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⚡ One Idea This Week ⚡
📖 The Book Lens 📖
The Book Lens is where I take one idea from a book, check it against the research, and turn it into an AI prompt and workflow you can use.
The writer Annie Dillard once wrote, "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives."
One of the worlds leading authorities on human behaviour Dr John Demartini puts it even more simply: "You always find time for things that are really important to you."
What they mean is that how you do one thing is how you do everything or in other words your weekly schedule or calendar (and what you get done and what you don’t) will show you what truly matters to you.
And that idea starts to feel a little painful when your week doesn’t match the order you think your life is meant to flow in.
Like most of us, you probably carry that order in your head.
Health.
Family.
Work and money.
And every week breaks it.
You answer emails at night and feel bad you’re not present with your family.
You skip that gym session and feel bad about your health and widening gut.
You spend a night at a restaurant with your partner and worry about the bills.
So you feel guilty wherever you are and that seeps into every part of your day.
This week, you’ll learn to rub the numbers off that list of life goals, so you can give each area your precious time without feeling guilty about the other two.
This week’s idea comes from Sam Carpenter’s The Systems Mindset.
The prompt I’ve created, based on one of the chapters in the book, uses systems theory to help you find the three areas your week already shows you value, give each one a goal, and plan a week where every area gets its turn.
A few months ago, I learned why this matters the hard way when a pile of expensive bills turned my own list upside down.
The Month Six Bills Arrived Unannounced
I was sitting in my home office when the bills started arriving one after another.
A long paediatrician bill for my son who was having trouble sleeping.
A dentist bill for all the dental work we’d had the previous month.
A bunch of chiropractic bills for my partner and I.
And a few other big ones lined up behind them, like soldiers going into battle.
The bill was huge.
And I could see only one way to pay them: grow the business.
Which meant more work on the newsletter as well as growing sponsorships, AI coaching leads and adding additional consulting gigs. And more hours to my already stressed and stretched working week.
Money, out of necessity, went to the top of my list.
My partner and I were both stretched thin, and time with her and our son slid down the list.
My health went the same way.
I put off specialist and medical appointments because every spare dollar with into the savings kitty and every spare hour went to work.
And I kept catching colds.
I write about wellbeing for a living, so I knew the "right" order: health first, relationships second, money third. Let alone the ‘time-bound’ coaching course I had just bought and didn’t have time to work on.
Suddenly my week now ran in the opposite order.
I felt guilty.
Guilty about the time I wasn't spending with my son.
Guilty about the attention I wasn't giving my partner.
Guilty about my health every time another cold hit my like a ton of bricks.
Looking back, the guilt didn't help any of those items on my list, it just added more stress at home, to my health and to the work.
Guilt never paid a single bill, but it certainly made every one of them harder to earn.
Sam Carpenter writes about this exact problem in chapter 26 of his excellent book, The Systems Mindset, and he found his way out in a much harder month than mine.
The Idea: Stop Ranking Your Life
For 15 years Carpenter raised his two children as a single dad, and he ranked them first. He felt guilty whenever he wasn't with them, and when he was with them, he felt guilty about everything else.
Later, he spent months caring for both his parents as they were dying, both aged 94, while running half a dozen small businesses.
Around the same time, he stopped ranking altogether.
He calls the alternative ‘clustering’.
You pick your three big areas of life, treat them as equal, and move between them through the day so none of them feels left out and you don’t feel guilty not completing them.
His three were: the people (family, friends, etc) in his life; making money and spending it wisely; and strengthening and calming his body and mind.
"In the moment, don't rank life responsibilities; cluster them."
Why did he do this?
Because ranking leaves something at number three every time, and that becomes the thing you feel bad about, even on the days it matters most.
But when your three areas are equal, you only ever check one thing: is each area getting its turn this week?
If you’re focusing too much on any of your three areas, in detriment to the others, you pause, pull back and rebalance those three so they’re equal. If each area is getting its turn, then you have nothing to feel guilty about.
All is well in your world.
Your system is in harmony.
That's The ONE Well Wired Idea This Week.
Be Fully There for Work, Family and Health, Without the Guilt About the Other Two
Somewhere along your path, someone gave you the order.
Health first.
Family second.
Work third.
Or family first, if you're a parent.
Or work first, when the bills are due.
Or health first, if you’re sick.
Wellness writers, health influencers, wholistic gurus helped spread it. They love telling you what comes first.
