Frequently asked questions about thinking, epistemology, and cognitive tools. 9738 answers
Measure things that predict outcomes rather than waiting for outcomes themselves.
WYSIATI (What You See Is All There Is) is a cognitive bias identified by Daniel Kahneman where your brain treats available information as complete, ignoring what you don't know.
Do a full brain dump. Set a timer for 15 minutes. Write down every open loop, task, commitment, worry, idea, and half-formed plan. Don't organize — just dump. Count the items. Wait 24 hours and do it again. Compare the lists. Items that appear on one but not the other were always there — just not.
Saying 'I've thought about this thoroughly' when you've actually thought about the parts of it that are currently activated in memory. Thoroughness is impossible without externalization. You can't audit what you can't see — and you can't see what working memory hasn't loaded.
Your sense of cognitive completeness is an illusion. What you can access at any moment is a context-dependent sample of what you actually know — and the sample changes without your awareness.
A rough note you actually make is infinitely more valuable than a polished note you do not.
A well-formed question is as valuable an atom as a well-formed answer.
The definitions you use quietly shape every conclusion built on top of them.
If processing an item takes less than two minutes, do it immediately — deferring it costs more than completing it.
A photo of a whiteboard, sketch, or physical artifact is a legitimate capture method — and for spatial, visual, or environmental information, it is the superior one.
Today, capture three things as photographs that you would normally try to describe in text: a whiteboard, a physical arrangement, a diagram, a book passage with margin notes, or an environment that triggered an idea. For each photo, add one line of text context (date, why it matters, what you were.
A camera roll with 400 unlabeled photos and no way to find anything. Visual capture without minimal metadata becomes a graveyard of context-free images. The photo preserves the visual information perfectly — and becomes useless because you cannot remember why you took it or what it connected to.
A photo of a whiteboard, sketch, or physical artifact is a legitimate capture method — and for spatial, visual, or environmental information, it is the superior one.
When you resist writing something down, examine what you are avoiding. The resistance itself is data about what matters most.
Write down insights from conversations immediately — social memory is especially lossy.
In your next conversation — a meeting, a phone call, a coffee chat — keep a capture tool visible (phone, notebook, index card). Every time something lands as useful, surprising, or decision-relevant, write a 3-to-7-word fragment. Don't explain it. Don't polish it. Just anchor it. After the.
Telling yourself you'll remember it later. You won't. Stafford's research shows you retain roughly 10% of conversational idea units after five minutes. The failure is invisible — you don't know what you forgot — so you never feel the loss. The second failure mode is over-capturing: transcribing.
Write down insights from conversations immediately — social memory is especially lossy.
Place capture tools where you will see and use them without having to remember. The best capture system is one your environment triggers automatically — not one that depends on willpower or recall.
Walk through your home and workspace with fresh eyes. Identify three locations where you regularly have thoughts worth capturing but currently have no capture tool within arm's reach — the kitchen counter, your nightstand, the car dashboard, your walking route. For each location, place a capture.
Designing a beautiful capture environment once and never adjusting it. Environments change — you rearrange your desk, switch offices, start working from a coffee shop. The capture tools that were perfectly placed six months ago are now invisible or inaccessible. Environment design is not a.
Place capture tools where you will see and use them without having to remember. The best capture system is one your environment triggers automatically — not one that depends on willpower or recall.
When you trust your capture system your mind stops trying to hold everything.
You wake each day with a limited reservoir of focused attention — roughly three to four hours of genuine deep work — that depletes with every act of sustained concentration and cannot be refilled by willpower alone.