A personal system that turns daily note-taking into a gather-decide-execute loop, letting remote engineering leaders capture, prioritize, and act on information with tools like Logseq.
The article argues that the way you organize daily activity becomes your mental model for management, so a system must mirror how you and your company work and produce the outputs you need. The author shows how a simple, trustworthy personal system can survive tool changes and scale with responsibility.
Gathering is an ongoing habit. Using Logseq's daily journal, the author captures anything that matters the moment it appears, turning raw information into searchable, linked notes. Hashtags and daily pages keep a firehose of Slack, email, and meetings from drowning memory.
Deciding happens by reviewing gathered notes, tagging them for further research, questions, or turning them into TODO items with due dates. The author pushes beyond passive consumption, challenging assumptions in proposals and using the notes as a rubber-duck for deeper critical thinking.
Executing splits into personal tasks and a "chase" list for work that can't be reduced to a simple checkbox. By tagging follow-ups, escalations, and metric checks, the system provides a lightweight way to monitor ongoing responsibilities without letting anything slip.
The loop-gather, decide, execute-creates a feedback cycle that keeps a remote leader effective, accountable, and continuously improving the quality of information and decisions across the team.
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