My Personal Stack
Three Things #106: February 11, 2024
I’m taking a short break from recent topics to write about something a little more personal. I want to share an idea that struck me recently as a helpful framework for planning and prioritizing one’s personal life. I call it my “personal stack” and it has to do with the set of beliefs, practices, and behaviors that make me who I am, and how I prioritize and conceptualize them.
As technologists we talk a lot about the concept of a “stack.” The most famous of these is the OSI communication stack, but every application and all infrastructure also has a stack. The basic idea is that there’s a layered “stack” of technologies that, piled one on top of another, enable the amazing applications and user experiences that we’ve come to expect today through abstraction and encapsulation. For instance, an app running on your iPhone relies on the iOS operating system, SDKs that allow it to read and write data and send and receive information over the Internet, OS networking libraries to transmit them using TCP/IP, WiFi, Ethernet, 5G, and similar transmission protocols to encode and decode low level data and to transmit and receive it over the Internet, the operating system, databases, and applications running on the server that the app is talking to, encryption libraries for privacy and security, and much else besides. All of this is quite literally the tip of the iceberg of technologies that come into play every time you open an application or send a message, which shows how large and how powerful this stack of technologies has become.
I think this notion of a stack could helpfully be applied to things other than technology. As a technologist, when studying an application one of the first questions we ask is, “What stack is it built on?” as a way of understanding how it works, what it does, and how we might rebuild or improve upon it. Comparing architectures and stack choices with other technologists is hugely educational—there’s at least one website dedicated to this. Our personal stack is just as big, complex, and powerful as any technology stack. We should seek to understand and compare the architecture of our personal lives in similar fashion. It’s good to know that there are other, functional alternatives.
This my attempt to apply the notion of the stack to my personal life. Here are the three most important layers that make up my “personal stack,” i.e., the stack powering my personal life, from bottom to top, from most foundational and concrete to most dynamic.
Thing #1: The Every Day 🧱
Let’s start at the bottom. The best visual for this “stack” is actually a pyramid, a bit like the infamous food pyramid. Another helpful visual is Stewart Brand’s pace layers. The idea here is that the things at the bottom of the stack are the most important and change the least often. They’re also the foundation upon which everything else is built.
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For me, the bottom contains the things I do continually, every day, without hesitation. They’re thoughts and behaviors that are so fundamental to who I am that they’re pre-programmed, so to speak. They’re things I’ve pre-decided and pre-committed to. They’re things I don’t reevaluate more than once a year at maximum during my annual review process, and even then they very rarely tend to change. The only form of sudden change is an epiphany—that’s sort of the definition of an epiphany—but I can count on one hand the number of times this has happened in my life.
There are of course sub-layers within each layer. At the very bottom is probably some base layer of underlying assumptions and beliefs and it would be interesting to examine these too, but they tend to be subconscious and are only revealed under great stress, deep meditation, or hypnosis so for the purposes of this analysis I’m going to leave them out.
Above those subconscious assumptions and beliefs are abstract values and beliefs that are clear to me and that I express freely. These form the foundation of the base layer. I’ve spent quite a bit of time reflecting on my values and core beliefs. I find it a valuable exercise and I encourage you to do the same. I won’t list all of them here but for context they include things like: Freedom is paramount and we’re all entitled to freedom, autonomy, and personal sovereignty. Excellence. Curiosity. Compassion. And Buddhist principles like anicca, anattā, and duḥkha. These values, principles, and beliefs are all so core to who I am that I can’t imagine myself without them and I can’t imagine ever changing, replacing, or expunging them.
And above this are concrete commitments and promises. Family, personal health and fitness, hard work and personal development are some that come to mind. These are things I work on every single day regardless of the circumstances. I wrote about how I promised myself that I’d run every day last year; for the past two years I’ve made a promise to myself that I’d write every day (this falls under personal development). I’ve committed to these practices regardless of the circumstances and regardless of how I feel on a given day. These everyday behaviors lie at the top of the base layer. Overall health, fitness, and wellbeing is a bit of a gray area and it probably falls somewhere between layer one and layer two since I don’t always eat what I should, I don’t always sleep as much as I should, and this year I haven’t been working out every day—other things including family, career, and travel sometimes come first.
Thing #2: The Priorities 🏹
The second layer is the largest layer for me. The base layer is larger in the sense that it’s more foundational and more important, but there are definitely more things—more beliefs and behaviors—in the second layer. Generally the second layer consists of all of the things in my life that are important but not foundational, i.e., all the important stuff that I didn’t list above and that I don’t manage to achieve every day. It includes important things that aren’t as pre-programmed, pre-committed, or pre-decided, i.e., I still have to prioritize them alongside everything else in the big pile of tasks and priorities each given day or week.
