27 published lessons with this tag.
No productivity or thinking system works without a reliable capture reflex. The system is not the bottleneck — the habit that feeds it is.
If capturing a thought takes more than a few seconds, you will not do it consistently — and inconsistent capture means permanent information loss.
Link capture to existing habits like morning coffee or commute time so it becomes automatic rather than effortful.
Extended focus needs environmental rituals and structural support to sustain. You cannot will yourself into deep work any more than you can will yourself into sleep — you have to construct the conditions that make it inevitable.
Evaluations you make so often that you no longer notice them are the most dangerous.
Small patterns repeated daily become the dominant forces in your life.
Regularly audit what you consume and cut sources that produce more noise than signal. Without scheduled review, your information environment silently degrades — and you adapt to the noise without noticing.
Rather than relying on willpower create contexts that make desired behavior natural.
Progress you cannot see is progress you will not sustain. Externalize it or lose it.
Add new nodes and edges daily and the graph becomes increasingly powerful over time.
Your habits and automatic reactions are agents that were installed without your conscious input.
Every deliberate agent you create replaces an unconscious default.
Inventory your existing agents both designed and default to understand what is running.
A simple agent that fires consistently beats a complex agent that fires intermittently.
Agents for sleep exercise nutrition and stress management decisions.
Without a clear trigger an agent never activates no matter how well designed.
Internal triggers are thoughts and feelings — external triggers are events and cues.
Physical cues in your environment trigger more reliably than mental intentions.
Linking an agent to a specific event like arriving at work or opening your laptop.
The completion of one agent becomes the trigger for the next.
Habits persist because they create their own reinforcing feedback.
Identifying the reinforcing mechanism is the key to breaking a destructive loop.
A well-designed habit is delegation to your future automatic self.
Your environment can enforce behaviors that willpower alone cannot sustain.
Consistent 1% improvements produce transformative results over time.
Making an agent faster means it can serve you more often with less friction.
New agents are most fragile in their first month — they need extra attention and support to survive.