LENS - a decision-centric approach to knowledge and productivity

LENS is the system I use to turn the flood of meetings, emails and documents in my day-to-day work into something I can actually act on. It grew out of TORP, my earlier attempt at a “remeber everything” system, once I realized that recall wasn’t the bottleneck anymore. Decisions were.

The core idea: most productivity systems optimize for storing and retrieving information. LENS optimizes for something else: clarity under uncertainty.

Image by the author created in cooperation with MS Copilot

It’s built around a few simple principles (insights > raw information, context > completeness, decisions as the real output) and a layered structure that goes from a highly condensed “what matters right now” view down to the raw material behind it.

I’ve been running this system for a few months now.

The core (the principles and the five-layer structure) has settled and I don’t expect it to change much going forward.

What’s still evolving is the outside: how information gets in, how AI fits into the workflow, and how the system connects to the tools I actually use day to day.

Start here

This is the system as it stands today - the clearest and most current descriptionof how it works.

• Building a Decision-Centric Productivity System, Part 1: Principles & Structure
• Building a Decision-Centric Productivity System, Part 2: Workflows & Weekly Synthesis
• Building a Decision-Centric Productivity System, Part 3: The Agentic Layer

More applied posts will get added here as I write them - particular problems I ran into, how I adapted the system for specific parts of my role, that kind of thing.

Where LENS is still moving

The core of LENS (the principles and the layered structure) is stable at this point.

What’s still in motion is everything at the edges: how AI agents fit into postprocessing and weekly review, which tools I use to run it and how much of the capture step can be automated without losing the “interpret, don’t just store” discipline the system depends on.

I’ll keep updating this page as that settles, but I don’t expect the core described above to change much.

Origins

LENS didn’t arrive fully formed. This two earlier posts are where I first worked out the concept and wrote a first practical guide (to write a guide to my future self actually). It’s useful, if you want to read about the origin story of how the thinking developed, but the system has moved on since then in ways the three-part series above reflects more accurately.

• What LENS Is - the original concept and why I moved away from a pure recall-based system.
• The Practical Guide - my first attempt at a practical build, since refined into the series above.