The LearnChangeDo System: A Complete Human Operating System for Creating Impact

How would your life be different if you had the right personal systems and strategies for making the impact that’s important to you?

With each passing week, our world becomes more abundant with information and opportunities. Never before have we had so many resources for actualizing whatever future we want to create. If there’s a skill you want to learn, a change you want to make in life, or something impactful you want to do, you can do it.

From books, courses, videos, and podcasts, to artificial intelligence, web applications, and workflow automations, we all have a seemingly infinite amount of options for what to learn, how to change, and most importantly: what to do with our time.

And if you’re like me, you’re probably focused on outer impact — the kind of value you bring to the world, in whatever kind of work you do.

In my work, I’ve learned that when you break it all down, maximizing your outer impact comes down to three things:

  • Learning

  • Changing your behavior

  • Productively pursuing (doing) what’s most important to you

The Three Pillars for Actualizing What’s Important

When you’re good at learning skills, changing and managing your behavior, and turning your ideas into completed projects and measurable results, the world opens up to you in a new way.

Of course, we never arrive at that state in a single instant — it’s a process. It’s a never-ending, perpetual process.

It’s the combination of skills, each simple and easy to learn, and when done over time, can help you thrive in our current age of information and opportunities.

Here’s an overview:

(Accelerated) Learning

“Learn things once and use them forever.” - Tim Ferriss

Most people associate learning with school and tests.

But the truth is: whatever problem, challenge, or goal you’re currently focused on, there’s a learning process that can get you through it.

Being an effective learner means having more options in life, exposing yourself to less downside risk, improving your flexibility and adaptability, and increasing self-efficacy that can help you make any change you want to make in your life.

The good news is that you can improve your learning ability.

With a handful of core strategies and tools, you can turn any goal or desired outcome into an organized learning process that leads to purposeful, meaningful change.

Some of these include:

  • Purposeful Reading — A method of reading engagement that maximizes retention and integration.

  • Deliberate Practice — A systematic approach to refining and improving skills.

  • Memorization — A handful of proven techniques for memorizing anything.

  • Curating Learning Notes — Creating a personal library of personal notes for everything you learn.

  • Autodidacticism — The ability to create and follow your own learning plans for any learning goal you choose.

Behavior Design

All learning, when effective, leads to behavior change.

After you “learn” something, you should also be able to do something you couldn’t do before.

In the digital age, the goal of all self-learning should be meaningful behavior change in the direction of what’s most important to you.

By this same logic, learning should also decrease behaviors that are getting in your way.

But this is all easier said than done.

Making changes to your behavior is much more than garnering the “willpower” to do something.

That’s because behavior operates around a core set of principles.

And when you understand these principles, you start to realize that our behavior is also a product of:

  • Whether or not we contact reinforcement after doing the behavior

  • Our current ability to do the behavior (how hard or easy something is)

  • The cues in our environment (prompts, reminders, good productivity systems, motivating operations, etc.)

When you know how to use principles work, you can help yourself (and those around you) shape behavior in the direction of what’s most important.

This can include increasing valued habits, committed actions toward important projects, or even simple routines to improve your mental health. It can also mean decreasing behaviors, breaking habits, and redesigning your environment to get more of the behavior you want to engage in.

It’s for this reason that this approach to behavior is called “Behavior Design.” In the context of organizations, we call it “Performance Management.”

It’s all about intelligently designing your behavior around what’s most important to you using a collection of skills:

  • Habit Formation - Using simple principles to create and establish purposeful habits that “stick.”

  • Habit Extinction - Decreasing (and eventually stopping) habits that are getting in your way.

  • Performance Management - Helping yourself and the people around you increase the specific behaviors that will move you closer to your key results.

  • Establishing a Daily Practice - Creating daily and weekly routines that are built around your values.

Value-Focused Productivity

"Most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of laziness — lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being overwhelmed is often as unproductive as doing nothing, and is far more unpleasant. Being selective — doing less — is the path of the productive. Focus on the important few and ignore the rest." - Tim Ferriss

The “cult” of productivity you’ve probably seen on YouTube can be very misguided.

After all, what good is productivity if its aim isn’t something we care about or that makes a positive impact on the world around us?

