Frequently asked questions about thinking, epistemology, and cognitive tools. 567 answers
Choose a routine environment — your commute, a work meeting, a meal. Before entering, write down one sentence about your current mood and one expectation you hold about what will happen. After, write down what you noticed. Compare the two lists. Where did your mood or expectation direct your.
Choose something you interact with daily — your morning routine, a codebase you maintain, a recurring meeting. Set a timer for ten minutes and describe it in writing as if you have never encountered it before. Do not use any evaluative language (good, bad, efficient, broken). Only describe what.
Set three random timers throughout your workday. When each one fires, pause for 30 seconds and scan: jaw, shoulders, chest, stomach, hands. Rate tension on a 1-5 scale. Write one sentence about what you were doing or thinking. After five days, review the log. Look for patterns — which activities.
Pick one situation from the past 24 hours that bothered you. Write two columns on a page. Left column: 'What a camera would record' — only observable, verifiable data (words said, actions taken, timestamps, measurable outcomes). Right column: 'The story I told about it' — every interpretation,.
Pick a decision you've recently made or a design you've recently shipped. Write down your perspective in two sentences. Then ask three people with different roles, experiences, or stakes to describe what they see. Write each perspective on a separate card. Compare them side by side and mark.
Choose one thing you interact with daily — a dashboard you check, a codebase you maintain, a meeting you attend. Tomorrow, spend five minutes observing it in silence before forming any opinion or taking any action. Set a timer. No notes, no conclusions, just looking. Afterward, write down three.
Choose one event from today — a conversation, a meeting, something you read. Open a blank page and draw a vertical line down the middle. Label the left column 'I observed' and the right column 'I interpreted.' Fill the left column first, writing only sensory-level facts: what was said, what.
Choose a situation you need to evaluate — a technical decision, a team dynamic, a process that seems broken. Before you allow yourself to judge it, set a timer for fifteen minutes and write only observations: specific behaviors, exact data points, direct quotes, timestamps, measurable outcomes..
For the next 48 hours, keep a judgment log. Carry a small notebook or open a note on your phone. Every time you catch yourself evaluating something — a person's competence, a piece of work, a decision someone made, your own performance — write down the judgment verbatim and the situation that.
Pick one situation today where you notice a judgment forming — about a person, a decision, or an outcome. Before the judgment fully lands, ask one genuine question about it: 'What might explain this?' or 'What am I not seeing?' Write down the judgment and the question side by side. Notice which.
Pick one low-stakes situation today — a slow checkout line, a mildly annoying email, someone interrupting you in a meeting. Instead of reacting, narrate what you observe internally: 'I notice tension in my jaw. I notice a thought that this person doesn't respect my time. I notice an urge to.
Conduct a twenty-minute 'observation audit' of a domain you care about — a work project, a relationship, a personal habit. Set a timer. For the full twenty minutes, write only observations: facts, behaviors, measurements, timestamps, direct quotes. No evaluative language whatsoever. When the timer.
Pick one small behavior you repeated today — checking your phone, rewriting a sentence, hesitating before speaking in a meeting. Write it down in one sentence. Now ask: where else in my life does this same structure appear? Check three scales: daily habits, recurring work patterns, and.
Review your past week. Identify one behavior that repeated at least twice — a reaction, a decision pattern, a conversational habit, a way you responded to stress. Give it a short, specific name (2-4 words). Write the name down along with a one-sentence description of what triggers it. Over the.
Choose one behavioral pattern you named in L-0103. Over the next three days, track every instance where the pattern activates. For each instance, record three things: (1) the trigger that initiated the pattern, (2) the moment you recognized the pattern was running, and (3) what you chose to do —.
Pick a pattern you have already named — from your work, your relationships, your health, or your thinking. Write the pattern in structural terms, stripping out all domain-specific detail. (Not 'I procrastinate on quarterly reports' but 'I delay action when the output will be evaluated by people.
Open your journal or notes from the past two weeks. Instead of scanning for problems, answer one question: What went well, and what was I doing just before it went well? Write down three positive patterns — routines, habits, environmental setups, or sequences of actions that preceded good.
Start a pattern journal today. Choose one domain — energy, mood, decisions, or creative output. Each evening, write three lines: (1) what recurred today that you've seen before, (2) what conditions surrounded it, (3) your provisional hypothesis about why. Do this for 14 consecutive days. On day.
Review the last 3-5 patterns you've identified in your own behavior (from a journal, tracker, or memory). For each, write down: (1) when did this pattern first form, (2) what conditions strengthen it, (3) what conditions weaken it, (4) has it changed over time. Now look across all of them. Do your.
Open your calendar, journal, or email archive. Pick one recurring behavior — energy level, spending, exercise frequency, creative output, conflict with a partner. Chart it by week or month for the last 12 months. Look for peaks, troughs, and phase relationships (does one cycle lead another by 2-3.
For five consecutive workdays, rate your mental energy at four fixed times: 9 AM, 12 PM, 3 PM, and 7 PM. Use a simple 1-5 scale (1 = foggy/depleted, 5 = sharp/focused). At each checkpoint, also note what you're doing, what you ate last, and how much sleep you got the night before. At the end of.
Pick a task you've been avoiding for more than 48 hours. Don't do it yet. Instead, write down: (1) what you feel when you think about starting it, (2) what you did instead the last time you avoided it, (3) what story you told yourself to justify the delay. Now look at the last three instances of.
Pick three genuine successes from the past two years — shipped a project, nailed a presentation, maintained a habit for months, solved a hard problem. For each one, answer: (1) What conditions were present? (2) What did I do differently from my usual approach? (3) Who was involved? (4) What was my.
Identify one automatic behavioral pattern you want to change. Map its chain: trigger -> response -> consequence. Tomorrow, when the trigger fires, execute a pre-planned competing response instead. It doesn't need to be perfect — it just needs to be different. Write down what happened. The goal.