Building Peter OS v0.2: I Built a System, and It Told Me to Work on the System
A few weeks ago I wrote about why I needed a personal operating system – a single place to connect the parts of my life that never seemed to talk to each other. Business, money, health, all running as separate projects with nothing holding them together.
This is the follow-up. I’ve built the next version, I’ve started using it, and I’ve already learned something that made me laugh at myself. I’ll get to that, because it’s the honest part and it’s the part worth reading.
Firstly, what changed.
What was wrong with version one
The first version of Peter OS was a dashboard. It showed me things. My focus for the day, my three pillars, a weekly review, some useful questions.
The problem is that showing you things isn’t the same as helping you do things.
I’d open it, read it, nod, and then… carry on with whatever I was already going to do. It was a nicely arranged noticeboard. It didn’t actually change my behaviour, which is the only thing that matters.
So the whole point of version two was to fix that. Less display. More direction.
The idea: one path, in order
Version two isn’t a dashboard anymore. It’s a path you follow from top to bottom, in order.
It starts with the big, slow questions and narrows down to one small, immediate thing:
- Where am I now?
- Where am I going?
- What’s the route to get there?
- What matters in the next 90 days?
- What does success look like this week?
- What is the single next physical action?
That last one is the whole game. Everything above it exists to make that one line trustworthy. By the time I reach “today,” I’m not guessing — the action is connected all the way back up to where I’m actually trying to go.
The idea is simple: don’t try to manage everything at once. Read the destination and the route at the start of the week. Then each day, just work on the one next action. At the end of the week, look at what actually happened and adjust.
The two features I’m most pleased with
Two small things are doing most of the work.
The decision filter. Under the route, there’s a single line: “If an activity doesn’t support this route, it probably isn’t a priority right now.” That sentence has already killed two or three things I was about to spend time on. It turns out most of what fills a day doesn’t survive that question. It’s a saying-no machine, and saying no is the thing I’ve always been worst at.
“Why this action?” Every daily task has to justify itself. Next to today’s action, there’s a box explaining why it’s the right thing. If I can’t fill that box with a real reason, the action probably isn’t the right one. It stops me doing things just because they’re easy or in front of me.
Neither is clever. Both are just questions the system forces me to answer before I’m allowed to feel busy.
The bit I have to be honest about
Here’s what made me laugh.
I built a system to run my whole business. I opened it up, ready to be told what the single most important thing to do was.
And it told me to… work on the system.
Today’s action: outline the next Peter OS article. This week: use Peter OS, write about Peter OS, make pins about Peter OS. The 90-day priority: establish Peter OS as the story.
Do you see the problem? I’ve built a tool whose current main job is promoting the tool.
Now – there’s a fair defence. At the very start of anything, you do have to build the thing before it can do anything else. Documenting it publicly is genuinely part of the plan, not a distraction. So a bit of “working on the system” is unavoidable early on.
But I know exactly what this trap looks like, because I criticise it in other people. Plenty of make-money-online folks build a business whose only real product is teaching others to build the same business. It eats its own tail. And here I am, at risk of building a life-management system whose main output is content about the life-management system.
So I’m writing this down as a warning to myself, in public, where I can’t quietly ignore it: the system exists to improve my actual life — the business, the finances, the health — not to become the project that replaces them.
The real test of Peter OS isn’t whether it’s nicely built. It’s whether, three months from now, it’s pointing me at things that grow the business and sort the finances, rather than just generating more posts about itself.
I’ll tell you honestly which way it goes.
What’s next
I’m going to use version two for a full working week before I change anything. That’s a rule I’m trying to keep – build, then actually use, before deciding what to improve. Too many systems get redesigned before they’ve been lived in.
After that, the next area to bring into the system is finances – which, given the destination I’ve set (clear debts, eventually pay off the mortgage), are the one’s which matter most.
If you’re building anything like this yourself, I’d genuinely love to know what’s in yours. What are the parts of your life you’d want a system like this to connect? Drop me a line – I read every message.
Peter Tranent, East Lothian
