Whenever you’re debating what to do, explicitly ask yourself “what do I predict will happen if I choose option A?” and try to unroll the trajectory. Even if you think you’re already intuitively predicting the results of your choices, I’ve found it helps surprisingly much to be explicit—one of my manager role models asks me this (“what do you think... See more

One of the easiest ways to get more leverage is to take a goal you’re already trying to accomplish, and figure out a better way to accomplish the same thing. (For example: changing your experiment design to be more directly relevant to the high-level question; finding an 80/20 way of building a tool; just deciding not to do something entirely;... See more

I wrote these questions out: What should I spend my time doing? What are the 20% of my activities that will yield 80% of the results? What can I stop doing? How can I use constraints to my advantage? What are my hypotheses about the future—and how do they inform my actions today? Over the next hour, I wrote pages of notes with answers to those

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Not every project needs to check all the boxes, but reviewing his intentions helps him be, well, intentional about the work he takes on and, therefore, creates better outcomes for his clients and his projects. His intentions are in two blocks: outcomes and compensation. Outcomes: Better collaboration (between humans doing good in the world)

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