I’ve spent 40 years helping organisations design operating models — the systems, processes, and governance that make things actually work. A few months ago, I started applying the same thinking to my own life. Not because my life was broken, but because I kept noticing a pattern: I’d have a good idea, make some progress, get busy, and then quietly move on to the next thing. The ideas were fine. The follow-through wasn’t.
So I built what I now call an Intentional Living Engine. It’s an operating model for my life.
What I Mean by Operating Model
In IT management, an operating model answers a straightforward question: how does this organisation actually run? What processes exist, what systems support them, how does information flow, and who is responsible for what?
A Personal Operating Model asks the same question about your life. It makes visible the systems you already have — whether you’ve named them or not — and the ones you’re missing. Where does your information live? What happens daily, weekly, monthly to keep things on track? What gets automated, what needs your judgment, and what needs a real conversation?
Most of us have informal versions of this. A calendar. Some to-do lists. Maybe a journal. What I found is that making it explicit and intentional changed how I relate to my own commitments.
Starting with Purpose, Not Tasks
Here’s what I got wrong at first: I started with productivity. Better task management, more automation, smarter inbox processing. And those things matter — but they’re not the point.
The point is purpose.
For me, that purpose is rooted in faith. Living close to God. Being fully present with my wife, my family, my friends. Serving my community. The operating model exists to help me actually do those things consistently — not just think about them or plan to do them.
But the framework works regardless of what your purpose is. The core question the system asks every day is the same: does what I’m doing today bring me closer to where I want to be?
That’s a different question from “what do I need to get done today?” Productivity systems optimise for throughput — how many tasks can you check off. An Intentional Living Engine optimises for faithfulness — are you living the life you actually want?
What I’ve Built
After a few months of building, testing, and honestly also overbuilding, here’s what I’ve found matters. There are ten dimensions to a Personal Operating Model, and I’ll share the headlines here. I plan to write more about each one.
Vision and purpose come first. Without clarity on what the system is for, it becomes a treadmill. I use a framework of four domains — Contemplation, Constitution, Community, and Craft — with a deliberate priority order. Faith and health before business.
Life architecture means mapping out your areas of responsibility. I have 18, from faith and marriage to business development and household maintenance. Each gets regular attention through a weekly rotation. The upstream priorities get reviewed first. That’s not just organisation — it’s a statement of values encoded in a schedule.
Information architecture is about having one place to look. My Obsidian vault is the index of my life. Not everything lives there, but everything is reachable from there. When I open my daily journal in the morning, I can see and reach every decision that needs my attention. At least, that’s the goal — making the links reliable is still a work in progress.
Process architecture has three layers: a pipeline for mechanical data processing that runs invisibly, a cockpit (the daily journal) that presents information clearly, and a conversation layer — a morning standup with AI that doesn’t just list tasks but asks questions about what matters.
Automation and AI strategy follows a simple principle: use the simplest technology that works. Deterministic scripts for routine processing. A local language model for classification tasks that need more intelligence than regex but less than a full conversation. And a frontier AI for the genuine dialogues — morning reflection, strategic thinking, the conversations where being challenged is the whole point.
Technology choices matter less than you’d think. What matters is that each component has a clear role, and when one piece is unavailable, the whole system degrades gracefully rather than breaking.
Lifecycle tracking means that tasks, opportunities, and commitments each have defined states. The system doesn’t just tell me what’s new — it surfaces what’s stuck, what’s overdue, and what deserves to be celebrated.
Review cadences give the system its rhythm. Daily for orientation. Weekly for feel and direction — how did it go? Monthly for data — what do the numbers say about health, finances, goal progress? Quarterly for strategy — am I doing the right things? Each cadence has a different character, and mixing them up makes them all less useful.
Governance means the system itself gets maintained. Documentation is a first-class output. And there’s a question built into my monthly review that keeps me honest: is the system helping me achieve my goals, or am I just enjoying building it? Because building systems is fun, and that’s a legitimate risk.
Human factors are the most important dimension. If I open the system with curiosity in the morning, it’s working. If I open it with dread, it’s not. Joy matters. The satisfaction of checking things off matters. A system you avoid is worse than no system at all.
What I’ve Learned So Far
Three things stand out.
First, purpose before productivity. Every design decision gets tested against the question: does this help me live faithfully? Not “does this make me more efficient?” Efficiency in service of the wrong things is just faster drifting.
Second, enterprise thinking works at personal scale — if you strip it down. I’m drawing on TOGAF, ITIL, Wardley Mapping, and GTD. Configuration management, capability mapping, service value streams — these are design patterns for complex systems, and your life is a complex system. But you have to be ruthless about what to keep and what to drop. Most enterprise architecture is overhead at a scale of one.
Third, the biggest enemy is the good-idea cycle. New idea, burst of energy, initial progress, life gets busy, new idea replaces old one. The operating model’s job is to break that cycle — not by being rigid, but by making it visible. Here’s where you said you wanted to be. Here’s where you are. Here’s what changed and why. You decide — but with clear sight, not in the fog of busyness.
Why I’m Sharing This
I’m building this for myself, and I’m genuinely enjoying it. But I also notice that the methods and frameworks are not specific to me. The purpose is personal — yours will be different from mine. But the architecture of intentional living is universal.
Over the coming months, I’ll share more about specific components: the daily journal as a life cockpit, the three-tier AI strategy, the review cadence framework, and the design principles that make the difference between a system you love and a system you abandon.
If you’re someone who has plenty of good ideas but struggles to make them stick — or if you’ve tried productivity tools and found them useful but somehow not enough — I think you’ll find something here.
Martin Kallenbach is an independent IT management consultant based in Helsinki. He helps organisations with transformation, service integration, and governance — and is currently applying the same thinking to the question of how to live well and intentionally.
Get in touch at martin@bilboconsult.com or connect on LinkedIn.
