Concepts
The irreducible epistemic atoms underlying the curriculum. 4,828 atoms across 8 types
Measure your biological prime time with hourly ratings…
When measuring your biological prime time, set hourly check-ins for at least 10 workdays and rate mental clarity, motivation, and physical energy on a 1-5 scale to identify your peak 2-3 hour window.
Offer alternative times instead of justifying your focus…
When defending peak attention hours against meeting requests, offer alternative times outside your blocked window rather than explaining or justifying the block itself.
Batch shallow work outside your peak hours, not throughout…
Batch all shallow work—email, Slack, administrative tasks, routine meetings—into time blocks outside your measured biological prime time rather than distributing them throughout the day.
Write a one-minute ready-to-resume note before every task…
Before switching from any unfinished task, write a one-minute ready-to-resume note specifying: where you stopped, what remains unresolved, and the next concrete action you will take when returning.
Put your phone in another room during deep work…
Place your phone in a different room, drawer, or timed lockbox during deep work blocks, not merely flipped over on your desk, to eliminate both visual cues and immediate retrieval affordances.
Insert 5-minute transition buffers between all calendar…
Insert five-minute transition buffers between all calendar blocks—meetings, deep work sessions, any context shifts—using those minutes to close the previous context and orient to the next rather than scheduling back-to-back commitments.
Write for three minutes after charged interactions before…
After emotionally charged interactions—difficult conversations, stressful emails, frustrating exchanges—take three minutes to write what happened, what you felt, and what (if anything) needs to happen next before switching to analytical work.
Name the emotion driving task-switch urges — three-second…
When experiencing the urge to switch tasks during focused work, pause for three seconds to name the internal state driving the urge (boredom, uncertainty, anxiety), then consciously return to the task without suppressing the emotion.
When a task bores you through under-challenge, inject…
When a task produces boredom through severe under-challenge (skill level exceeds task demands by 3+ points on a 10-point scale), inject complexity by adding constraints, combining tasks, or converting execution into teaching rather than forcing continued engagement through willpower.
Match curiosity type to task type — open questions…
Frame exploratory work with broad open-ended questions to recruit I-type curiosity (pleasurable anticipation), and frame convergent problem-solving with specific gap-closing questions to recruit D-type curiosity (need-state tension), matching curiosity type to the cognitive demands of the task.
60-90 minute boxes for creative work, 15-25 minutes…
Use time-boxes of 60-90 minutes for creative and strategic work requiring divergent exploration before convergence, and 15-25 minute boxes for administrative work where compression forces efficiency, matching box duration to the cognitive signature of the task type.
Take soft-fascination breaks (walking, nature)…
Structure breaks between time-boxes with activities providing soft fascination (nature, walking, distant gaze) rather than hard stimulation (social media, news, email) to enable genuine deactivation of the attentional goal and prevent false breaks that drain the same resource you're trying to restore.
Stop and take a real break when output quality degrades…
When cognitive output quality begins degrading (increased rewrites, slowed pace, rising error rate), stop work and take a 10-15 minute break with genuine disengagement even if the task is incomplete, because work produced during depletion has lower quality than work produced after restoration despite shorter total time.
When stuck on a creative problem, switch to walking…
When stuck on a problem requiring creative or non-obvious solutions, stop active work on it and switch to low-demand activity (walking, showering, routine tasks) to activate incubation effects, as the break enables cognitive processing that continued deliberate effort cannot produce.
Pre-decide everything before a deep work session…
Eliminate decision points during deep work startup by pre-deciding tool configuration, document access, notification state, and physical materials before the session begins.
End deep work sessions with a 2-5 minute shutdown ritual…
End every deep work session with a 2-5 minute shutdown ritual that reviews accomplishments, documents next steps, and closes all open cognitive loops before transitioning to other activities.
Keep separate Deep and Shallow task lists — schedule Deep…
Maintain two separate task lists—Deep (requiring sustained focus) and Shallow (executable while mildly distracted)—and schedule Deep items during measured peak attention windows while batching Shallow items for post-peak periods.
If shallow work exceeds 50%, the problem is structural…
Track your shallow-to-deep work ratio weekly and treat ratios exceeding 50% shallow as signals of structural calendar problems requiring role negotiation rather than personal discipline improvement.
Track decision quality, comprehension, and emotional…
Rate your decision quality, comprehension speed, and emotional regulation daily on a 1-5 scale across five consecutive workdays to detect attention debt accumulation before subjective awareness registers the degradation.
Use both automated and manual time tracking — neither…
Use automated time-tracking tools alongside manual 30-minute increment logs simultaneously for three consecutive workdays to capture both digital activity and non-digital context that neither method alone reveals.
Predict your time allocation before reviewing tracking…
Before reviewing any attention tracking data, write explicit predictions about your time allocation percentages across categories, then calculate prediction-reality gaps to identify your largest attention blind spots.
On depleted days (capacity 1-2), cap deep work at 1 hour…
When daily capacity rating is 1-2 (depleted/foggy), limit focused work to 1 hour maximum and allocate remaining time to administrative tasks, recovery, or maintenance rather than forcing deep work.
Your capacity ceiling is where strong output stops…
During capacity measurement, rate output quality at the end of each work block (strong/acceptable/weak) and identify the cumulative hour mark where strong output stops as your effective capacity ceiling for planning purposes.
Alternate between cognitive pools — creative, then…
Sequence work blocks across different cognitive pools (creative, then analytical, then social, then administrative) rather than stacking same-type work, to allow depleted pools to recover while fresh pools carry the load.