Charlotte’s Personal Operating Model 2021 — Vision and Values

Published in

HabitClub

4 min readMar 16, 2021

This is a delayed published blog, I wrote during my Christmas holiday period, well, late is better than never, here we go- this is a blog about my personal vision and value

Well, for people who know me for years or have visited my place — you will have been tired of hearing me explain about my seemed structured and complicated personal operating systems, that includes: my personal mission, values, annual vision board, Quarterly OKRs, happiness metrics, personal kanban board, fortnightly planning space and retrospective wall.

Well, I am a productivity nerd… (and ex-agile coach and management consultant :))

As impressive as it may sound, they are all being visualised through my doctor styled handwriting and kindergarten level drawing around the house. (examples below…)

Charlotte’s Operational Model Wall Examples (old version)

It becomes a huge inconvenience when having people visit my place or even for my partner who just wants to have a clean and minimal looking environment to live in.

Despite the inconvenience above, there are huge benefits for putting my operational models everywhere:

They are front and centre, I can refer to it and use it to guide my day to day decisions, especially difficult ones.
They are so low tech. I can easily update them when needed. In fact, I am updating them with relative high frequency — each artefact has its own cadences and associated ceremonies set up (which I can explain more in future blog)
As it’s right in the living area, it prompts me to regular check-in with myself and refine them.

Other benefits include: it makes me be more accountable for these items as they are “public” in the area and it also pushes us to be more selective of guests who get invite over, in fact, we barely have any visitors come to our place these years because of the consideration of my exposed operating systems

Well, this particular blog, I can show you the most critical part of my operational model — my personal vision and value. This is the most important guideline in everything I do.

Live a life with humanity and joy

This is my vision, I only refined a little bit from last year — “live a meaningful life”

But with everything that has happened this year (bushfire, loss of family members, burnout, health crisis, depression…) I have built a deep connection with the word “humanity and joy”

Humanity to me means — treat people (myself included) with kindness and respect,

Joy is not only about happiness — it drives me to continuously seek passion and live a purposeful life.

The process of defining this vision has also makes me realised the importance of human connection and community to me personally.

I also have the following 4 key values that are visualised in my bedroom and looking at it everyday.

They are closely align with my vision and have been my Northstar in the past 3 +years.

Stay human and put people first — Make people the priority, live with humanity and spread joys.

Make a positive impact and be influential -Continue to inspire, influence and drive meaningful impacts.

Keep the beginner mindset — Be humble, appreciative and curious.

Be brave — Stay psychological independent, resilient and strong.

Key Learning

The blog is getting long again, I will share the link on some of the processes and exercises that I used to help me come up with the above vision and values here.

My key learning from this exercise, it doesn’t really matter what approach you use to come up with your vision and values, as you need to build your own operational model that works for you.

But once you have come up with it, make sure you