The goal isn’t to become more productive for productivity’s sake — it’s to first decide on what’s most important (your values, the future you’re trying to create, etc.) and then optimize your productivity around creating that future.

I call this Value-Focused Productivity, and it’s at the core of the LearnChangeDo system.

It’s about learning how to get more of the right things done — the things that will move you and those around you closer to what you want and need.

Similar to behavior, there are simple, easy-to-learn frameworks for creating a simple, efficient system for planning, prioritizing, and completing the work that will move you forward.

And anyone can learn them:

  • Project Management Fundamentals - How to turn goals into manageable projects, whether for yourself or your team.

  • Backcasting — How to effectively prioritize high-value initiatives by working backward from the future to the present.

  • Personal Task Management — The art of planning, prioritizing, and systematically completing the tasks that are most urgent and important to you.

  • Time Management — How to create a daily and weekly workflow that allows you to balance both life and professional work.

Creating Systems for Learning, Changing, and Doing

My name is Gabe — I’m the creator of LearnChangeDo.

Over the last ten years, my career has revolved around three core domains:

  • Learning

  • Behavior change

  • Personal and organizational productivity

My professional work is about helping people (and teams) use learning, behavior design, and performance management to get (the right) things done.

This sometimes looks like:

  • Working with solopreneurs to revamp their workflows

  • Assisting creatives with improving their creative process

  • Helping teams optimize their project management systems

  • Working with serial entrepreneurs who are “all over the place” with gaining clarity and building systems to manage everything

Some of my most important career work has been helping impact-focused individuals create the perfect personal management systems to accelerate their learning, change their behavior, and increase their outward impact.

And the best part: I’ve done it all using Notion.

Notion is one of my favorite tools of all time. Through the years, I’ve developed a complete personal knowledge and behavior management (PKBM) system, which you’ll learn about below.

I call it the LearnChangeDo Workspace.

It combines all the core skills you read about above, creating the ideal workspace for planning, prioritizing, and managing everything important to you.

I consider Notion to be the most effective tool for integrating the LearnChangeDo System.

I’ve seen firsthand how the combination of good strategies and the right tool (Notion) can make a huge impact on people’s lives.

Over the 11 sections below, I want to show you how I use Notion to:

  • Capture and reflect on my personal value system

  • Define, measure, and track progress toward my key results

  • Curate an insight journal containing journaling, quotes, and mental models

  • Ideate and develop content for my content schedule

  • Map out all my projects and tasks, whether personal or for clients

  • Plan out and expand my knowledge and skills using templated learning plans

  • Capture and organize notes for all the content I learn from

  • Write, organize, and reference meeting notes for clients and projects

  • Identify, challenge, and reflect on what I call “Anti-Values”

  • Pinpoint and decrease behaviors that I get in my way (Anti-Habits)

  • Manage and overdeliver for all my clients and client projects

  • Organize important docs and assets across my workspace

If you’re a Notion user (or just interested in learning more about any of the topics mentioned above), you’ve come to the right place.

Capture and Reflect On Your Values

Most people have never taken the time to define and reflect on their values.

And yet, all meaningful direction and progress in life begins with your values. They’re the “operating system” you live by, whether you know what they are or not.

Your values are the things you care most about in life.

They can be as simple as a single word or as specific as a purpose-driven phrase. Together, they represent the centerpieces you live your life by. And while they may evolve as learn and age, identifying and reflecting on them is a time-tested approach to creating personal meaning, purpose, and direction.

I use a simple list database to capture each of my values.

Using Notion’s relations, you can connect each value to key results, projects, and journaling, creating an integrated system for seeing how your values connect to the different areas of your life.

Define, Measure, and Track Your Key Results

Key Results are the specific, measurable outcomes that turn your values into outcomes.

I first got inspired by the idea of key results through Andy Grove’s system of OKRs (objectives and key results).

Grove defines a key result as “a measurable goal that serves as a milestone towards achieving an objective.“

As important as your values are, they’re only static ideas. They exist only in your mind.

Not until you turn those values into key results do they begin to illuminate opportunities and direction in your life. Once you know what’s important to you (your values), it becomes a lot easier to figure out what to learn, what to change, and what to do with your time (your key results).

To define my key results, I use a simple list database with two views:

  • In Progress

  • All

When you click on a key result, you can use relations to plan out projects and tasks, measure your progress over time, and connect learning materials that can fuel your achievement of a key result.

