2. Do the most important thing first thing in the morning, and don’t check social media until you’ve done it. Because energy compounds, the first actions in the day matter a lot: the right actions get you into a positive spiral, the wrong actions get you into a negative spiral. The further into a negative spiral you get, the harder it is to get out. So if you start the morning by doing something you care about (e.g. writing a page of an essay), you are way more likely to have a good, productive and happy day overall, because you’ve gotten yourself into a positive spiral.
Moreover, even if you don’t subsequently do anything, you have at least done that one thing in the day; most people fail more from many days of zero output than they do from not maximizing output on any given day, so the key is to stay consistent. [1]
I’m pro social media and think it makes us smarter, but I think it’s a bad idea to check it first thing in the morning. A simple rule is just to check it after you’ve done your ‘first thing in the morning’. I don’t know why this works, but my folk-theoretic model is something like: you want to get rewards from doing a productive thing, not from doing an unproductive thing, and social media gives you rewards in a way that perniciously substitutes for the kinds of rewards you actually want. Once you have the ‘reward’, your drive to do things lessens, so by checking Twitter you kill your drive to do the more productive thing. (The analogy to sugar is apt: you want calories from the good stuff, not the sugary stuff.
8. Do a weekly review. Every Sunday, sit down for an hour with a text editor and review your week. What went well, what went poorly, and what you’re aiming for in the next coming week. I find this is a useful way to force myself to get out of ‘doing mode’ and into ‘reflection mode’, and often surfaces useful insights / things that I could be improving about my life. This goes into my plan for the next week, which sets off a set of slowly compounding improvements.
9. Synthesize things as you read. Just because you’ve read something, doesn’t mean you’ve understood it; your brain has to come up with its own encoding. Whatever understanding things is, it’s related to compression. Which implies that you want to read and then restate in your own words, so that your mind is forced to compress the thing. Ideally several times, in varying ways.
Once you’ve done this, you are much more likely to retain the thing, and to actually grasp it; and if you’re struggling with this exercise, then you don’t understand the thing and should go back and look at it again. (This is also a useful bullshit filter — try and restate someone’s claim in a different way, and see if it still holds up).
When I say ‘restate it in several different ways’, one useful way would be drawing it. Just draw a schematic representation of what you think is being said. Another would be to state it as though you’re writing an article for simple words Wikipedia.
10. Map out problems using logic trees. This is a classic problem-solving and brainstorming technique, also known as morphological analysis. It’ll be familiar to any consultant, as it’s 80% of their secret sauce.
Take a problem, say analyzing a business’s profits (as in consulting). Break it down into logically exhaustive possibilities, e.g. “revenue” and “costs”. Break down each branch further into its component parts, e.g. revenue becomes price * quantity. Follow this process recursively, each time breaking the tree down into components.
Now you have a full map of the possibilities and can start to answer questions like “how do we increase profits?” by listing out all available options. This often helps you spot options that other people will overlook.
You might consider this example simplistic and MBA-ish, but Ed Boyden uses this in a scientific/invention context, and demonstrates an example applied to climate/energy around minute 14 of this video.
I found this technique especially useful when tackling ambiguous problems in a startup. Questions that seem like “how do we grow faster?”, can be reduced to lower-level components that are easier to reason and brainstorm about, and because you’re making sure each ‘layer’ of the tree is mutually exhaustive, you’re not missing anything.
7. Write regularly, and learn to ‘think in writing’. This is true for literally everyone, regardless of whether you want to be a writer or not, whether you want to publish or not. Just have a Google Doc in which you add a page a day of whatever’s on your mind. This has a million benefits, but a simple one is just clearing your cache: if you don’t do this, your brain sort of gets clogged by all the things you have on your mind, whereas if you ‘empty’ your brain onto a page that creates room for new thoughts.
If you really want to be a clear thinker, you need to learn to ‘think in writing’. I like Holden Karnofsky’s guide to this.
Qureshi,Nabeel S. https://nabeelqu.co/advice, July 4, 2022.
All ten are excellent, but these four resonated most.
Floodlights and Goalposts 