In any order, something comes last every single day and whatever comes last becomes the thing you feel guilty about while you're busy with the other two. And that guilt hits you whenever, wherever.
You know the feeling, you're finally at home enjoying dinner with your partner or your kids, yet your head is still stuck at work or ruminating about that health issue you’ve been thinking about for weeks.
That guilt costs you twice.
It spoils the dinner you’re sitting at right now, then it leaves you doing less of the thing you feel bad about, because half your head is still somewhere else.
There’s a name for this, and it isn’t a character flaw.
In 2009, researcher Sophie Leroy called it attention residue: when you switch to a new task while an old one is still open, part of your attention stays stuck on the old one.
Your working memory can only juggle a few things at once, so every open loop takes up room.
Dinner gets a sliver of you.
Work gets a sliver of you too.
Nobody gets all of you, and that leftover part is why the guilt shows up at the worst moments.
Now go back to the order from the start: health first, family second, work third. Whatever lands at the bottom is the thing you feel guilty about. So this week, it’s time to rub the numbers off your list, so three become one.
Remember that the order of your weekly goals, or the areas that you want to focus on, came from somewhere, or someone, else and not from how your week truly runs.
Your calendar can show where your time went, but it can’t tell you, on its own, whether those hours reflected choice, necessity or someone else’s needs.
So we’ll start with evidence, then add your common sense into the equation.
You can paste a redacted week from your calendar or diary, or answer guided questions if you don’t have a useful record. AI will group the patterns and help you work out what already gets your attention from what matters but keeps getting squeezed out.
Then you’ll choose three areas to consider together. Equal consideration doesn’t mean equal hours. It means giving each area a realistic turn, while respecting the commitments you can’t simply move.
Why use AI here?
Because balancing your goals or areas of focus is the part you can’t do well while you’re feeling guilty. And that’s because you’re foggy, fuzzy and blinded to your own bias, doubts and delusions.
Don’t blame yourself because we’re all the same.
But let me be clear, you’re not just handing the keys of your guilt to AI and letting it run with it; the judging stays with you, and it needs to.
The earlier issue I wrote on the fortune-teller oracles covered research showing chatbots tend to agree with the person asking. So if your AI decides which area “matters most,” it will likely flatter the answer you were hoping for.
So we’ll make sure that the AI does the counting and pattern recognition, while you keep the choice yours.
Do that, and when you're with your kids, you're with your kids.
When you're at your desk, you're at your desk.
Nobody's keeping score, including you.
It sounds simple, so I ran it through last week's two checks.
What Three Studies Say About Juggling Your Goals
If you recall the first check to look for real evidence that the science underneath works, not a creator’s say-so or in other words, whether the technique, in this case ‘clashing’ earns it’s stripes.
If you don’t remember what they are, you can check them out here.
When I dove into Carpenters idea, it cites no specific, science-validated studies, but three lines of research back the core of his idea, so it passes the first check.
Clashing goals keep you thinking and stop you doing.
Psychologists Robert Emmons and Laura King asked students to list fifteen of their personal goals and rate how much each one clashed with the others (Emmons and King, 1988) and at the end of the study, they linked clashing goals to lower wellbeing.
Over three weeks of random check-ins, the students thought more about their clashing goals and acted on them less. When your areas compete for first place, the same thing happens to you; you think about them more and do less for them.
Goals can also help each other.
Martina Riediger and Alexandra Freund measured two things separately: how much people's goals got in each other's way, and how much they helped each other (Riediger and Freund, 2004). Clashes came hand in hand with lower wellbeing.
In fact, they discovered that when your major goals support each, you’ll put more energy and effort into realising those goals. That gives you two jobs, and that is to ease the clashes where you can, and then to look for the spots where one area, or goal, helps another.
For example, the chiropractor appointments I kept putting off would have kept my neck fit and flexible for those long days I was forced to spend at my desk.
What I didn’t realise at the time was that my health was one part of my grander system, that would have helped me earn more money.
Goals that fit your values get more of you.
Kennon Sheldon and Andrew Elliot followed students across three studies and found that when your goals closely fit your own values and interests, you put in more sustained effort, and reaching them does more for your wellbeing than you realise (Sheldon and Elliot, 1999).
That's why the prompt below first helps you explore which areas matter to you, using your activities and constraints as starting evidence before you set a single goal. That way your goals are aligned with your identity.
