Frequently asked questions about thinking, epistemology, and cognitive tools. 567 answers
Identify the health domain where you currently spend the most decision energy — sleep, exercise, nutrition, or stress management. Write one agent for that domain in full trigger-condition-action format. Be precise: specify the exact trigger (a time, a sensation, an environmental cue), the.
Audit your financial decision patterns for the past 30 days. Identify three categories: (1) recurring spending decisions you deliberate on every time despite knowing the right answer, (2) savings behaviors that depend on leftover money rather than automatic allocation, and (3) investment actions.
Conduct a Phase 21 integration audit. (1) List every agent you have identified or designed across Phase 21 — social, decision, communication, health, financial. For each one, write: trigger, condition, action, and current reliability rating (1-5). (2) Draw a simple diagram showing how these agents.
Pick one behavior you've been meaning to do consistently but keep forgetting. Write it as an implementation intention: 'When [specific situation], I will [specific action].' The situation must be something you already encounter reliably — not a time on a clock, but a contextual cue you cannot.
Choose one behavior you've been trying to do more consistently — stretching, journaling, reading, taking vitamins. Identify the physical location where that behavior should happen. Now place one visible, tangible object in that location that makes the behavior obvious: a yoga mat unrolled by your.
Choose one epistemic behavior you want to install — journaling, graph review, a weekly reflection, anything. Assign it a specific time: not 'in the morning' but '6:45 AM' or 'every Friday at 4:00 PM.' Set a single recurring alarm. Run the behavior at that exact time for five consecutive instances.
Map your next workday as a sequence of transition events — not times, but observable moments where one activity ends and another begins. Waking up. Finishing breakfast. Arriving at your workspace. Opening your first tool. Finishing a meeting. Returning from lunch. Closing your last application..
For the next three days, carry a small notebook or use a notes app to log every emotional shift you notice — not just the big ones, but the subtle ones: a flicker of irritation when someone interrupts, a dip in energy after reading an email, a surge of anxiety before a call. For each entry, record.
Map one existing chain in your life. Pick a reliable morning or evening sequence and write out every link: 'After I [completion of A], I do [B].' Identify where the chain breaks most often — that's your weakest link. Now design one new two-link chain: pick an existing behavior you already do.
Pick one trigger you currently use (or want to use) for a behavior change. Write down the last five times it fired. For each, mark whether the firing was a true positive (the situation genuinely warranted the behavior) or a false positive (the trigger fired but the behavior wasn't needed). If more.
Pick one behavioral trigger you currently use — a habit cue, an emotional response pattern, or an if-then rule you've set for yourself. Write down every context in which it fired over the past week. Mark each as 'correct fire' or 'false positive.' For each false positive, identify one qualifying.
Pick one trigger you have set for yourself that consistently fails to fire. Write it down. Then ask: Is the cue perceptually distinct from its background? Does it interrupt my current attentional focus? Is it tied to a moment when I have cognitive bandwidth to notice it? Redesign the trigger using.
Choose one behavior you want to trigger more reliably. Identify the exact physical or digital location where you'll be at the moment you want the behavior to fire. Place a cue there — a physical object, a sticky note, a tool positioned for immediate use. The cue must be impossible to miss and.
Audit your current digital triggers by opening your phone's notification settings and your calendar. Count every recurring alert, alarm, and notification that is supposed to prompt a specific behavior (not just inform you of something). For each one, answer: (1) Does this trigger fire at the right.
Identify one behavior you've been trying to trigger consistently but keep failing at. Choose one person — a friend, partner, colleague, or peer — and make a specific social agreement: 'I will do X at Y time, and I will report to you by Z.' Make the report format concrete (a text, a photo, a shared.
Open your phone's notification settings right now. Count the total number of apps with notifications enabled. Then count how many you actually acted on in the last 48 hours — not glanced at, acted on. Calculate your personal signal-to-noise ratio. If fewer than 20% of your notification sources.
List every trigger you currently rely on — alarms, environmental cues, habit stacks, calendar prompts, digital notifications. For each one, answer three questions: (1) How many times did it fire in the last two weeks? (2) When it fired, did I actually execute the intended behavior? (3) Is the.
Choose one trigger you currently rely on — a habit cue, a reminder, or an environmental prompt. Conduct a UX audit of this trigger using Norman's seven fundamental principles. (1) Discoverability: Can you reliably notice this trigger when it occurs, or does it blend into the background? (2).
Pick one trigger you currently use (or want to use) for a behavior you're building. Write it down exactly as it stands. Now run it for three days, logging every time it fires and whether the activation felt useful or wasted. At the end of three days, rewrite the trigger to be more specific based.
Conduct a trigger coverage audit for one domain of your life (work, health, relationships, finances). List every important recurring situation in that domain — every condition that, if you failed to respond appropriately, would produce meaningful negative consequences. For each situation, answer:.
Over the next five days, keep a decision log. Every time you face a decision — large or small — write down what it is, then classify it by type. Do not invent categories in advance. Let them emerge from the data. By the end of five days, count how many distinct types you have logged and how many.
List every decision you made in the past two weeks. Group them by type: hiring, purchasing, architectural, scheduling, prioritization, relationship. For each type, write down the process you actually used. Now compare: did the process match the stakes? Pick the one type where the mismatch is.
Pick a real decision you're facing that involves at least three options and at least four criteria. Build a weighted decision matrix on paper or in a spreadsheet. First, list your criteria without assigning weights — just get them all down. Second, assign weights from 1 to 5 based on how much each.
List your five most recent decisions that took more than a day to make. For each one, answer: if this decision turns out badly, can I reverse it within a week at low cost? Mark each as a one-way door or a two-way door. Count how many two-way doors consumed disproportionate deliberation time. For.