This note is organized as layers: what you pour in (attention, information, energy), what happens in between (judgement, routines, relationships), and what ships (work worth signing, relationships that compound, health you do not gamble). I wrote it because fragmented “productivity hacks” stop working once the stack gets heavy. Deal with leaks at the lowest layer first. On AI specifically: useful where you already have taste and verification; noisy where those are absent.
| Framework | Used for | One-line operating manual | Pillar |
|---|---|---|---|
| First principles Feynman / Musk | Breaking through dogma | Strip a problem to atoms you can verify, then rebuild upward. Refuse analogy until you must. | Wiser |
| Inversion Munger / Jacobi | Avoiding catastrophe | Don't ask “how do I succeed?” — ask “what would guarantee failure?” and remove those. | Wiser |
| Second-order thinking | Decisions with consequences | Always ask “and then what?” at least twice. Most bad calls die at the second order. | Wiser |
| Bayesian updating | Living with uncertainty | Hold beliefs as probabilities; move them on evidence, not identity. Track your priors in writing. | Wiser |
| Circle of competence Buffett | Knowing when to act | Only bet inside it. The edge is the edge, not the area. | Wiser |
| Margin of safety | Sizing risk | Plan for the world being 30% worse than your forecast; size positions accordingly. | Wiser |
| Pre-mortem Klein | De-risking projects | Before kickoff, write the obituary: “It's 12 months from now and we failed — why?” | Wiser |
| OODA loop Boyd | Acting under fog | Observe → Orient → Decide → Act, then repeat faster than the situation changes. | Faster |
| Cynefin Snowden | Diagnosing problem type | Match method to terrain: simple→best practice, complicated→expert, complex→probe, chaotic→act. | Wiser |
| Pareto 80/20 | Focus & pruning | Find the 20% of inputs that yield 80% of outputs. Then do it again on the 20%. | Faster |
| Eisenhower matrix | Triage | Urgent/important quadrant. Live in Q2 (important, not urgent). Q3 looks like work but isn't. | Faster |
| 5 Whys Toyota | Root-cause analysis | Don't stop at the first reason. The first reason is almost always a symptom. | Better |
| Feynman technique | Learning anything | Explain it to a 12-year-old without jargon. Holes in the explanation are holes in your understanding. | Better |
| PARA Forte | Organizing digital life | Projects · Areas · Resources · Archives. Files migrate by actionability, not topic. | Faster |
| Zettelkasten Luhmann | Long-horizon thinking | Atomic notes, written in your own words, densely linked. The graph is the second brain. | Deeper |
| BASB — CODE Forte | Notes that compound | Capture → Organize → Distill → Express. The point of notes is shipping, not collecting. | Better |
| Spaced repetition | Permanent memory | Anki / SRS for anything you must never forget. Active recall ≫ passive review. | Better |
| Interleaving | Transferable skill | Mix topics during practice. Harder in the moment, far more durable in the long run. | Better |
| Deliberate practice Ericsson | Mastery | Practice at the edge of ability, with feedback, on isolated sub-skills. Reps without that don't count. | Better |
| GTD Allen | Open-loop hygiene | Capture everything, clarify next action, organize, reflect weekly, engage. Trust the system. | Faster |
| Time-blocking | Calendar as commitment | Every priority earns a block, not a vibe. If it isn't on the calendar, it won't happen. | Deeper |
| Deep Work Newport | Cognitive output | Long, undistracted blocks on cognitively demanding work. Schedule it; protect it; track it. | Deeper |
| Pomodoro / 52-17 | Starting & sustaining | Fixed sprint + fixed rest. Lowers activation energy and reduces burnout in long sessions. | Faster |
| Energy management Loehr & Schwartz | Sustainable output | Manage energy, not time. Match task difficulty to physiological peak; recover deliberately. | Deeper |
| Atomic Habits Clear | Behavior change | Make it obvious, attractive, easy, satisfying. Identity > goals; systems > willpower. | Better |
| 2-minute rule | Beating procrastination | Shrink the first action to under two minutes. Momentum, not motivation, is the unlock. | Faster |
| OKRs / NSM | Strategic alignment | One ambitious Objective; 3 measurable Key Results. Review quarterly, mercilessly. | Wiser |
| Parkinson's Law | Forcing focus | Work expands to fill time. Set unreasonable deadlines on purpose; ship rough; iterate. | Faster |
| Ikigai | Vocational alignment | Intersection of what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs, what pays. | Wiser |
| Stoic dichotomy Epictetus | Emotional regulation | Sort every concern into “in my control / not in my control.” Spend zero energy on the second. | Deeper |
| Memento mori | Priority forcing | You will die. Probably sooner than you think. Decide accordingly — without panic. | Wiser |
| Wheel of Life | Whole-self audit | Score health, work, relationships, finance, meaning, leisure quarterly. Work the lowest spoke. | Better |
| 4 Burners theory | Honest trade-offs | Family · friends · health · work. You cannot run all four on high simultaneously. Choose which two. | Wiser |
| Hanlon's / Occam's razor | Interpreting others | Prefer the simplest explanation, and assume incompetence before malice. Cheaper, usually right. | Wiser |
Ask AI to argue the opposite, find your weakest premise, run a pre-mortem, or list what a smart skeptic would object to. Never accept your first draft of an idea.
