What is Life Ops

Life Ops is an engineering and management discipline in the service of living life more deliberately by taming complexity and surfacing meaningful data for decision making. As a discipline, it’s new. As a subject, it’s very old. Self-help books are broadly about character development (e.g., becoming braver), interpersonal skills (e.g. making friends), or life ops (e.g. frameworks for Getting Things Done, or for living more purposefully). We just didn’t call it that.

Since the 1970’s, an extraordinary amount of venture capital -- over $1 trillion -- has been invested in experiments called startups that are highly incentivized to discover the leverage points for maximum societal impact per person. This large scale experimentation has resulted in high water marks like WhatsApp, which in 2014 had 500 million users, adding 1 million per day, with a staff of just 55 people.

The DevOps revolution, and its influence on Sales Ops, Product Ops, and even Biz Ops, has been extraordinarily successful. As venture capitalist Jeff Bussgang explains, “Ops” is taking over Startup Land because “As companies stabilize their business models and find product-market fit, they begin to adjust from a hunch-driven operating model, where decisions are made by the founders in large part on gut instinct, to a metrics-driven model, where decisions are made by professional managers based on data. With the availability of so much data across all functions to professional managers, they need more analytical and operational horsepower to synthesize that data and derive insights from them that drive the business.” If you want to evolve your personal life in the same way, you need Life Ops.

Data and Insights

Self awareness is so difficult to achieve that the best practice for centuries was radical simplification: living as a monk or ascetic. This works by radically reducing demands on your attention, so you can then spend your attention on yourself. But that’s no longer the only way to solve this problem. What if you don’t want to live like a monk? What if you don’t want to withdraw from the world, but rather improve it? If you want to have the self awareness of a monk and the output of Thomas Edison, you need to instrument your life to measure what matters even when your attention is elsewhere, then surface those measurements in formats that you can use to make deliberate decisions about what’s important, what’s next, and what’s best.

A foundation for lifestyle upgrades

Everyone’s talking about how, to achieve great performance, you need a coach. But there’s a huge measurement and observability problem that needs solving before a coach can be useful. To be able to coach you, your coach needs to be able to see you in action. That’s straightforward in sports performance. It’s really hard for lifestyle coaching or productivity coaching. With a platform investment in life ops, more of your life becomes upgradeable.