Priorities change more often than foundational stuff like core values and beliefs but they don’t change as often as things in the third category. Old priorities for me include reading more, getting enough sleep, seeking adventure, maintaining existing friendships and forming new ones, completing work-related or professional tasks, exploring professional areas adjacent to my professional focus, meditation and mindfulness. New priorities include things like a well-rounded exercise regime, working out every day, building strength and balance, and a better diet. These are all things that are important and that I’m serious about investing time and energy into, but they’re also things that sometimes give way to one another and/or to more foundational things. After all, unlike the first layer, I can’t do every one of these things every day.
I do an annual review every year, as mentioned above, and priorities are one of the main things I look to set for the new year as part of this process. I think a good rule of thumb is that foundational items should evolve and change on the order of once per decade (i.e., a very small number of times in your life, or a very gradual shift as you age and mature), priorities should change on the order of once a year, and everything that changes more often than that belongs in the next category.
Another way to think about priorities is as a manifestation of the foundational, core values and beliefs. The values and beliefs themselves don’t change but the strategy for enacting or achieving them does change over time and depending on the circumstances. These strategies are the priorities. As a couple of examples, getting enough sleep is a concrete priority because health and wellbeing is one of my core values. Seeking adventure is a priority because freedom, adventure, and open-mindedness are core values. Each priority could be traced back to one or more foundational values or beliefs.
Thing #3: The Aspirational 🎯
I generally have a long list of things I’m working on, much longer than would fit into the first two buckets. The largest number of these are aspirational goals: a sort of catch-all bucket for new ideas, experiments, personal projects, and generally things I’m trying out that haven’t quite stuck yet or for which I haven’t yet found a rhythm. These may be things that are extremely important to me but they’re still novel. It takes time—months to years—for new practices and behaviors to become routine habits and move down the stack, so to speak. In the same vein, nearly all priorities and foundational items start as mere aspirations, the only exceptions being “permanent” things like family and core values. I’m happy when I manage to make time for aspirational practices but I don’t get too upset when I fail to do so.
Aspirations are practices that I’m trying to get into the habit of doing regularly. A good example right now is strength training (derived from the priority mentioned above). After intending to for a long time I finally began working on it early last year. (This item moved down from the fourth layer of the stack: things I intend to do but haven’t gotten to yet!) Whereas I promised myself I’d run every day last year—since that was a foundational priority last year—I only promised myself that I’d do my best with strength training. While I aspire to do strength training pretty often, ideally every second day, very often something else comes up or it just doesn’t feel convenient. This is a key differentiator of aspirational items: they tend to be the first things that get dropped when it’s inconvenient or when I’m short on time (which has been most of the time lately).
This is okay. New practices need to start somewhere and an aspirational practice that I do once in a while is a good place to start. I can plan or try to optimize the use of my time and energy and its division among tasks and buckets but I find that an organic sorting and filtering process is usually more effective. I naturally find myself drawn to certain tasks and practices more than others, and over time the ones I enjoy more, or the ones that are more beneficial, naturally work their way down the stack. I’ve already organically decided to invest more in strength training this year than last year, and if all goes well I hope to reliably do it a few times each week. It took 15-20 years of running before I took it to the next level last year so it’s fine if this practice also takes a while to establish.
This stack idea isn’t fully developed but I hope you find it as useful as I do. I find visualizing my priorities and practices in this form of a three-layered stack to be very helpful as I plan how to use my time. In fact the same strategy works for optimizing any situation where you have a lot of candidates and a small number of slots to fill! A good example is dining. I have my go-to restaurants, dishes, and snacks, i.e., the bottom layer, things I’m happy to eat every day. There are places and things I like and seek out regularly. And I have another pile of things I’m always experimenting with—new dishes, new restaurants—because that’s both the only way to find what’s optimal and also the only way to adjust to changing tastes and priorities and to explore new offerings. In a sense it’s yet another manifestation of the classic explore vs. exploit dilemma. The stack helps you approach this dilemma in a thoughtful, structured way.
My favorite thing about the stack idea is that it doesn’t require too much thinking or planning. In my experience trying to plan or optimize too much is a recipe for disaster. Practices, behaviors, and principles tend to naturally arrange themselves in buckets or layers and it can be helpful to acknowledge this and go with the grain when planning. It’s also good to be thoughtful and intentional about which items you intend to move down the stack over time, and about what needs to give way for this to happen!
Your personal stack, top to bottom, your bundle of beliefs, practices, priorities, and behaviors, quite literally defines you. If you want to improve who you are, you could do worse than beginning by writing down your stack.