The Lineup

Like it says on the first page: nothing here is for sale, there’s no pitch. No subscription, app, paid PDF, course or anything. I don’t care about any of that. This is a for-fun-project of what has worked for me while launching M33, my space data company.

It really works if you use it, slowly shrinking the sprawling task list you already have down to the essentials. That narrows your focus, reduces anxiety, and teaches you what matters, and what can wait.

So then, shall we?

I’m gunna take a guess, and I bet if I’m correct, you’ll want to keep reading. If not, you can peace out at any time!

We all want to be more productive in work and life. Some days we are, some days we aren’t. Maybe it’s that you have more interests than you have hours? Or is it that you have a task list growing faster than time itself?

Are you an app-jumper, or using outdated rules, constrained systems, disorganized notes? I have been, absolutely.

But I’mma tell you what. None of that is going to matter when you’re done reading here. What you needed all along has been around for sixty years, borrowed from NASA, who had a similar problem during the Apollo program. They may have had a different budget than you, but they used pen and paper, and it worked.

The method is built around three ideas about how attention actually works, plus one small routine to keep spacetime from collapsing in on you.

”Okay, but what tools do I need?”

That’s the beauty here, pal. This works on paper, on index cards. It works in Notion, Obsidian, Things 3, Asana, a shoebox, the back of a receipt or even a bar napkin at 3am.

The tool is not the point. The tool has never been the point, no matter what that tool-car-salesman is telling you.

I call my personal three-piece system, “The Lineup.”

The Lineup is structured, but it isn’t a system with a rigid rituals and early morning tactics. That’s a productivity-blog promise and, well, generally horseshit to sell you more productivity secrets or books or subscriptions. I’ve bought them, and now burned them.

Each of the three pieces: The Lineup Card, The Roster, The Shelf move at their own different rates, and they each need their own time. What time, what rate depends on your needs, but I’ve got some foundations for you that are more-or-less foolproof.

This system is based around what helped put mankind on the moon, after all.

Here’s what The Lineup actually looks like:

• The Lineup Card: Your projects. The work in front of your face.
• The Roster: Ongoing work with no finish line, an indefinite space.
• The Shelf: Knowledge base, interests, articles, videos, etc. It’s not just a clever name, it’s like a bookshelf.

roster vs. lineup card, side-by-side

Now in a bit more detail…

the lineup

The lineup card is daily.

This is where most of the time goes. Fifteen to twenty minutes a day, usually first thing, sometimes at the end of the day, sometimes with a sandwich!

You’re looking at the current cards, checking what’s next, replacing first-moves as you finish them, sometimes writing a new card because a project is ready to be promoted from the Shelf (more on this below) or has emerged from a Roster sweep.

On a good day this is quick. On a day where you’re scoping a new card from scratch, expect thirty minutes to an hour — that’s the work, not the overhead.

Sometimes I spend an hour on my kitchen counter with a stack of index cards writing out a new lineup card for a project, and that hour becomes the most useful hour of the week, because it sets everything else up for delivery and deployment.

Lineup Card Examples: Launch website, Go To Market Strategy presentation, Plan anniversary vacation, etc. These are projects.

the roster

The Roster is weekly, or whenever life hits it.

Once a week, pick your day. Sit with the Roster for thirty to sixty minutes. You’re here to ask yourself whether anything’s been neglected, and what’s succeeded. Whether any of the long-term responsibilities should be drawing a new lineup card.

Maybe some of your Roster items are actually expired and should come off the future Lineup. Your Roster should be updated when something big happens — a job change, a health thing, a big relationship shift. If it’s a serious life shift, you can hold on it to tackle real life, it’s a system not a bully. But once you’re settled and back down to reality, update your Roster.

Roster Examples: Family, Friends, Ongoing Education, Work. These are items with no necessary end-date.

the shelf

The Shelf doesn’t run on a schedule.

This is the part that operates on instinct. You add to it whenever something interesting crosses your path. You go to it when a lineup card needs research or you remember you saved something useful. You tidy it when you feel like it — call it a foraging session, maybe an hour every few weeks, processing the random stuff you’ve been collecting into the organized Shelf. There’s no penalty for skipping a month. The Shelf is patient.

The total time?

It’s on you and your workload, but I’d say somewhere around, but never more than two to three hours a week of dedicated Lineup + Roster work, plus whatever you spend on the Shelf when the mood strikes. If that sounds like a lot, compare it to the time you currently spend feeling vaguely behind on everything, switching between apps looking for the thing you forgot, or re-reading the same articles you’ve saved three times.