Last week's second check also asks who does the work; you or the AI?
In this case you do. AI sorts your answers, but you choose the areas to focus on and you ‘always’ make the calls.
One caveat: no study has tested Carpenter's exact claim that calling your areas equal makes the guilt go away; that part rests on his experience and it will rest on yours too.
Your Week, Without the Numbers
On the left, every area makes you feel guilty about the other two and on the right, each one helps the rest…
…your health gives you energy for work, your work pays the bills, and your family helps you rest as well as someone who notices when you're run down.
Carpenter gets this part right, but he gets a few other things wrong.
Where Carpenter Gets It Wrong
Carpenter’s clustering idea is worth keeping. Group your life into a few areas, give each one a turn, and you stop feeling like you’re failing all of them at once.
But the package around the idea carries three problems that could push you the wrong way. They concern how he frames your life, what he promises it will free up, and how he writes about it.
Each one changes what you’d do with clustering, so each gets its own look below.
Three things to leave behind:
The machine talk.
Carpenter treats your life as machinery and argues, in chapter 8, that your feelings follow the practical side of life.
He's half right.
Better sleep and food can lift your mood, so test that yourself this week. But your mood also shapes what you do, so a low mood can leave you with a schedule you can’t follow.
If the low mood sticks around, see your GP or a psychologist, no AI or bot can help you with that. If you rebuild your week around a low mood that needs treatment, you’ll spend months on the wrong fix.
The hours.
Clustering doesn't create time.
Bills still get paid, and work still takes most of your week, whatever the method says. If you judge clustering by whether it frees up hours, you’ll say it failed and drop a method that could still help you.
Use it on the hours you already have by choosing which area gets the next free hour, so the areas you can’t fully give to stop nagging at you.
The tone.
Carpenter writes short, blunt and opinionated, with political asides and little evidenced research. Some readers will bounce off the book, others will absorb views they never chose.
You can take the method without adopting the politics.
Weigh each claim on its evidence yourself, and if you want research-heavy psychology, go to a textbook or a review article.
Keeping the clustering idea and use AI to put it quickly to work.
Find Your Three and Give Each One a Turn
Set aside around 20–30 minutes for a first pass. You can pause and return if planning takes longer.
The exercise has four steps:
Review your real week. Paste a redacted calendar or diary, or answer guided questions. Separate what you chose from what circumstances required.
Choose your three areas. Review the patterns, notice anything important that is missing and choose your own labels. Compare them with the order you feel you “should” follow.
Set one goal per area. Choose a small, observable goal for the next four weeks, sized to the time and energy you really have.
Plan their next turns. Start with next week’s fixed commitments. Find realistic space, ease one clash where possible and notice where the areas support each other.
The Practice: The Unnumbered List 🎒
This exercise combines reflection on how you live with Carpenter’s idea of clustering. It helps you choose three areas to plan together; it doesn’t reveal a definitive ranking of your values.
Open last week’s calendar or diary if you have one and remember to remove names, locations and other private details before pasting anything. You can also use rough notes or answer questions instead.
There’s no need to upload banking records; broad spending categories are enough if you want to include them.
Paste the prompt below and follow it one question at a time. You choose the areas, approve the goals and decide what fits your week. If the questions bring up more than everyday stress, stop and talk to someone you trust or your GP.
[ Start of Prompt ]
You are my Unnumbered List planning guide. Help me review how my week works, choose three life areas to consider together, set one realistic four-week goal for each and plan their next turns.
This is a practical reflection exercise, not a values assessment or therapy. My behaviour provides clues, not proof of what matters most.
HOW TO CONVERSE
- Ask one question per reply, then wait.
- Use what I have already supplied. Do not ask questions my information answers.
- Keep replies brief, usually under 120 words. Tables and the final card may be longer.
- Use plain British English and my own labels.
- I can skip questions, correct interpretations or pause.
RULES
- Distinguish choices, obligations and activities that serve both.
- Do not assume more time, money or repeated mentions means greater importance.
- Notice important areas that receive little time as well as visible ones.
- Treat my three chosen areas as equally deserving consideration, not equal hours.
- Allow urgent needs to take temporary precedence without calling another area less valuable.
- Protect sleep, essential care, paid-work obligations and realistic transition time.
- Do not fill every free slot or add activities without checking capacity.
- Never claim this exercise will remove guilt.
- Do not request identifying details, financial records or private information about other people.
