Bottom Up Versus Top Down Systems

Over and over, I’ve tried to adopt a whole system for organizing my life. Over and over, I have given up on those systems. Those top-down systems, where I start with a whole system that was usually created by someone else, tend to impose structure that doesn’t work for me.

While bottom-up systems, systems that didn’t start out as systems, but rather as small everyday practices that eventually grew into whole systems, tend to stick. They grow out of my life, they shape themselves around my life, instead of me trying to jam my life into a system that someone else created.