Curate An Insight Journal

Insights, ideas, and inspiration can come from anywhere.

Using a simple list database with tags and created time properties, I can instantly capture an insight whether I’m on a walk, listening to a conversation, or sitting down to journal.

To get the most out of my insights and ideas, I use a list database with relations to my values, projects, tasks, learning materials, and content ideas. I use two views (All and Weekly Review) to regularly reflect on my most recent insights and capture content ideas I can expand upon later for a public audience.

Curating these valuable insights over time creates a kind of “compost” for all your unique ideas (which you’re already having all the time).

Ideate and Develop Original Content

Your best ideas are meant to be shared.

The best way to share your ideas is through original content, whether through writing, videos, or podcasts.

As Austin Kleon puts it:

“The minute you learn something, turn around and teach it to others. Share your reading list. Point to helpful reference materials. Create some tutorials and post them online. Use pictures, words, and video. Take people step-by-step through part of your process.”

Using a board database, I break my content output into four categories:

  1. Idea

  2. Outlining

  3. In progress

  4. Published

Because all my note-taking, insights, and journaling are also included in my workspace, I'm able to streamline my content creation process using relations to references, quotes, and previous ideas.

With an added calendar database, I can plan out and strategize my content schedule to see how consistent I’m being over time and plan out content strategies around major projects.

Map Out Personal and Professional Projects and Tasks

Values, key results, insights, and journaling should all equate to committed actions.

These are the actions you take on a daily and weekly basis to make measurable progress toward whatever is important to you. Think of projects as specific outcomes that are each comprised of tasks that make measurable progress toward completing that project.

Without an organized way to define, prioritize, and complete your tasks over time, you’re likely to miss deadlines and fall behind on things that are important to you or that you’re accountable for.

This is why one of the most powerful uses of my Notion workspace is my Projects and Tasks database.

For my Projects and Tasks setup, I use a simple list database with sub-items enabled along with the following views:

  • Today

  • Board View

  • By Project

  • By Key Result

  • By Client

  • Calendar

  • Done

Through these views, I’m able to plan, prioritize, and complete tasks across my entire workspace, whether personal or professional. With sub-items enabled, I can instantly create projects and associated tasks while tracking deadlines, statuses, and project progress.

With one click, I can instantly relate any task or project to a key result, a project, or a client, creating well-structured dashboards for managing anything I’m accountable for.

Additionally, through Notion Calendar, I’m able to see all my tasks throughout my day, making it easy to plan out my days and weeks without starting at a gigantic task list. For more on this approach to task management, check out Sam Corcos’ interview with Tim Ferris.

Expand Knowledge and Skills with Templated Accelerated Learning Plans

As mentioned above, learning is the catalyst for all meaningful growth in life.

And with a refined approach to learning, no matter what the purpose, you can tackle any challenge, obstacle, barrier, or growth you decide.

To streamline and systematize my learning, I use a Learning Dashboard that displays:

  • Learning goals

  • Questions, topics, and skills

  • Learning sub-goals

  • Learning materials

Using one-click templates built directly inside my Learning Goals database, I can instantly deconstruct a learning goal into:

  • My current questions about the learning goal

  • The topics I’ll need to study and master

  • The skills I’ll need to learn and gain

Then, using relations to my learning materials and pre-loaded sub-goal templates (inspired by Bloom’s Taxonomy), I can further break down the specific learning activities I need to complete to reach my learning goal.

I’ve used this method for years to learn a wide range of knowledge topics and skills and have shared it openly with students, clients, and friends through the years.

Prioritize the Content You Consume and Curate Learning Notes

In our digital world of endless content options to consume, it can be overwhelming to decide what books, videos, podcasts, or reading materials to focus on next, not to mention, remembering what you’ve consumed over the years.

One of the most important parts of a personal knowledge management system is the ability to capture and prioritize any content you want to consume. Through clever use of sorting using Notion’s properties, now I never have to follow my gut when it comes to deciding what to consume next — my system helps decide for me. When a piece of content is in progress, I can instantly capture and organize all my notes on that content in a single page, making it searchable and “referenceable” throughout my workspace.