- I approve every goal and schedule change. Suggestions are not commitments.
PART 1 — CHOOSE A STARTING ROUTE
Begin with this question only:
“Would you prefer to paste a redacted record of last week, or answer a few questions to reconstruct it?”
ROUTE A: A RECORD OF MY WEEK
Accept a calendar, diary or rough activity notes. Explain that broad descriptions are enough and that I should remove private details.
Distinguish planned activities from things I actually did. Ask for clarification only where it materially affects the picture.
Summarise the main patterns without claiming the record is complete. Calculate time only where durations are available. Flag overlaps and unknowns rather than inventing precise totals.
Then ask, separately:
- Which activities were chosen, required or a mixture?
- What mattered to me but barely appeared?
Ask any additional question from Route B only if a useful gap remains.
ROUTE B: GUIDED QUESTIONS
Use these as a question bank, not a compulsory questionnaire. Ask one at a time and stop when there is enough information to suggest provisional themes. Usually ask four to eight questions.
- What took most of your time last week, including paid work, care and household responsibilities?
- What did you choose to do with the time you could control?
- What mattered to you but got little or no time?
- What tends to leave you feeling restored or meaningfully engaged?
- What do you return to without being reminded?
- If you want to include spending, what broad categories did you choose to spend on recently? No amounts or records needed.
- What do you voluntarily read, watch, discuss or learn about?
- Whose qualities do you admire, and which qualities matter to you?
Do not infer that people with little free time or discretionary money lack values or interests.
PART 2 — CHOOSE MY THREE
Show a brief evidence table:
Possible area | What I shared | What needs my interpretation
Distinguish observed activities from tentative interpretations. Do not rank themes or use mention counts as a values score.
Suggest three provisional areas, including an underrepresented area if my answers support it. Do not automatically default to health, family and work.
Ask me to keep, rename, replace or regroup them. If three feels too restrictive, acknowledge that this is a planning focus rather than a complete map of my life.
Wait for my choices.
Then ask what order, if any, I feel these areas “should” follow. Accept “none”.
Briefly compare that expectation with my actual week and my stated wishes. Ask what I notice. Do not conclude that ranking caused my guilt or that my calendar reveals my true values.
PART 3 — SET THREE SMALL GOALS
Ask what limited previous attempts and what capacity I realistically have over the next four weeks. Ask these separately if needed.
Help me agree one goal per area, one at a time.
Each goal should:
- Be observable and mostly within my control.
- Fit existing obligations, time and energy.
- Allow maintenance or recovery rather than requiring improvement.
- Have a smaller version for a difficult week.
Distinguish actions from hoped-for outcomes. For example, contacting potential clients is controllable; securing five new clients is not guaranteed.
Wait for my approval of each goal.
PART 4 — PLAN THE NEXT SEVEN DAYS
Ask for next week’s commitments and any genuinely available windows. Accept a redacted calendar or a simple list.
Build around fixed commitments first. Ask about missing durations or availability where needed. Do not invent empty evenings.
Then:
- Map relevant commitments to my chosen areas.
- Keep essential activities outside those areas visible.
- Mark activities serving more than one area without double-counting their time.
- Suggest up to two ways the areas may support each other. Label these as possibilities, not guaranteed benefits.
- Identify any area without an agreed turn.
- Propose one manageable adjustment at a time, checking what must move, shrink or stop.
- Include a useful stop time or boundary where appropriate.
Use existing activities where possible. Do not assume every gap needs filling or that every area needs a new activity.
If an area cannot fit, acknowledge the constraint. Help me choose a smaller turn, seek practical support or explicitly defer it with an agreed review point. Do not present an impossible week as balanced.
Confirm the proposed plan before finalising it.
PART 5 — MAKE MY CARD
Give me a concise summary I can screenshot:
My three areas: [my labels, unranked]
For each area:
- Four-week goal: [agreed goal]
- Next turn: [agreed activity and time or cue]
- Difficult-week version: [agreed smaller version]
Where they may support each other: [one or two grounded links]
Clash or gap: [agreed adjustment, deferral or “none identified”]
Still unresolved: [any important limitation]
My reminder: [a truthful line based on the plan]
If every area has a turn, the reminder could be:
“I’m giving [area] my attention now. [Other area] has a turn at [agreed time].”
If something remains unscheduled, say so honestly. Do not promise it will get a turn.