That is the cost The Lineup is replacing. Two to three hours of deliberate attention against an indefinite amount of distributed friction.

what happens when a lineup card is done

There are only three ways to leave a card in the lineup.

Done. Killed. Paused.

Get used to it. You don’t need more categories.

Done. You finished the card, it was approved, shipped, sent. For better or worse, it had to go out to the world. Mark the card, make a note on the back of your card (or a note however you take them) about what actually happened versus what you predicted when you wrote the card. Archive it.

That’s it. But please, don’t skip the note at the end. It’s easy to skip because you’ve marked the card as “Done” — but later you’ll want the compound interest of what, why, how when you can look back. Trust me. You’ll learn more about yourself years down the road than any paid course can ever tell you.

Now for murder.

Killed. You decided not to finish it. The world changed, or the project turned out to be the wrong project, it was forked to another version, or you realized halfway through that you didn’t actually care.

Mark the card, write one line about why, archive it. Killing a project deliberately is healthier than letting it rot on the lineup. It also keeps you honest. Every kill is data about how good your initial scoping was. I’ve also found it builds thick skin. You put in all this time and effort into a stage of a project, but when the signs show it’s not the right direction, kill it. Move on. It’ll be in an archive folder, so you can always resurrect it if you have the strength.

Paused. Priorities shifted. Real life happened. The project is still good, but it can’t get your attention right now. The card comes off the active lineup and goes into a holding pattern. Your paused stack of cards is a dedicated folder, a tag, whatever your tool allows — with a one-line note about what would have to change for it to come back.

Pause isn’t kill.

You’re saying not now, not never. Most projects that get paused either come back later sharper than they were, or turn into kills three months later.

Both are fine outcomes. Knowledge from a pause can also go to the shelf for reference and research. Even if you pause, kill and abandon a project or part of a project, you can learn from it later.

Anything else is simply death disguised as business. The wave of unnecessary inundation.

A project that’s been on your lineup for six weeks with no movement isn’t “active.” It’s something YOU (via The Lineup system) need to make a decision about. The weekly Roster sweep is partly what catches this, but you can also catch it any day you look at the card and feel that a neurological twitch of, “oh yeah, I should really get to that.”

That reaction should tell you if it’s signal or noise, if it’s active or pause, or… kill.

a slower check, every few months

The weekly sweep keeps the lineup card honest. It can be done any day of the week, but I like to call it “The Sunday Sweep” and do it before the week begins.

The Roster, the slow stuff, the long-term responsibilities, your evergreen life moves on a longer cycle, so it deserves a longer look every once in a while. Call it quarterly. Call it “every few months when it feels right.”

If it’s personal, you don’t have to put it on a calendar. That’s bait!

If it’s business and you do need quarterly checks, calendar it and stick to it, you’ll likely be reporting to your team about it, so you need proper prep.

For the most part, just notice when it’s been a while and sit down for an hour.

What you’re doing is asking, item by item: is this still a real responsibility of mine?

Some Roster items will renew themselves — your health, your closest relationships, your job, your home. They’re just on the Roster, always.

Other items will need to be retired or sent to the minors. That class you said you’d take? I have 20 of those. The hobby you haven’t touched in eight months, I swore I’d get better at piano. The side project that turned out to be someone else’s dream, not yours. Take it off. You’re not failing by removing it. You’re being honest that your life moved. Remember: the kill.

The other thing you’re doing is asking: is anything on the Roster generating projects faster than I’m shipping them, or slower than it should be?

If “the company” hasn’t spawned a single lineup card in weeks, that’s information. Either you’re coasting or you haven’t noticed that you stopped doing the work, and need to notice.

The Roster is where you notice.

The whole quarterly check takes about an hour or two, or five. Less if your life is stable, more if you’re in a period of real change. Don’t make it precious. It’s a sit-down, noise cancelling headphones, and an honest read of your own list.

I don’t think there’s a solid rule for the time-log of a quarterly Roster check. It just depends how you’re using The Lineup in your life.

I might take hours and hours (and hours) for my business, but just an hour or less for my annual check-ins on life admin tasks.

Remember, this system isn’t a rulebook, it’s a guideline.

why this works

I’ve tried a lot of systems. Every one of them worked for a bit of time, or for a project or three. Then they become haunted mansions of tasks floating around you, never laid to rest.

