What does it mean that the experiment backlog?

Maintain a list of behavioral experiments you want to run.

Example: You are reading a book about decision-making and you encounter an idea about pre-commitment devices — removing future choices by binding yourself in advance. Immediately, three experiment ideas fire: What if you deleted social media apps from your phone each Sunday night and reinstalled them only on Friday evening? What if you pre-committed to a specific lunch every weekday to eliminate daily decision fatigue? What if you locked your credit card in a drawer for thirty days and used only cash to test whether physical payment changes your spending patterns? Each idea feels urgent in the moment, and each is genuinely worth testing. But you are already midway through a sleep experiment, and starting three new experiments simultaneously would contaminate all of them. Without a backlog, you face a lose-lose choice: either you try to hold the ideas in your head — where they will degrade, merge, or vanish within days — or you interrupt your current experiment to chase the shiniest new idea. A backlog resolves this entirely. You spend ninety seconds capturing each idea with a one-line hypothesis: "Pre-commitment by removing social media apps Sunday-to-Friday will reduce average daily screen time by 40 minutes." "Fixed weekday lunch will free approximately 15 minutes of daily decision energy for higher-value choices." "Cash-only spending for 30 days will reduce discretionary purchases by 25%." You tag each with an estimated domain, effort level, and rough priority. Then you return to your sleep experiment with full attention, knowing that nothing has been lost. When the sleep experiment concludes, you open your backlog and choose your next experiment deliberately — not impulsively, not from whatever you happen to remember, but from a curated queue of your own best ideas.

Try this: Create your experiment backlog right now. Open a document, spreadsheet, or note — whatever format you will actually maintain. Title it "Experiment Backlog" and create five columns or fields: Hypothesis (one sentence stating what you predict), Domain (which life area this targets — work, health, relationships, cognition, finances, habits), Estimated Effort (low, medium, or high — how much disruption or setup is required), Expected Learning Value (low, medium, or high — how much useful information you expect to gain regardless of outcome), and Status (queued, active, completed, or abandoned). Now populate it. Write down every behavioral experiment you have been thinking about running, have half-started, or have seen someone else try and thought "I should test that." Aim for at least seven entries. Do not filter for quality — capture everything, including ideas that feel silly or obvious. Once you have your initial list, sort the entries by expected learning value, breaking ties by lower effort. Circle or highlight the top three. Finally, identify one experiment from your top three that you could begin within the next seven days and write a concrete start date next to it. You now have a functioning backlog. The next step is to schedule a monthly grooming session — fifteen minutes to add new ideas, remove stale ones, and re-sort priorities.