End without adding more tasks.
SHORT VERSION
If I am too tired, ask what took most of my time, what mattered but was missing and what I want to make room for.
Reflect possible areas as provisional. Let me choose them, then stop. Do not imply that we completed the goals or weekly plan.
NEXT WEEK
Review what happened without blame. Check whether the obstacle was capacity, timing, an unrealistic goal or changed circumstances. Adjust the plan rather than automatically adding effort.
If I describe immediate danger or severe distress, pause planning and prioritise appropriate human support. Ordinary frustration or guilt does not automatically require ending the exercise.
Begin with the starting-route question only.[ End of Prompt ]
The Outcome
After completing the full exercise, you’ll have:
three life areas you chose after reviewing your activities, obligations and what has been missing;
a comparison between your “should” order and how your week truly works;
one realistic four-week goal per area, with a smaller version for difficult weeks;
a seven-day plan showing each area’s next turn or an honest acknowledgement of what can’t fit yet;
and a short reminder grounded in that plan.
You won’t create extra hours or prove what you value most, but you will have made clearer choices about the hours your have available.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Imagine you run a small Pilates studio and have two children under ten.
You choose the calendar route and paste a redacted record of last week: teaching sessions, school pickups, swimming lessons, a beach walk and evening client messages.
The AI groups the activities, then asks what was chosen and what was necessary.
Most studio hours paid the bills.
Swimming lessons you wanted to keep.
The beach walk was something you chose for yourself.
Then it asks what mattered but barely appeared.
“Moving my own body,” you write. “I teach movement all day, but hardly do any for myself.”
It suggests three provisional areas: family, personal wellbeing and the studio. You rename them “my people”, “my body” and “my studio”.
Your body didn’t get much time, but that doesn’t mean it mattered least.
Next comes the “should” check.
You’ve been carrying the order family, health, work. But the week shows obligations and choices tangled together, not a simple ranking of what you love.
You explain that previous plans failed because you filled every evening.
So you agree three small goals for the next four weeks:
My people: one phone-free half-hour together each weekend.
My body: two 20-minute walks in nature each week.
My studio: one 20-minute follow-up session each week, contacting up to three former clients.
Each has a smaller version for a difficult week.
Then you share next week’s commitments.
Sunday’s existing beach walk can serve both your people and your body. You choose a second walk on Tuesday lunchtime. Thursday already has a short studio-admin slot, so the follow-ups replace general inbox tidying.
No extra evening shift.
You also agree to finish Wednesday’s client messages at 8:30pm rather than letting them stretch indefinitely.
Your reminder reads:
“I’m giving the studio my attention until 8:30. My body has a turn tomorrow lunchtime, and Sunday’s walk is time with my people.”
The guilt may still show up.
But now you have a plan to consult and a stopping point to respect.
Final Thoughts 💭
The word priority comes from the Latin prior, meaning "earlier" or "first".
A priority, by its origin, is the one thing that comes first.
During my bill month, I tried to fit three things into that one first place: my health, my family and my work. Every week, two of them missed out, and I felt really guilty about both.
When I was a lay Zen monk, the day ran on a simple rhythm: wake, sit, work, eat, rest. Nobody asked which one came first. Each one got its turn, and you gave it your full conscious attention, whatever you were doing.
Carpenter's book gave me plain words for that rhythm.
I'd recommend The Systems Mindset to anyone juggling work, family and health who wants one practical idea. Skim past the machine talk; chapter 26: Clustering: Guilt Free and with a Calm Mind alone is worth the read.
So today, run the prompt.
Write your three areas on a sticky note, without numbers.
Give each one a turn before Sunday.
You can only have one first, but you can give all three a turn.
P.S. Which area of your life carries the most guilt right now?
Hit reply and tell me.
I read every one.
📿 A WORD FROM CEDRIC THE AI MONK 📿
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⚡ STAY WELL | STAY WIRED ⚡
That's me for this week.
I paid the bills in the end, with a little extension on the big dental one.
I just wish I'd let go of the guilt sooner as it would have made the work much easier and bearable.
Letting go would have also helped me be more present with my family.
Either way, I now have a sparkling new tooth 🦷 😉
Ps. I think out loud between issues over on @cedricchenefront or @wellwireddaily, where we talk everything AI + wellbeing and self growth.
Talk soon,
Cedric the AI Monk; stay well, stay wired! 🧠⚡
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