The reason was more or less always the same, even though it took me years to see it: they all treated being interested in something and committing to do something as the same thing.

Once you save the article, it lives somewhere with a vague sense of obligation attached.

Once you write the task down, it’s “on the list.”

Once you add the project to the board, it’s active, or needs to be updated to in progress, paused, blocked-by-something. There’s no gate between curiosity and commitment, so curiosity accidentally becomes commitment, and three weeks later you’ve got forty things you said you’d do and you’re behind on all of them.

Choose your metaphor, The Lineup works because it is the load-bearing wall of the whole system, the foundation, Atlas Mountains.

The Shelf is as big as your interests are wide, it’s a place for being interested. It costs nothing. Pile it as high as you want. That paper on hyperspectral remote sensing, the Kindle highlight from Rovelli, the half-formed thought about Apollo-era project management, the article your friend sent — all on the Shelf, no questions asked, no expiration. I have years of stuff on my Shelf. Some of it has fed real projects. Some of it just sits there. Both are fine.

The lineup card is for committing. This is your discipline, my friend.

Card front: why this, why now, what does done look like.

Card back: what’s the first move here? That’s the gate I never had in any of the other systems. It’s the thing that stops me, at the moment I’m tempted to start a new project, and asks me to articulate it. If I can’t, the project goes to the Shelf and I move on. If I can, it earns a slot and I treat it like real work. Like. Real. Work.

Most of the overwhelm I used to feel wasn’t from doing too much work. It was from carrying too many unmade decisions. Twenty things I’d half-committed to and never actually decided about. The card forces the decision. The Shelf catches the things I wasn’t ready to decide on. The Roster keeps me on the level about what’s actually real in my life versus what’s performative.

Note to remember: When I say ‘card’ you don’t actually need to use index cards, it can be a notepad, a napkin, in Notion, Google Docs, or any medium that suits you. I just love index cards with a laptop closed, then move back to digital.

And the Sunday Sweep! It’s fifteen minutes, an hour, whatever it takes. That’s where you can notice the gaps, wins, losses. That’s where you improve week by week, iteration by iteration and build The Lineup into your own system.

You made it! That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

Three pieces: One daily process. One weekly check-in, One quarterly sit-down. The system is small because it has to be. If it were any bigger, I wouldn’t run it.

Life gets big all on its own, no need to run systems that do the same. Keep that shit tight, and you’ll get it done.

I’ve been running some version of this for years now. It’s the only system I’ve ever used that kept getting smaller the longer I used it, instead of bigger. That’s the test, for me. Anything that asks for more of you over time is probably the wrong thing.

And most systems ask more of you, and then more of you. And then you switch again to another system.

The Lineup might just be the last one you ever need.

now! let’s get started

You don’t need to set anything up to begin. Pick a tool, any tool, and do these four things between today and tomorrow.

1. Write your Roster. The long-term responsibilities. Aim for five. You’ll be able to come back and add five more, ten more. But just start with a fiver.

Don’t pause or overthink it. You can kill at will! Remember, a Roster item is an indefinite commitment. A long term scope, not a project or a task or a todo.

2. Pick three things you’ll actually do this week. That’s your starter lineup. Write each one on its own card (paper or digital, doesn’t matter).

• Front: why this, why now, what does done look like.
• Back: what’s the first move.

3. Start a Shelf. Wherever you keep your interesting stuff already, you probably already have a Shelf, maybe too many of them. Try to consolidate into a notes app, a bookmarks folder, a Notion page, a stack of articles — that’s your starting Shelf. Don’t reorganize it yet. Just notice that it exists, and call it the Shelf from now on.

4. Block thirty minutes next Sunday. Or any day of the week that works for you, it doesn’t have to be Sunday, it can be Tuesday at noon. That’s the Sweep. You’ll know what to do when you sit down — the system tells you.

That’s the whole starter setup. Thirty to sixty minutes split between today and tomorrow, and you’ve got a Bingo.

Don’t drop an hour today unless you have it in you. This can be a multi-day exercise, just get it done. The Shelf consolidation also may stretch longer depending on what you’ve already got piled up. That’s expected. Take ten minutes a day this week and a month from now everything will live in one place.

The system has one promise, and it’ll keep it if you let it: it will tell you the truth with permission to keep being curious about everything else.