43 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.
Your emotions do not add random noise to perception — they warp it in predictable, measurable directions. Anxiety inflates threats. Euphoria shrinks risks. Anger manufactures certainty. Once you know the direction of the distortion, you can correct for it.
Document your process for managing knowledge — not just the knowledge itself. Your system should be explicit enough that you could rebuild it from documentation alone.
The best category systems adapt as you learn more about what you are organizing.
When you draw all the relationships between elements the system structure becomes visible.
Your meta-schemas form the operating system that runs all your other cognitive software.
Improving your meta-schemas improves everything built on top of them.
Filing systems come and go but a well-linked graph retains its value regardless of how you browse it.
Cognitive agents are repeatable processes you design to handle recurring decisions.
Any system that cannot observe its own output cannot improve.
Action observation evaluation and adjustment form the basic feedback cycle.
Measure things that predict outcomes rather than waiting for outcomes themselves.
Real situations often involve several interacting feedback loops simultaneously.
Do not wait for feedback to arrive naturally — engineer feedback into your systems.
The ability to build and tune feedback loops is the ability to continuously improve.
No process works perfectly every time — error correction must be built in from the start.
You cannot fix what you cannot detect — invest in error detection mechanisms.
Design systems that surface errors early when they are easiest and cheapest to correct.
Accept that some error rate is normal and define how much error is tolerable.
A checklist is an error prevention agent that catches predictable mistakes.
Small uncorrected errors can trigger chains of increasingly large errors.
Design your systems to fail partially rather than completely.
For every important process have a documented way to recover from common failures.
Recurring errors point to structural problems not personal failures.
Use tools and systems to catch errors that manual vigilance misses.
Every correction takes time and energy — reduce the error rate rather than just correcting faster.
Expecting perfection creates fragility — expecting and handling errors creates resilience.
The best systems detect and correct their own errors without manual intervention.
Some agents can run simultaneously while others must wait for previous results.
When two agents each wait for the other neither can proceed — design to prevent this.
When multiple agents need the same scarce resource like your attention define allocation rules.
Coordination itself costs effort — keep the coordination cost proportional to the benefit.
Your set of agents is an ecosystem — it needs balance and periodic assessment.
Every new agent interacts with all existing agents — add new agents deliberately.
When retiring an agent update everything that depended on it.
Periodically assess how well your agents work together as a system.
Tools, checklists, and automated processes are delegation targets.
Specify the result you want, not the exact steps to get there. This preserves autonomy and invites better solutions.
Delegation without verification is abdication. Build lightweight checks to ensure delegated work meets your standards.
A dashboard gives you a single view of all your agents' health and performance.
Monitoring completes the feedback loop — observation enables adjustment enables improvement.
Use monitoring data to make targeted improvements to your agents.
Optimization improves within a framework; innovation replaces the framework. Know which you need.