Using the Notion Web Clipper or the built-in share features on my phone, anytime I come across a piece of content I want to consume, I’ll instantly add it to my Learning Material database. Using a select property titled Relevancy, I categorize content into one of six categories:

  • Time Sensitive

  • Current Challenge

  • Current Key Result / Learning Goal

  • Client-Related

  • Seems Helpful / Interesting

  • Future Key Result / Learning Goal

When necessary, I’ll use an AI tool to summarize the content to get a “gist” of what it’s about to ensure I’m appropriately categorizing its relevancy.

I then organize all my Learning Materials using a simple list database with the following views:

  • Next Up

  • In Progress

  • By Learning Goal

  • Done Calendar

In the Next Up view, I automatically sort all my new entries using two stacked sorts:

  1. Relevancy (ascending)

  2. Created time (ascending)

This automatically puts the most relevant content at the top of the list, ensuring that each time I start consuming something new, I can quickly glance at the top items of the list and pick the most currently relevant item to start learning.

Inside the page for each entry, I’m able to relate to key results, learning goals, and sub-goals. Because each entry is its own page, I can also take notes directly on that page using pre-loaded note-taking templates.

Using tags, I can make my learning notes searchable from multiple places in my workspace. With relations, all of my learning notes are instantly available as references when I’m planning out a content piece.

Write, Organize, and Reference Meeting Notes

Even if you don’t consider yourself a “note-taker,” curating meeting notes from all your meetings is a great way to make sure nothing “slips through the cracks.”

Anytime I’m in a meeting, I’ll either take notes directly into Notion or use an AI-powered meeting transcriber to capture notes for that meeting. With relations, I can instantly connect meeting notes to a client or project and even create tasks directly from a meeting template.

Depending on the type of meeting I’m in, I always have the option to use pre-loaded meeting note templates designed for discovery calls, pitch meetings, and more.

Identify and Reflect On Your Anti-Values

One of the most unique aspects of the LearnChangeDo workspace is the Anti-Values database.

While Values are the things you care most about in life, your Anti-Values are the thoughts and beliefs that hold you back from what’s most important to you.

I first got interested in the idea of “Anti-Values” through the work of Steven Hayes and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. As Hayes points out, through the use of an ACT Matrix, identifying your Anti-Values can help you begin the process of working through them as they emerge on your way to achieving what’s important to you.

Similarly to Values, I capture each Anti-Value on a simple list database that relates to my journaling and my Anti-Habits databases. Each Anti-Value is pre-loaded with a guided reflection template inspired by Cognitive Behavior Therapy.

Pinpoint and Decrease Your Anti-Habits

While Anti-Habits are the disruptive mental and emotional content that gets in your way, your Anti-Habits are the behaviors that you tend to emit as a result.

Simply put: your Anti-Habits are the behaviors getting in your way of pursuing what’s most important to you.

Understanding and changing these behaviors begins with pinpointing them — defining them using specific language.

To do this, I use a simple list database with built-in templates for reflecting on specific occurrences. Using these templates, I increase awareness around the context in which it occurred, potential antecedents, and other important variables.

Most importantly, I can increase my capacity to change that behavior by understanding what’s preceding it and what’s occurring afterward.

Manage All Your Clients with Peace of Mind

Managing clients can get messy without the right systems.

Using a simple board view, I categorize my clients into four phases (Discovery, Proposed, Active, and Inactive).

By clicking on a client, I have a simple one-page client dashboard displaying everything I need to see, including:

  • Contact information

  • Client projects

  • Meeting notes

  • Tasks

  • Docs

All projects, tasks, meeting notes, and docs relate throughout my workspace, making it easy to find exactly what I need when I need it. To make my life even easier, using additional pre-loaded templates, I can quickly create proposals and specs that are easily shareable with clients via public Notion links.

Download the LearnChangeDo Workspace

The LearnChangeDo Workspace is my complete personal system for personal knowledge and behavior management. I’ve created dozens of iterations for a wide range of clients, including:

  • Founders

  • Professionals

  • Solopreneurs

  • Content creators

  • Nonprofit leaders

  • and more

The best part about the entire system you just read about above is you can get it for yourself.

If you’re interested in learning more about the core strategies behind the LearnChangeDo system, you can browse my free library of strategies here.

To download the entire system for your Notion workspace, click here: