Frequently asked questions about thinking, epistemology, and cognitive tools. 1287 answers
Linking an agent to a specific event like arriving at work or opening your laptop.
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.
Position trigger cues where you will encounter them at the right moment.
One-way doors deserve careful analysis — two-way doors should be walked through quickly.
Define good defaults so that the do-nothing option is acceptable.
Know which decisions you must make yourself and which can be delegated.
Know which decisions you must make yourself and which can be delegated.
Different frameworks for decisions made alone versus with others.
Sometimes deciding fast is more important than deciding optimally.
Your emotions create self-reinforcing cycles — anxiety begets more anxiety.
What you read shapes what you think which shapes what you seek out to read.
Resistance to certain feedback signals it touches an important blind spot.
The ability to build and tune feedback loops is the ability to continuously improve.
You cannot fix what you cannot detect — invest in error detection mechanisms.
Accept that some error rate is normal and define how much error is tolerable.
Asking why five times in succession usually reaches the root cause of a problem.
For every important process have a documented way to recover from common failures.
For every important process have a documented way to recover from common failures.
Recurring errors point to structural problems not personal failures.
Recurring errors point to structural problems not personal failures.
Use tools and systems to catch errors that manual vigilance misses.
Use tools and systems to catch errors that manual vigilance misses.
Every correction takes time and energy — reduce the error rate rather than just correcting faster.