Context for the Win

Building up the context for my very own “Exec OS” has proven immensely valuable.

Knowledge workers face a fundamental challenge to organize and direct their efforts. We aim to stay aligned with our key objectives as much as possible, while allowing some room to explore and experiment.

Keeping the course is the continuous challenge. Setting a well-charted course is a prerequisite, which we can work out with more deliberation during a planning phase.

In order to define key objectives and design a strategy (the course) that actually fits our profile, what we need is context. With that we should be able to engage in well-informed, or well-contextualized, strategic conversations with an AI system.

In essence, the context is what increases relevance. General information is filtered and mapped to a specific situation.

Getting a Grip on Things

The goal of this project is to achieve better organization and alignment—not so much at the tactical level, like maintaining a clean and up-to-date calendar, but more at the strategic level: focusing on projects, goals, values, available resources, constraints, and so on.

Here’s how I stated the idea in broad strokes:

I need some help in organizing my professional life, even beyond that, we should be taking a holistic approach throughout. As you can probably imagine, I struggle with balancing focus and exploration.

I have to give you some more background on what I currently do, what my skills are, and what I am seeking to do, or rather enable myself to do.

Now, I am starting this conversation in a pretty abstract way. I hope we can get all the way down to the concrete. But I really want to work out a way to “get a grip” on things.

Here's how I would describe the problem, or challenge:

I am losing track, or am not able to hold all aspects and the moving parts in my working memory, so to speak. […]

Claude named the conversation “Expanding Cognitive Reach Through External Architecture.” Seems fitting¹.

A key aspect of this project is its personal and bespoke (to me) nature.

The system we create needs to serve your actual patterns of thought and work, not just an idealized version of how you think you should work. […]

However, for this to be truly useful—rather than becoming yet another system to maintain—we need to ensure it maps to your natural ways of thinking and working.

Building an External Cognitive Architecture

The beginning of an exo-cortex, maybe.

Awareness

Building up the content was a bit of a process. It felt like a workshop, stretched over multiple days. Sum total, I spent a few solid hours on this. The act of producing the documentation itself turned out to be valuable, as it forced me to express, review and refine the current situation and how I got there. You can see what we eventually covered below.

Consecutive coverage

Each conversation focused on one topic, or part of the whole. If something else came up, which happened regularly, I took a note and then covered it in later session.

Depending on the topic at hand, I’d start off with what I could immediately produce, or I would ask for questions to help me extract the information and cover all necessary aspects. In some cases, I added files that I already had, e.g. on ICP, or pricing calculations. At other times, it was a more lengthy and iterative process to clarify and eventually distill a core idea.

Towards the end of each conversation, when I was satisfied with the results we had arrived at, I would ask to create a comprehensive summary – making sure to not only include the end result, but also how we arrived there.

This way, one by one, we created the documents that became the project files.

Topics covered

Knowledge Architecture: The documents represent a sophisticated multi-layered framework covering strategic planning, implementation architecture, and operational capabilities.

These documents establish the fundamental operating system for knowledge work and decision-making.

Instead of giving you the list of file names, I'd rather describe the topic scenarios than I covered.

Foundation and Strategy

First, we explored, refined and defined what the overall purpose of the framework is. Its ingredients and building blocks.

This included not only what I do, but also how I think, learn, create – my “natural processing patterns.”

Adding values and goals, you get to a pretty solid basis.

Resource Analysis

We went over my skills and my professional background, my expertise, my strengths, my network, and what I can use in terms of resources.

My economic situation, as a resource, as a constraint as a future goal. But also to gauge the impact of any work project or initiative in relation to it.

Resources stretched from basics, like how much time I have to work with, all the way to listing the equipment I have for recording audio and video.

Implementation

What services and products I offer and work on developing. How they are delivered. GTM and business acquisition strategies.

Methodologies I use for implementation projects with clients.

A deep dive into working with educational institutions, which is something I plan for 2025.

Key themes across documents

This is what the AI tells me about the entire collection:

1. Systems Thinking Approach The documents consistently emphasize orchestration over individual performance, focusing on how different elements work together to create value.

2. Value Creation Patterns There's a strong focus on translating deep understanding into practical implementation through teaching and framework development.

3. Implementation Focus The materials provide detailed frameworks for moving from concept to action, with particular emphasis on AI implementation and organizational transformation.

4. Network Architecture Significant attention is paid to developing and activating professional networks for value creation and distribution.

Notable Pattern: The documents form a coherent progression from theoretical foundation to practical implementation, with consistent emphasis on systematic thinking and value creation through knowledge translation.

The need for updates

As you can imagine, these documents are a snapshot in time and some of them need to be regularly updated. That is not much work or particularly hard either.

I also added new documents for different aspects when they came up. It is a living corpus.

Here’s a plan to follow

Once I had the basic context set, I was able to produce the following output. This is the outline. I removed personal details.

And while this is neat, it is only one possible application.

What the project actually enables me to do is to explore and evaluate anything I come across, within it. Say I have a meeting with a client where a project is discussed. I can take the notes from the meeting, the current project proposal, plusI can add some of my thoughts and then have all of this processed to see how it fits in and influences the bigger picture.

None of this is automatic or fully reliable, but it is pretty close to the external cognitive architecture I was looking for.

I’ll share more updates and examples as this develops.

If you have tried something similar, please share your experiences. As usual, I’m curious.

1. Note that the big words are there by design. I am using a style for Claude which is based on

David Shapiro

’s Pretty and Dense.