Frequently asked questions about thinking, epistemology, and cognitive tools. 200 answers
Audit your last five workdays. For each day, mark every hour as M (manager mode — meetings, coordination, emails, decisions) or K (maker mode — deep work, writing, coding, designing). Then count your longest unbroken K-streak each day. If it's under three hours on most days, your schedule is.
Audit your calendar for the past week. Identify every point where one activity ended and a different type of activity began with zero transition time — meeting into deep work, deep work into a call, creative work into administrative work. Count these back-to-back transitions. For each one,.
For the next five working days, keep a simple energy log. Set three alarms — at 10 AM, 2 PM, and 7 PM — and when each one fires, rate your mental sharpness on a scale of one to five and note what type of work you are doing. At the end of the five days, lay the fifteen data points side by side. You.
Choose five tasks you plan to complete this week. Before starting each one, write down three estimates: your optimistic time (everything goes perfectly), your realistic time (normal conditions), and your pessimistic time (things go wrong). Use the PERT formula to calculate a weighted estimate:.
Pick a project or task you are currently planning. Write down your gut estimate for how long it will take. Now find three to five comparable past projects — yours or others' — and record how long each actually took from start to finish. Calculate the average actual duration and compare it to your.
Open your current task list, project board, or backlog. Go through every item and estimate — honestly, without rounding up — how long each one would actually take to complete. Mark every item that falls under two minutes. Now set a timer and dispatch them all, one after another, without pausing to.
Identify three to five categories of small, recurring tasks that you currently handle as they arrive — email, Slack messages, administrative approvals, filing, errands, phone calls, social media responses. For one full week, instead of handling them on arrival, capture each one into a simple list.
Select three meetings from your calendar this week. For each one, answer four questions before the meeting starts: What is the specific purpose of this meeting — what decision needs to be made or what problem needs to be solved? What is the agenda — the ordered list of topics with time.
Run a seven-day time audit starting tomorrow. Use thirty-minute intervals from the time you wake up until the time you go to sleep. For each block, record two things: what you actually did (not what you planned to do), and whether that activity serves one of your top three stated priorities for.
Return to the time audit data you gathered in L-0833. If you have not completed that audit, do so first — this exercise requires real data, not estimates. Review every activity from your audit week and assign each one to exactly one of five categories: eliminate (stop doing this entirely — it.
Identify the single activity in your life where consistent daily output would produce the most cumulative value over the next twelve months — writing, practicing an instrument, exercising, coding a side project, studying a subject, whatever it is. Now design a routine container for that activity.
Open your current daily schedule or routine and list every element in it — wake time, activities, blocks, transitions, rituals, all of it. Now classify each element as either load-bearing (removing it meaningfully degrades your output or wellbeing) or cosmetic (it is preferred but not essential)..
Pull up your calendar, task records, and any available data from the past twelve months. Identify three to five periods that were significantly harder, busier, or more disrupted than baseline — end-of-year crunch, tax season, a product launch cycle, back-to-school in August, a recurring.
For the next seven working days, build an energy-task alignment map. Each evening, open a simple spreadsheet with two columns per time block — energy rating (1-5) and task type (deep, administrative, creative, social, recovery). Use the natural breaks in your day as time blocks. At the end of.
Schedule your first weekly planning session for this week. Choose a consistent day and time — Sunday evening, Friday afternoon, Saturday morning, or any slot where you reliably have forty-five uninterrupted minutes. Set the appointment in your calendar as a recurring event. Then execute the.
Build your Personal Time System Architecture document — the synthesis artifact for Phase 42. This is not a schedule. It is a meta-document that describes how your time system works. (1) State your three to five highest priorities — the things your time system exists to serve. These should come.
Choose one significant decision you are currently facing or have recently made. Write down the three to five pieces of information that are most influencing your thinking. For each one, answer: Where did this information come from? How old is it? Have I verified it against a second source? Is it a.
Draw five columns on a piece of paper or in a document. Label them: Input, Processing, Storage, Retrieval, Output. Now trace one piece of information you encountered in the last week through all five stages. Where did it come from? What did you do with it when it arrived? Where does it live now?.
Conduct an input audit. Open your phone's screen time data, your email inbox, your browser history, and your social media follows. List every recurring information source: every app, newsletter, podcast, YouTube channel, news site, social account, Slack workspace, and group chat that regularly.
Choose one inbox — email, physical mail, a notes app, a read-it-later queue, whatever has the most accumulated items. Set a timer for 25 minutes. Go through each item top to bottom and make exactly one decision per item: act on it now (if it takes less than two minutes), schedule a specific time.
Conduct a reference filing audit and build your initial system. Step 1: Gather every place you currently store reference information — your notes app, your email, your bookmarks, your desktop folders, your physical files, your phone photos, your browser tabs, your 'save for later' lists. List them.
Build or audit your action filing system in five steps. Step 1: Identify every place where actionable information currently lives — your email inbox, sticky notes, mental reminders, text messages, Slack threads, notebook margins, browser tabs you kept open as reminders. List them all. Step 2:.
Choose your largest current inbox — email, Slack, a notes capture app, or a read-it-later queue. Before processing any items, perform a triage pass. Set a timer for three minutes. Scan every item without opening, reading in full, or acting on any of them. As you scan, sort each item into one of.
Build and test a read-it-later system this week. Step 1: Choose one tool — Pocket, Instapaper, Readwise Reader, a browser extension, or even a single note titled 'Reading Queue' in your notes app. The tool does not matter. The single location does. Step 2: For three days, every time you encounter.