Every day, there are seven time slots:

• One 2-hour slot;
• Two 1-hour slots;
• Four ½-hour slots.

This sums up to a total of six hours. The rules of the game are then as follows:

• At the start of every day, you must assign an activity to each slot, filling all of them;
• Throughout that day, for every slot, you must engage in your chosen activity for at least that much time;
• You may choose to do slots over the day as you wish. You may not change which activities are assigned to which slots after planning them, however.

Additionally, you must commit to the following restrictions on what activities you plan for your day:

• At the start of every month, you must choose a monthly theme; every day for that month, you must dedicate one slot to fit the monthly theme;
• Likewise, at the start of every week, you must choose a weekly theme;
• Additionally, at the start of every week, you must choose three habits, three specific activities, and assign all three of them a slot every day of that week.

Thus, added together, this gives you 5 commitments, 6 hours, 7 slots per day, forming the 567 system.

On the weekend, slightly different rules apply. On Saturday, the 2 hour time slot should always be reserved for “leisure” (e.g. watching a movie, going to the pool, that kind of thing). Additionally, on Saturdays, drop the monthly theme and one of the 1-hour timeslots, forming what I suppose may be called a 456 system. Feel free to drop another slot and/or another commitment too if you wish.

On Sunday, there are no commitments; spend your entire Sunday at your own discretion (a 000 system?).

The system as described is intended to work for people who are self-employed or otherwise work in the kind of self-directed manner that allows this. It is not intended, and indeed too heavy, to be crammed wholesale into whatever time you have left after coming home. It can’t be easily imported into your job as a McDonald’s fry cook, either.

For supplementing a day job, I would suggest dropping the 2-hour slot and one 1-hour slot, making a 535 system. You might want to drop a habit commitment too if you feel like you’re running around too much (435, or 434 system).

The system is designed to balance discretion with commitment, for the sake of ultimately building trust. Specifically, it is designed to satisfy the following constraints:

• Guarantee enough personal discretion and adaptability to deal with the normal everyday flow of obligations and productivity;
• Allow the user to commit to things and guarantee that progress will be made without needing to muster constant willpower;
• Prevent the user from trying to plan every second of their life and place impossible strain on themselves, or constantly have to answer the question of “how much planning is appropriate?”;
• Centralize and minimize decisionmaking.

The system sets a bound for enough; at the end of the day, if you’ve filled and executed all the slots, you will know that you spent some six hours being productive; that you spent an appreciable amount of time on several different activities; that over the course of a week you will spend at least a couple hours on some thing of your choosing, and over the course of a month, at least a double-digit number of hours on something. If you follow the system for a day, that day is never wasted; even if you do nothing else but play video games afterwards, you will never outright stall.

At the same time, the system only covers a total of 6 hours out of a waking day of 16 hours or so. It can be quite gentle and adaptable when it needs to be. On the other hand, it’s not meant to cover all your productivity; you’re always free to spend more time on something than the time slot assigned to it.

Currently, today’s use of the system looks like this for me:

• Monthly Theme: game development;
• Weekly Theme: increasing my online presence;
• Habits:
  • Exercise;
  • Meditate;
  • Read a book.

With my slots assigned like so:

• 2-Hours game development;
• 1-Hour: increasing online presence – just about done fulfilling this slot right now by writing this blog;
• 1-Hour: meditation;
• ½-Hour x4: reading, exercise, studying math, visual art.

Most of the time, habits will tend to go into ½-hour slots (though they don’t have to; meditation for me today doesn’t) and tend to work better as more discrete activities. Habits are generally better left as more open-ended things that can fill arbitrary amounts of time.