25 published lessons with this tag.
Link capture to existing habits like morning coffee or commute time so it becomes automatic rather than effortful.
Every pattern has a trigger — identifying the trigger is the key to changing the pattern.
Record what new evidence or experience caused you to revise your schema. Every schema update has a trigger — a specific observation, conversation, failure, or piece of evidence that shifted your model. If you do not capture that trigger at the moment of change, you lose the provenance of your own thinking. Lost provenance means you cannot reconstruct why you believe what you now believe, cannot evaluate whether the change was warranted, and cannot detect patterns in what kinds of evidence actually move you.
Define specific signals that should prompt you to re-evaluate a schema.
Every agent has a trigger that activates it, a condition that validates it, and an action it takes.
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.
A trigger must be something you can detect consistently.
Physical cues in your environment trigger more reliably than mental intentions.
Using specific times or time intervals as triggers leverages your existing time awareness.
Linking an agent to a specific event like arriving at work or opening your laptop.
Using specific emotional states as activation signals for pre-designed responses.
The completion of one agent becomes the trigger for the next.
Too sensitive and the agent fires too often — too insensitive and it never fires.
When a trigger fires in the wrong context you need to add qualifying conditions.
When you fail to notice a trigger you need to make it more salient.
Combining multiple trigger conditions for higher-specificity activation.
Position trigger cues where you will encounter them at the right moment.
Alarms, notifications, and calendar events as systematic trigger mechanisms.
Other people can serve as triggers — asking someone to remind you is a social trigger.
Too many triggers overwhelm your attention — curate ruthlessly.
Regularly review your triggers to ensure they are still relevant and well-calibrated.
You are designing the user experience of your own cognitive systems.
Start with broad triggers and narrow them as you learn what works.
A complete set of well-tuned triggers means you respond appropriately to everything that matters.