The irreducible epistemic atoms underlying the curriculum. 4,828 atoms across 8 types and 2 molecules
Reassessment trigger: a mechanism or condition that initiates the process of evaluating whether current priorities remain valid, categorized into scheduled triggers (time-based), event triggers (discrete circumstances), and felt triggers (internal signals of misalignment)
Reassessment protocol: a structured four-step process for evaluating priorities when a trigger fires, consisting of stating what changed, running the zero-based question on each priority, checking for new priorities, and re-ranking and communicating changes
Churn: the pattern of changing priorities in response to momentary psychological states rather than genuine environmental shifts, characterized by frequent, poorly timed changes that lack structural justification and are driven by mood, anxiety, or attraction to novelty rather than verifiable circumstances
Priority stack: a cognitive data structure that maintains a small, ordered set of three to five priorities where only the top item is actively engaged, with four defined operations (push, pop, peek, swap) that respect working memory constraints and eliminate task-switching costs
Saying no: the deliberate, transparent, and principled act of declining requests or opportunities that do not align with one's top priorities, which serves as the enforcement mechanism for a priority system and protects attention from being diluted by non-priority commitments
Priority debt: the accumulated liability created by consistently neglecting important but non-urgent priorities, where the cost of addressing deferred priorities increases over time due to compounding effects
Silent deference: the deliberate withholding of information, opinions, and concerns relevant to people making decisions, specifically characterized by acquiescent silence where individuals resign themselves to the belief that their input does not matter and that others' priorities will prevail regardless of what they say
Internal negotiation: the structured process of resolving conflicts between competing internal drives by separating drives from positions, identifying underlying interests, generating options for mutual gain, and using objective criteria to evaluate solutions, following the same principles as external negotiation but applied within the self
Weekly priority reset: the deliberate practice of starting each week from a blank slate to select top priorities rather than continuing last week's priorities by default, involving a structured process of zero-based selection, comparison against previous priorities, and identification of priority debt
Priority communication: the practice of making strategic priority information visible to specific people whose behavior intersects with yours, enabling others to support rather than undermine your focus through coordination and adjustment
Priority trap: a systematic distortion mechanism that redirects time and energy away from stated priorities and toward activities that feel like they deserve priority status but do not actually have it, operating most effectively when the individual does not recognize it is occurring
Priority simplification: an emergency protocol for reducing active priorities to the absolute minimum viable set (one to three items) when overwhelmed, involving deliberate triage to identify which priorities would create the most downstream relief if advanced, followed by specific disposition of deferred priorities
Priority misalignment: the structural disconnection between the effort a person actually expends and the priorities they have explicitly ranked, where the effort flows to lower-ranked activities while important-ranked activities receive insufficient attention, producing exhaustion without progress and compounding opportunity costs
Cross-domain priority alignment: the integration of work, health, relationship, and personal growth priorities into a coherent whole where actions in one domain support rather than undermine priorities in others, creating reinforcing rather than conflicting demands across life domains
Revealed preferences: the economic concept that consumer choices under real constraints reveal preferences more reliably than verbal reports, which forms the basis for understanding that actual behavior reveals true values more accurately than stated values
Energy: the multi-dimensional system of physiological and psychological resources that must be systematically monitored, renewed, and strategically deployed to execute high-performance work, with distinct dimensions including physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual that each require different management practices and depletion/recovery patterns
Physical energy: the foundational fuel derived from oxygen-glucose interaction in the body, regulated by breathing, eating, sleeping, and movement, which determines raw capacity and depletes according to biological rhythms and ultradian cycles
Mental energy: the focus of energy that governs ability to organize attention, sustain concentration, shift between tasks, and think creatively, which depletes through sustained directed attention and recovers through engagement with involuntary attention and soft fascination
Spiritual energy: the force of energy derived from connection to purpose, values, and meaning beyond self-interest, which provides motivational power and can be demanding and renewing simultaneously, and depletes through disconnection from purpose and meaning
Energy audit: a structured, multi-day observation protocol that tracks energy levels before and after specific activities across all four dimensions (physical, mental, emotional, spiritual) to reveal patterns that obscure narrative memory and provide empirical data for energy management decisions
Ultradian rhythm: the approximately 90-minute biological cycle that alternates between periods of higher neurological arousal (focused, alert, capable of demanding cognitive work) and periods of lower arousal (diffuse, restless, better suited for recovery or routine tasks) operating within circadian rhythms
Peak window: the specific period during a circadian cycle when cognitive capacity for analytical problem-solving, pattern recognition, and sustained focus reaches its maximum level, typically lasting 90-120 minutes and aligning with the ascending phase of ultradian rhythms
Biological prime time: the specific window of time when circadian and ultradian rhythms align to create optimal conditions for cognitive throughput, characterized by peak cortisol levels, heightened arousal, and maximal availability of neurotransmitters supporting sustained attention
Recovery: the biological process of restoring depleted cognitive and emotional systems through structured rest periods that occur between stress cycles, enabling adaptation rather than breakdown.