l1f3 management ontology

#project #🌿 #l1f3 #alchemy #design #lifemanagement #lifedesign #methodology #framework

about

when i was 15 years old, i started constantly asking myself - what is an "optimal" or "better" way to manage my life? what would that look like?

this question has several philosophical layers leading to very practical consequences. lots of people have explored this coming from the field of personal knowledge management (as i share my major influences below), but most of them come from conventional western-centric, modern worldviews.

over time i learned that it must include several elements - from practical tools and practices, to clarified principles, heuristics, mental models, to algorithms, systems and design patterns.

i started this investigation in 2015 by attempting to implement principles, heuristics and mental models from references like farnam street, wait but why and tim ferriss, and most structured of them all, the last safe investment's S.A.F.E. plan into systems and frameworks such as david allen's getting things done, zettelkasten, leo babauta's zen to done, taylor pearson's purposeful productivity. (this was before many contemporary "business gurus" such as naval ravikant, andrew huberman, lex fridman and others have risen in popular culture.)

this evolved through my own work in 2018 when i was learning/working with gabriel goffi and later on when i dove into tiago forte's BASB (building a second brain), august bradley's pillars, pipelines & vaults, nick milo's LYT, zsolt vicziΓ‘n's visual knowledge management system.

deeper than that, there are several knowledge design frameworks and patterns,

now, these were still very much in the personal knowledge management space. once again integrating insights from other disciplines,

at the basis of it all lies ken wilber's work on the integral OS. in 2022 my vision collided with Γ­sis schuarts (l1f3 manager), drinking inspiration from ancestral orientation devices such as the i-ching, mahalila, tarot, several mindvalley elements such as the lifebook, for different modules.

a bunch of game interfaces/design patterns, frameworks such as rodrigo arantes' a jogada, jamie combs' fourgames.

finally, integrating all of these references, around 2022 i started to have glimpses of a "life management methodology" that integrated all of these learnings.

tiago forte and anne-laure le cunff (two influential people in the field) have flirted with metamodern ideas, as shared in anne-laure's An introduction to metamodernism: the cultural philosophy of the digital age and tiago's numerous accounts of his transformative experiences. but they're still mostly centered in a rationalist perspective for navigating life.

while going through all that, i kept constantly questioning myself:

what are or "should be" the design primitives of life management?
what are the fundamental ways in which we see, relate to and engage with reality?
what are the fundamental tools that we use to do so?

instead of assuming a bunch of premises widely accepted in modern culture (and just "get on with these simple productivity apps/tricks"), this inquiry clearly came from an inner place of strong dissonance - what's being talked about in media, how "normal lives" are being lived feels off. that's not what i believe in and want for my life.

so this necessarily crosses into deeper metaphysical, epistemological, ontological, axiological territory. the metacrisis distinctions gave me a vocabulary to talk about that.

yet, i didn't want to get esoteric. i wanted it to work for other people too. so my inquiry remained: how can i create something that is grounded in reality, that is systemic, modular, non-dogmatic, interoperable, fully extensible, customizable and regenerative by design?

very wordy and challenging, yes. but necessary nonetheless.

i wanted it to be minimally opinionated, yet i found this regenerative frame to be a key difference between meaninglessness and unconsciously damaging behaviors to ways of living that are more conscious and life-affirming, so i opted to keep it.

as it's intended to be modular, the ontology of the framework itself is under constant development, but the initial core principles/structures are set in place.

the L1F3 framework

it consists of:

a set of maps of content, structured under the fourgames framework, that is in a sense, similar to GTD's 6 horizons of focus.

🟣 deep game:

πŸ”Ή long game:

🟩 mid game:

πŸ”΄πŸŸ πŸŸ‘ short game:

inspired by the OODA loop, i also created a few spaces to visualize/understand/improve meta-cognitive processes:

inspired by the fourgames framework, there are also pages categorized according to the descriptions of their games:

🟣 deep game:

πŸ”Ή long game:

🟩 mid game:

πŸ”΄πŸŸ πŸŸ‘ short game:

and finally, inspired by solo leveling/nanomachine's player system and sword art online's yui/iron man's jarvis, i created the L1F3 player toolkit - i.e. a toolbox for playing life in more conscious, effective, collaborative, fun and purposeful ways.