Frequently asked questions about thinking, epistemology, and cognitive tools. 4568 answers
Pick one decision you made in the last week — what to work on, which tool to use, whether to attend a meeting, anything. Write a five-line decision record: (1) What you decided. (2) What alternatives you considered. (3) What information you had. (4) What you were optimizing for. (5) What would.
Documenting only the conclusion without the context. Writing 'We chose React' tells future-you nothing. Writing 'We chose React because the team already knows it, the timeline was six weeks, and we valued shipping speed over long-term performance' tells future-you everything. The decision without.
The most valuable thing to capture is why you chose what you chose. Decisions decay faster than facts — and unlike facts, they cannot be reconstructed after the outcome is known.
What is not connected to anything else is either irrelevant or disconnected by mistake.
A link labeled causes is more useful than a generic link labeled related.
Explaining your knowledge to someone else forces you to integrate it.
Reviewing key conditions before starting a task catches errors before they propagate.
Identify one recurring task you perform at least weekly — sending a report, publishing content, deploying code, running a meeting, submitting an invoice. Write a pre-flight checklist of 5-7 conditions that must be true before you execute. These are not steps in the task itself; they are conditions.
Treating a pre-flight check as a formality rather than a genuine verification. The most dangerous version of this is 'flow-through checking' — running your eyes down the checklist and marking each item complete without actually testing the condition. Airline investigators call this 'checklist.
Reviewing key conditions before starting a task catches errors before they propagate.
Delegating too much creates disconnection from the work that matters and atrophies critical skills.
The act of writing generates new thoughts rather than merely documenting existing ones. Writing is not transcription — it is the primary mechanism through which vague intuitions become precise understanding.
If processing an item takes less than two minutes, do it immediately — deferring it costs more than completing it.
Process your current inbox — email, notes app, physical papers, whatever contains unprocessed items. For each item, ask one question: 'Can I complete this in under two minutes?' If yes, do it immediately and move to the next item. If no, defer it (add it to your task list, calendar, or reference.
Using the two-minute rule as a license for reactivity — doing every small thing that crosses your path all day long, instead of applying the rule during dedicated processing sessions. David Allen was explicit: the rule applies when you are processing your inbox, not when you are doing focused.
If processing an item takes less than two minutes, do it immediately — deferring it costs more than completing it.
New captures go to a hot inbox — only processed items move to permanent storage. The separation protects both speed of capture and integrity of storage.
Audit your current system. Open whatever tool you use for notes, tasks, or ideas. Can you identify a clear boundary between unprocessed captures and permanent storage? If everything lives in one undifferentiated space, create a separation right now: make an 'Inbox' note, folder, or tag. For the.
Mixing hot and cold in one container. Your permanent notes become polluted with half-formed fragments. Your inbox accumulates hundreds of items that were supposed to be temporary but became permanent by neglect. You stop trusting your system because you cannot tell what has been processed and what.
New captures go to a hot inbox — only processed items move to permanent storage. The separation protects both speed of capture and integrity of storage.
You overestimate the likelihood of events you can easily recall examples of. The availability heuristic substitutes the question "how frequent is this?" with the question "how easily can I think of an example?" — and the substitution happens below conscious awareness, which means you feel like you.
The most valuable thing to capture is why you chose what you chose. Decisions decay faster than facts — and unlike facts, they cannot be reconstructed after the outcome is known.
You need rules for choosing which schema to apply in a given situation.
An unnamed pattern is invisible — naming it makes it manipulable.