Last week I shared that when I stepped back and looked at the whole Family OS I'd built through a systems lens, I realised most of my skills were doing the same handful of jobs. So I stopped building my Family OS around whatever problem, idea, or area of life was currently overwhelming, and started organising it around the job each skill was actually doing.
Turns out I'd hired the same employee seven times
When I lined my skills up and asked what each one was really for, they all turned out to be variations of the same core functions, just applied to different areas of life.
It was a bit like discovering I'd hired seven different employees with the same skill sets and given them different coloured uniforms. For many reasons, this is ineffective.
And it makes sense when you think about it. If you do ten tasks that follow the same pattern, it’s faster, more consistent, and you make fewer mistakes (and you use fewer AI credits too).
Across all areas of life the jobs looked something like this:
Capturing
Syncing
Triaging
Detecting
Digesting
Planning
Maintaining
My tiny binocular-wearing legends: Detectors
Of all of my skills, detectors are my favourite.
In my head, they're fluffy, colourful, energetic little creatures carrying miniature binoculars. They're quietly watching the horizon, anticipating things before they become my problem.
A detector simply looks at what's available, applies some logic, and gives me an intelligent heads-up.
I currently have two of them.
One carries a crystal ball. The other carries a stop sign.
The Purple Fluffy One: My Claire Voyant
He sounds something like this:
"Sarah. I have consulted the energies of the near future, and the road ahead is bumpy. A financial omen rises on Thursday in the form of the mortgage repayment.
The universe informs me that this weekend is a fruitful time to clear out the old (council cleanup is on Tuesday).
There's an approaching wave of family bonding (the school holidays are in three weeks). I recommend setting slow, steady boundaries to survive that gravitational pull in the form of booking in holiday camp.
Finally, Chiron has now entered Taurus and the cosmos will bring deep and lasting peace over the coming months."
He's very good at predicting the future for me and ensuring I’m on the right path. Even if he gets a bit overexcited.
In the background, there are so many things we have to remember or prepare for that come around monthly, fortnightly, weekly, once a term and .. also randomly. It's too much to remember and my brain can't hold all the cadences, so my Claire Voyant does it for me.
He interprets the future, adds a layer of cosmic drama (life's too short for boring), and occasionally overstates the influence of planetary movements on bin day.
His job is simple: look slightly ahead in time and report back anything that will cause Future Sarah inconvenience if ignored. Not so early that I dismiss it but not so late that it's already on fire.
The Blue Fluffy One: my logistics lollipop lady
The second detector has absolutely no interest in the cosmos. She is practical and pragmatic. She stands in the middle of the week holding a stop sign and a whistle, and she will use both if necessary.
Her messages sound more like this:
"No. Absolutely not. You cannot physically be at the doctor and swimming lessons fifteen minutes apart on Thursday. One of these must move. Friday needs sorting too - both you and Ben are out and you only have one car."
She watches for:
appointments stacked so tightly they defy physics
two people assigned to one car and two destinations
school pickups colliding with anything else on the calendar
days that look fine until they are very, very not fine
Her job is to step in early enough that the day doesn't collapse into last-minute logistics and passive-aggressive texts ("I put it in the calendar AND mentioned it this morning 🙄").
She’s my preventative enforcement.
No, they're not constantly pinging me
Neither detector has its own alarm. They have to co-ordinate with my "digests" - my morning coffee digest, my night-before digest, and my week-ahead digest.
When the digest runs, the detector wakes up, does its job, and returns anything relevant.
I already get more notifications than I want, so this keeps everything contained and predictable for me.
Your turn to employ a tiny psychic traffic controller
The lovely thing about a detector is how little it needs.
Really, just three things:
Something to look at - your calendar, or a document (term dates for example)
A bit of logic - what this means you need to think about and when
How to inform you - e.g a daily digest via a calendar invite
If you had a fluffy little detector quietly watching the horizon for you, what would it need to notice to be helpful? Pick one thing and set it up!
Hit reply and tell me, I'm keen to add a yellow one to my collection.
Sarah xx