and the intrinsically driven creation that is so fundamental to a fulfilling life.
Here are 12 modern struggles:
Addiction to optimisation for its own sake
Attachment to busy-ness as a signal of value
Abundance-induced overwhelm
Distrust in the existing arbiters of truth
Easy access to cheap dopamine stimulation
Unstable and shifting models of desire
Excessive levels of social comparison
Increasingly complex financial instruments
Capital-driven movement away from group dependencies
A world of work that is changing at an accelerating pace
Motivated environments permeating all aspects of our lives
Increasingly effective attention merchants
These struggles are pushing all of us to the edge of our cognitive carrying capacity.
It’s tough. And a hard truth is that part of ourselves have become so attached to these struggles, so familiar, that it feels uncomfortable to try to resolve them.
And once we have resolved these struggles? Then what? What will we do with the freedom we have created for ourselves?
Most of us would rather stay cocooned in the struggles we are familiar with than deal with the unfamiliarity on the other side of them.
Fortunately, I have been exposed to many people who have become aware of these struggles and the consequences. I’m also seeing people start to delve into the uncomfortable messiness of the freedom they are creating for themselves and generating truly inspiring transformations.
A More Sincere Value Proposition. A Much Harder Sell.
What I am saying here is that I recognise the value proposition for Circles in Time going forward is going to be a much harder sell.
Selling better habits, self-improvement, incremental optimisation, and personal development would be much easier. Yet, to be honest, I can’t do that. It just feels short-sighted and insincere. These concepts are sexy, catchy and trendy, but they offer no substance on their own.
Why do you want better habits? What aspects of yourself do you want to improve and why? Are you just optimising your systems for the sake of optimisation, or are there meaningful consequences? What are you developing towards?
Perhaps you just enjoy the challenge of self-improvement—optimisation for optimisation’s sake. Unfortunately, if that is the case, Circles in Time may resonate with you less and less over time.
A Structured Approach to Personal System Building
The initiative will still help its members build effective personal systems. Unlike the prior version, however, the sorts of systems, system functions, and constraints will be predefined as opposed to open-ended.
These systems will be essential but not exceptional. You will not achieve any level of mastery or significant expertise by putting these systems in place. Their role is to take care of your ‘behavioural utilities’—the functions that are necessary for increasing your ‘capacity surface area’ (freedom in a day x years of freedom).
This is done by building systems that are:
Essential (necessary utilities for capacity creation)
Effective (highest leverage versions of these utilities)
Efficient (don’t use more resources than are needed)
Endless (recurring and resilient over the long run)
Enough (don't do more than is necessary)
The behavioural utilities will cover four essential activity domains for sustaining a high level of capacity over the long run.
Physical (sleep, exercise, diet, breath, posture, stretch work)
Attentional (distraction, procrastination, deep work, remote management)
Financial (spending, saving, downside risk management, investing)
Wellbeing (expectations, gratitude, social connection, meditation, reframes)
The intention here is to partner with experts within each of these domains and co-develop four cohort-based programmes to run over the course of a year, covering one domain a quarter. The key output will be a systems blueprint for each domain, followed by a gradual implementation exercise that transitions the individual from their current systems stack to the ones they’ve mapped out in their blueprints.
As you can see, I am very early in my thinking here and would appreciate all the feedback I can get. If you have any thoughts or questions please do share them.
SOMETHING TO PART WITH
Until next week,
Take care,
David