Five stages. Ten build phases.

Every system optimizes for something. If you don't name it, it optimizes for busy. Write three short things — in pencil. You'll revisit them, and your AI will read them before it helps you with anything.

From my houseTwo of my filters show up everywhere in this system: love as the filter — if it crowds the people I love, it doesn't ship — and Sundays for being present, away from the tech. Those two lines shaped more of the design than any tool choice.

Vision is too big to act on, and a to-do list is too small to steer by. A macro plan sits in between: three or four year-level themes (big rocks). The 90-day plan pulls from those, and the week pulls from the 90 days. Lean teams call this a hoshin cascade. I call it “every small thing points up.”

The catchball part: each level checks with the one above. If a rock can't name the theme it serves, it goes back up for a rethink.

Borrowed from continuous improvement: five columns that show where your life's work comes from and who it's for. Fill it in once, on one page. It's the map everything else hangs on.

The C column tells you who. This grid tells you what each of them actually needs from you, how often, and how you'll keep them in the loop. It's where “be more present” turns into something you can plan around.

Next: turn each need into something you can check. Voice of the Customer → CTQ ↓

Six Sigma calls this the Voice of the Customer. You write down what people would actually say, find the need underneath, and turn it into a CTQ (critical to quality): a plain, checkable standard for “good.” It's how “be more present” becomes something the system can help with.

One cloud source of truth, three to five lanes inside it, and a rule for the junk drawer. AI is only as good as what it can find.

The Downloads rule is the one people skip and regret: nothing lives in Downloads.

On a Lean shop floor, 5S is why every tool has an outline painted on the wall. The virtual version does the same for files, inboxes and notes, and it's the reason an AI can find anything at all.

One low-friction inbox for thoughts: a wearable, a voice note, a single notes app. Voice beats typing. Whatever you capture should sync somewhere searchable. In CI terms, the capture inbox is your data collection point: if it isn't captured, it can't be triaged, remembered or measured.

A baseline is two ordinary weeks, measured honestly, before you fix anything. The data collection plan says exactly what counts (an operational definition), where the number comes from, and who collects it. Callie's time audit is my baseline for where the hours go.

Two numbers Ari tracks for work actions are a nice first taste: cycle time (an action opened → closed) and carryover (items rolled into next week, the personal version of work-in-progress). They measure how smoothly work moves, not how busy anyone looks. AI timestamps every action, so there's no stopwatch.

See them on the Dashboard →

Lean says go to the gemba: look at the real work, not your memory of it. Here that means a real week of screenshots, inbox and calendar. Walk the daily loop as a value stream, one step at a time, and tag anything that doesn't serve a customer from your SIPOC.

The eight wastes (DOWNTIME), at home

A Pareto chart is a tally sorted biggest first. Usually a few causes make most of the mess. AI does the tally across a month of email in seconds, so you fix the top few instead of everything.

When something slips, the Toyota habit is to ask “why?” until you reach a cause you can actually fix, instead of promising to try harder. A fishbone helps when there are many possible causes: sort them by category first.

The last question before you improve anything: which steps are clock work, which are one-offs, and who decides? This table is the output of the analysis, and the spec for everything in Improve.

Here's how the pieces actually work together — including the unglamorous parts. I talk to one chief of staff. It routes to specialists, who draft and report back. Nothing leaves the house without me.

Standard work is the current best way to do a job, written down: when, what, and how you know it's done. It's what makes the loop reliable on a tired Tuesday. It's also what lets a routine run a step for you, because you can't automate a step you haven't defined.

See all the guardrails, with an FMEA-lite risk list →

Kanban makes work visible by status and caps how much can be in progress. My “Waiting on you” card is a kanban column with a small limit: when it's full, specialists hold new drafts and Ford tells me. Nothing new lands on me until I clear something.

Heijunka means spreading work evenly instead of in spikes. For a week, that's deep work, admin, people time and home tasks spread across the days, so no single day breaks and Sunday stays free. Callie proposes where things fit and flags an overloaded day; she never moves people without my yes.

Narrow lanes, deep context. Start with one specialist (usually email) and add the next only when the first is boring. Each lane gets a RACI row before it gets a single task: specialists can own the work, never the yes.

Everyone has inbox pain, so this is the one to copy first. The goal isn't inbox zero for its own sake. It's a calm inbox — without AI freelancing your relationships.

Lean's A3 puts a whole problem on one page: background, current state, goal, plan, check. The mind map is how I fill it in fast.

Before a big one-off goes to Claude, I spend ten minutes mapping it: the topic in the middle, the questions around it. The branches become the brief's headings, and a good brief is why the session ends with a finish line instead of a new routine.

Control is where most improvement efforts quietly die: the new way slides back to the old way. Classic CI holds the gains with visual management, a control plan and a steady routine of check-ins. AI is what makes that affordable at home, because it does the checking.

A Six Sigma control plan lists each key measure with its normal range, who checks it, the signal that means “act,” and the reaction. It turns the Dashboard from pretty tiles into a system that responds.

Plan, Do, Check, Act: the oldest loop in continuous improvement. Here it runs on the draft-and-hold flow. When I review a draft, what I change, what I cut and what I reject doesn't just vanish. It gets captured and saved as style notes, rules or memory, so the next draft needs less from me.

Kaizen is the same loop at the scale of the system: one small improvement at a time. New routines get a two-week pilot (boring and reliable) before they become clock work.

Step 10, pass it on: teach it to someone. It'll show you what's still fuzzy. In CI terms, this is where the standard becomes a pattern other people can use.