Frequently asked questions about thinking, epistemology, and cognitive tools. 193 answers
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.
Pull up a collection of notes you've written over the past 30-90 days — a journal, a work log, a notes app, anything with at least 20 entries. Set a timer for 25 minutes. Read through every entry without editing. On a separate page, write down any recurring themes, repeated phrases, or topics that.
Pick one small pattern you currently repeat daily — a morning habit, a work ritual, a way you respond to stress. Project it forward: what does doing this thing 365 more times produce? Write down the 1-year and 5-year compound trajectory. Then pick one small pattern you'd like to install. What does.
This is the Phase 6 integration exercise. Over the next seven days, complete one practice each day using a different skill from this phase: Day 1 — Identify a pattern operating at three scales (L-0101). Day 2 — Log three recurrences and test one for the three-occurrence threshold (L-0102, L-0109)..
Run an information audit on a single day. From the moment you open your first screen to the moment you close your last, log every information input you encounter: emails, messages, articles, notifications, meetings, social media posts, news headlines. At the end of the day, go through the list and.
Write down the single most important outcome you are trying to produce this week in one sentence. Now open your email, Slack, or RSS feed and scroll through the last 20 items. For each one, mark it S (signal — directly relevant to your stated outcome) or N (noise — not relevant). Count the ratio..