Use AI to map a domain, surface key authors, and produce a glossary before you read deeply. Then read primary sources yourself — AI sets the table, you eat the meal.
Generate ugly drafts fast; your job is editing, restructuring, and adding the lived insight only you have. Never publish what you didn't rewrite.
Ask for explanations at three levels of depth, request analogies to fields you know, and have AI quiz you with progressively harder problems.
Pair-program: you architect, AI implements, you review. Read every diff. Run every test. Production-grade code is still your signature.
Standing prompts that triage email, summarize meetings, draft replies, and prep weekly reviews. Decisions stay with you; the paperwork does not.
Hand off bounded, low-stakes, high-volume tasks: scraping, formatting, transformations, scheduled monitors. Human-in-the-loop for anything irreversible.
Persistent context: your goals, values, ongoing projects, voice, and constraints. Quality of AI output = quality of context you maintain.
Same window every night. Cool, dark, no screens for the last 60 min. Caffeine cutoff 8–10h before bed. Sleep is when the rest of the system gets installed.
3× strength, 2–3× zone-2 cardio, daily walking. VO₂max and muscle mass are the two strongest longevity correlates we know — train both.
~1g protein per lb lean mass. Minimize ultra-processed inputs. Hydration before caffeine. Eat in a 10–12h window. Boring on purpose.
10–15 min outdoor light within an hour of waking. Dim lights after sunset. The biggest lever on sleep quality you don't pay for.
Daily 5–10 min: box breathing, physiological sigh, or meditation. Train the off-switch as deliberately as the on-switch.
Daily 3-line journal. Name the feeling, locate the trigger, reframe the story. Stoic dichotomy of control as default lens.
Hard things one step closer; junk things one step farther. Phone out of the bedroom. Default apps off the home screen. Friction is fate.
Emergency fund + boring index investing + low burn. Money is bought freedom — freedom to refuse the wrong work, take the long bet, walk away.
Invest disproportionately: weekly check-ins, annual trips, hard truths exchanged in both directions. This circle is the single best predictor of well-being.
Always be in three relationships you can learn from, three you can spar with, and three you actively pour into. Renew the roster every couple of years.
Give intros, share notes, send the cold email. Most asymmetric opportunities arrive through weak ties. Be the connector you wish existed.
Concrete > abstract. Structure > flow. Ask the question you actually want answered. Reduce ambiguity at the source — it compounds downstream.
Steelman first, critique second. Separate fact, interpretation, and request. Repair beats avoidance; resentment compounds faster than money.
Write where it’s indexable. Compounding readers > viral hits. Let your work be the resume; reputation is the only network that scales without effort.
Foundation first. Strategy returns more once the substrate is intact. The reverse is theater.
AI, capital, code, and content multiply whatever you point them at. Aim before you fire.
Deep work is the rarest skill of the decade. Treat it as a competitive advantage, not a personality trait.
Routinize reversible decisions; deliberate ruthlessly on irreversible ones. Don't confuse the two.
If you can't write it, you don't understand it. Writing is thinking, memory, and leverage in one.
Speed without verification is just confident wrongness. Keep your hands on the wheel for stakes that matter.
Pick 2–3 things. Don't quit before the curve turns. Most outsized lives are the result of dull persistence.
Eliminating dumb mistakes returns more than chasing clever wins. Subtract first, then add.
Sleep, walk, solitude, sabbath. Output without recovery is a slow-motion default.
Winning the wrong game is worse than losing the right one. Audit which goals are inherited.
10-year vision; today's three priorities. Both at once, or neither works.
Speed, depth, quality, and wisdom are instruments. The composition is a life of meaning, love, and contribution.