How to Think in Systems: Why Goals Fail and Systems Win (TPS595)

Welcome to The Productivity Show, a podcast where we believe that people like you can get the important things done without sacrificing your health, family, and things that matter to you. If it's your first time listening, welcome to the show. I'm Tam, founder of Asian Efficiency where we help people become more productive at work and in life, and I do this podcast together with my co host, Brooks Duncan. How are you today, Brooks? I'm good, but this is the, this is the world we live in now. Yesterday so we always talk about the Logitech MX Master mice that both of us really like. I have mine totally tricked out with all these sorts of controls. Well, Logitech all of a sudden had this, like, massive system failure, and turns out that all of these features we all like rely on the software being able to connect to their servers. So everybody who uses a Logitech MX Master mouse with customizations, it all died. So I was thinking to myself, how did I get myself in this situation where I need my mouse to be connected to the Internet? But this is the world we live in. Turns out a developer forgot to renew a certificate is what happened. But anyway, this is the world we live in now. Even our mice are connected to the Internet. That's so funny. We we had a similar issue a while ago for people who don't know. So we record this and we use a particular software called Descript to kinda edit the show. And for whatever reason, a few weeks ago, somebody forgot to renew some sort of domain name. And so we couldn't log in to record the episode because it's all done online. And, yeah, just make sure you treat and value everything that was going on a little bit more after you run into an incident when you realize, like, hey, we rely so much on this stuff to get things done and moving forward. Like, if AWS goes out, we just go, oh my gosh, half the Internet is done. Like, there's nothing going on. Global productivity is taking a dip. Right? Chat GPT is down for two hours and everyone's screaming on x and, you know, the world is coming to an end. So it's the world that we live in today and there's a lot of interconnected systems. And funny enough, today's topic is all about systems. We're gonna be talking about thinking in systems and how you can approach your productivity, how you get stuff done, your life in terms of systems thinking. So we're gonna talk about, like, goal setting and how you can reframe it and turn turn that into systems. We're gonna talk about different ways you can implement different systems and how we think about also system building. And before we start diving in, we always like to share our top three favorite resources. So, Brooks, what are …