System life. How to organize life to cope with uncertainty and achieve results without burnout
ystem life
How to organize life to cope with uncertainty and achieve results without burnout
Semyon Kolosov
Dedicated to my wife Nastya,
without whom I would never
have dared to write this book…
Translator Anastasiia Maltseva
Illustrator Kamila Udachina
© Semyon Kolosov, 2024
© Anastasiia Maltseva, translation, 2024
© Kamila Udachina, illustrations, 2024
ISBN 978-5-0060-2540-0
Created with Ridero smart publishing system
Introduction
About the author
Let me introduce myself. My name is Semyon Kolosov. I will briefly tell my story so that it will become clear who I am and why I wrote this book. I live in Moscow and work at red_mad_robot. I started my career in the company as a manager, then worked as an operating director in a design laboratory and now I work at Verno by red_mad_robot in the same position. We are engaged in solving business problems through consulting and training. I have a wife, a child, an apartment, an iPhone and photos from traveling on social media. It wasn’t always like that. I was born and grew up in the small town of Novogrodovka. It is located in the east of Ukraine and has a population of 14 thousand people. My dad is a retired miner, and my mom works in the Department of Social Protection of the population. In 2006, I graduated from high school and went to Donetsk to study as a computer systems engineer at Donetsk National Technical University. In 2011, I graduated and started working. I worked as a system administrator in an auto repair shop, then provided the Internet to apartments. In 2012, I got a job as a filling machine operator at a plant for the production of infusion solutions. My future wife and I rented an apartment on the outskirts of Donetsk. She worked for an insurance company, and I had night shifts at the factory. Then a more or less stable and adult life began.
This went on for 1.5 years. Even before that, my life began to resemble Groundhog Day, and I was thinking about drastic changes. I wanted to move somewhere to completely change the situation to a more promising one. I even started to develop a relocation plan. And I mean a serious structural plan, not just a set of abstract steps. To do this, I started studying planning, which led me to the topics of time management, goal setting, thinking, risk management and etc. But there will be no beautiful story of how I ran from war to the great success. Although the aggravation of the situation made its own adjustments, and I had to step into uncertainty faster than I expected. Therefore, I know firsthand what it means to get out of the comfort zone. In 2014, I moved to Moscow. Without citizenship, connections, work experience and skills, I found the job I had always dreamed of. I learned everything myself and now I’m doing what I love in one of the most modern cities in the world. In red_mad_robot, I went from manager to COO. I launched new services, built business processes and was a mentor for managers. Today I participate in the creation of programs for pumping soft skills and building digital practices. Every day I communicate with talented and hardworking people who want to change the world. For 8 years I have been studying management, psychology, the brain and different types of thinking for my own development and training of others.
Over the years, I have built my own life management system, developed by experience and proven in practice. I treat life like a manager always and everywhere. Whether it’s going to a hike or developing a digital service. I have my own system of processes, tools and approaches. I analyzed what influenced my development and what hindered it. I have gathered the most valuable things together and I want to share them with you. This is not a silver bullet, not an authentic idea or rules for a successful life but rather a set of well-known tools grouped into a sequence of processes that provide me with clarity, flexibility, productivity and development. That is, my subjective view and experience on the organization of life. When I communicate with people, and they find out about it, they are divided into two types: some twist their finger at the temple, others ask to teach them to do the same. I am always happy to help people and share my knowledge. In the book, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.
About the book
How the idea came about
It all started with the fact that I often began to hear from colleagues and friends: «Semyon, when are you going to write a book?» Where did such questions come from? Firstly, I read quite a lot: I can read several books a month. At work, I am mostly surrounded by people who also read a lot. red_mad_robot has a strong corporate culture that is focused on growth. The company is full of activities for the exchange and generation of knowledge. We often discussed books there. We argued a lot and exchanged opinions. Sometimes my point of view did not coincide with the author of the book, but was welcomed by colleagues during the discussion. Almost always such a discussion ended with a joke that it was time for me to write my own version of the book. Secondly, people often point out that I tell interesting stories. Probably, this allows me to do a broad outlook and life experience. I am only 33 at the time of writing the book, but various events and decisions allowed me to collect a good amount of experience that tested me for strength and pumped my soft skills. Thirdly, I have accumulated a lot of information about the organization of life from incoming sources that I have ever read, watched and listened to as well as the results of my research on this topic, which were transformed into notes, presentations and speeches. I shared them with people, they kept them for themselves and later gave a good feedback.
Thanks to these factors, for the first time I began to think that I had knowledge that could be recorded and shared with people. The idea took root after a dialogue with my friend Yana Djibouti. She said she didn’t have time for anything, although she had no problems with time management. She’s like Richard Branson, only the female version. She has an infinite number of interests, hobbies and projects. I told her about my task management system. She liked it and asked me to teach her. In a couple of phone calls, I explained everything to her, and she began to implement it. After a couple of weeks, she said that it became much easier for her to control everything, and she started to have more time. Although there were still many questions, and not all the tools were involved, the conversation ended with the fact that it would be cool to make a course or write a book on the topic of organizing life. We even came up with a few names. The current title of the book «System Life» was also among them. So, there was an idea. There were a lot of fears and barriers to start, but more on that later. I was also helped by the desire not only to share useful experiences, but also to show that anyone can write a book. So that people who are afraid, waiting for signs, knowledge or status, start sharing knowledge. That it is not necessary to launch rockets, own a multibillion-dollar marketplace or a unicorn startup to make your own or someone else’s life better. I coped with my barriers myself, but I spent a lot of time on it. I hope this book will be a support for you, help you organize your life and start something new.
How to read this book
I wanted to write a book that you can start reading from any chapter. I wanted it to be small, and to have everything you need. So that at any time you can turn to it, get benefits and not read other books. When I started writing, I realized that it was as impossible as to make a project quickly, cheaply and efficiently. This simply cannot happen. Life is not a goal, but a process. System life is an integrated approach in the form of a continuous cycle of six processes: analysis, planning, management, optimization, reflection and training.
The cycle of system life
The content of the approach is so large that it can be endlessly studied and experimented with details. You can even understand it in your own way and create your own approach. I tried to select a sequence of six processes in order to catch on to groups of tools and approaches within each. Each chapter