Welcome to Verstreuen, meaning “to scatter.” Each week I share highlights from my Workframe system, the process I use to turn books and notes into structured insights. Here, scattered ideas find connection and become something worth sharing.

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🗃️ This Week’s Highlights

This week's notes come from 31 new additions to the Zettelkasten - here’s the three that stood out most to share with you:

🟨 The life-design loop that makes your habits inevitable

🟦 The routines that quietly build your future

🟥 The decision shift that makes every next choice easier

As life gets busier, I keep coming back to this simple framework:

the Vision Chain:

Everything starts with vision. Once you know what you want, decisions become easier. Those decisions influence the environment you create — from your calendar to your workspace — which in turn shapes the habits that drive your results. And those results feed back into your vision.

As life has gotten crowded with projects and competing priorities, it’s been tempting to optimize the details—tasks, workflows, checklists. But without a clear vision, even the best work can feel like treading water. Whether launching a project or designing your life, clarity of vision is the first lever.

 📎 Takeaway: If you’re stuck optimizing tasks, zoom out and ask: Does your vision set the direction?

—🗃️—

The older I get, the more I believe this: your routine is your real identity. Not your goals, not your intentions — your daily actions.

I’ve been putting this into practice with a simple daily tracker I call Tous Les Jours (Everyday) — a short list of actions I try to complete every day. A few months ago, I decided I wanted to learn French. But a vision without action goes nowhere. So I made one small move: I added Duolingo to the Tous Les Jours list. Just a few minutes each day — nothing dramatic — but the habit gives the vision legs. It turns intention into momentum.

Routine isn’t glamorous, but it’s the mechanism through which your vision becomes real. When your environment supports your habits, and your habits support your goals, life starts moving — not because things get easier, but because you stop working against yourself.

 📎 Takeaway: Build small, durable habits in the areas that sustain you — they compound faster than motivation ever will.

—🗃️—

One idea that stuck with me this week is decision stacking — the idea that each choice should set up better future choices.

Most decisions feel small in the moment:

• whether you reply thoughtfully or reactively

• whether you invest in quality or settle for convenience

• whether you simplify or keep adding complexity

But decisions ripple.
They create momentum — upward or downward.

This became exceedingly clear at work this week.

For two days, I had been debugging a streaming issue — chasing edge cases, rewriting handlers, trying to “fix” the system without changing it. But at some point the pattern became obvious: the current architecture wasn’t just buggy — it wasn’t going to scale.

So I made one decision:
stop patching, start rebuilding.

Not a small choice — but a leverage point.

I spent the evening re-architecting the streaming solution, clearing out the layers of complexity that had been compounding silently. A few debugging sessions later, the whole system snapped into place. The UI stabilized, throughput increased, and what had felt like chaos suddenly felt navigable.

And the payoff came almost immediately.

Later that same day, a partner asked if we could stand up another instance.
Because the system wasn’t just “fixed” but rebuilt to scale, the answer went from “uh… maybe?” to an easy “yes.”

Good decisions compound.
They don’t just make progress possible — they make future decisions better, easier, and cleaner.

 📎 Takeaway: Don’t optimize for the next step - optimize for the next ten.

—🗃️—

Closing Thoughts

This week kept circling the same theme: alignment.

• Vision sets the direction.

• Habits create the motion.

• Decisions create the altitude.

Individually, each one matters.
Together, they form a system — a living loop that gradually makes life feel less like managing chaos and more like steering a vehicle that increasingly wants to move in the right direction.

If you take just one idea with you this week, let it be this:

Your life has a flywheel.
Every choice either spins it faster or slows it down.
Build the version that compounds in your favor.

Thanks for reading Verstreuen! 👋 

Until next week
-GH

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