Thinking & Reflection

“The central challenge of managing our limited time is not figuring out how to do everything, but deciding wisely what not to do.”

— Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks (2021)⁶

Productive intelligence is not mainly about thinking longer. It is about reducing uncertainty better, sorting better, and choosing better.

Burkeman’s full sentence has a second half that people quote less often: decide what not to do, and feel at peace about not doing it. The first half is a technique, and this lesson gives you several. The second half is the real work. A decision you reopen every morning is not a decision: it is one more task on your list.

The CMDglows decision framework

When you feel blocked by too many options, check these four levels:

1. Am I missing information, or missing a decision?
2. Am I comparing the right things?
3. Am I trying to optimize too many axes at once?
4. Is my mind clear, or saturated?

This framework helps avoid a common mistake:

• extending analysis when the real need is to choose

Decision fatigue

Many people stall not because they do too little work, but because they carry too many micro-decisions:

• what should I do first?
• what actually matters?
• is this the right time?
• is this important enough?

Every choice has a cognitive cost¹. When that cost accumulates:

• you postpone the real decisions
• you fill the day with secondary tasks
• you consume more information to delay commitment

The answer is not to “be stronger.” It is to build structures that reduce repetitive decision load.

An honest caveat, because you will often read the opposite. The strong version of this idea, where willpower is a tank that drains with every choice (“ego depletion”), has not held up well. A replication run in 23 labs with 2,141 participants found an effect close to zero⁷, and a second 36-lab project reached the same conclusion in 2021. What still stands is more modest and more useful: real mental fatigue does degrade judgment, and an open decision keeps pulling at you until you make it. So I am not asking you to save your willpower. I am asking you to close your decisions.

I go deeper on this, including the famous Israeli parole judges study and what critics found in it, in why your to-do list drains you before you even start.

Prioritize what actually deserves energy

The question is not only:

• “what is urgent?”

It is more often:

• “what creates the most leverage right now?”

Before scoring: find the biggest leak

Picture a bucket with several holes. Pouring in more water does not fill it faster. What changes everything is plugging the biggest hole first, then the next one. Your week works the same way: until the biggest loss is handled, small gains elsewhere stay invisible.

So before comparing options, find where you lose the most. Not by gut feeling: for one day, write down the moments when your work stalls and what triggers them. On a Windows PC, the usual leaks are mundane and expensive: reopening your windows and finding your place every morning, hunting for a file, getting pulled away by a notification, rereading the same email three times. Once the biggest leak has a name, the question gets precise: what could plug it?

The ICE method

The ICE method remains useful for quickly comparing several options.

You score each option on three criteria:

The point is not mathematical precision. The point is to stop choosing purely by mood when several options all seem attractive.

The original version, popularized by Sean Ellis in Hacking Growth, scores impact, confidence (how sure you are it will work) and ease⁹. I swapped confidence for cost, because when you work alone, what blocks you most often is not doubt about the outcome: it is the price in time or money. If your hesitation is mostly about whether an option will actually work, go back to the original.

The method has three steps. First, list every option without judging it: sorting comes later. Then score each option from 1 to 10 on each criterion, always in the same direction: the stronger the impact, and the lighter the cost and effort, the higher the score. Count effort twice if your energy is your scarcest resource. Finally, keep the three best totals, including at least one quick win, so you see a result this week.

An example. Your biggest leak: every morning, you lose fifteen minutes reopening your apps and finding where you left off.

The evening note wins: it costs nothing and takes two minutes, so it is your quick win. The script and the virtual desktops come next. The monitor, the only option that requires buying something, comes last. That is often the case, and it is good news for your budget. The script belongs to automation on Windows, and the end-of-session note is the closing move described in Focus.

The real frog

The “Eat the Frog” idea is still useful, but only if you understand what the frog actually is.

It is not only:

• the unpleasant task

Very often, it is:

• the highest-leverage task
• the task that exposes you
• the task you are replacing with neat, reassuring secondary tasks

A good test:

• which task would move the situation forward the most if it were really done well?
• which task am I avoiding through secondary occupations?

An even blunter question: am I working, or am I reassuring myself? Reorganizing your folders for the third time, changing your terminal theme, trying a new task app, polishing a detail nobody will see: it all looks like work, feels as tiring as work, and leaves the frog untouched. It has a name: productive procrastination. These tasks are comfortable because they expose you to nothing. Real leverage almost always means stepping a little outside that zone: sending the message you keep postponing, showing unfinished work, choosing between two options you like equally.

Think visually when text stops being enough³

Not everything becomes clearer through linear text.

Visual thinking helps when:

• you have too many variables in your head
• you cannot see the dependencies anymore
• several options are blending together
• the problem keeps looping

Turning reasoning into a map, diagram, table, decision tree, or timeline helps you:

• externalize mental load
• see the gaps in your thinking
• spot bottlenecks
• make tradeoffs more visible

Still-valid tools:

• Untools for quick access to useful mental frameworks
• MyMap if you want to turn ideas into visual maps faster: you describe your problem, the AI drafts a map, and you correct it

But the real leverage is not the tool. It is the shift from vague thinking to visible structure.

Self-reflection: think about how you think

Self-reflection helps you stop repeating the same mistakes with more intensity.

Often, a few simple questions are enough:

• what am I trying to avoid?
• what feels important but may not actually be important?
• when exactly did I start scattering?
• which choice am I delaying unnecessarily?

The goal is not endless introspection. The goal is recovered discernment, and catching your biases when they show up⁴.

Write to think

Reflection gets much easier when it leaves a trace. Simon Späti, a data engineer who publishes his second brain online, describes a practice I find spot on¹⁰: one plain-text file per question that keeps bugging him, along the lines of “thoughts on…”. Before writing, he rereads the previous entries, sometimes years old, and compares it to time-traveling to talk with his past self. He adds a daily brain dump when he has time, and a longer review every two or three months.

For daily use, four questions are enough, the ones from Nicolas Cole that Späti quotes: What did I do yesterday? What am I working on? What’s coming up? What am I grateful for?

Screen or paper? At the keyboard, you write as fast as you think, you can rearrange, and months later a simple search finds the idea again. Paper slows you down, which is sometimes exactly what you need when you are going in circles. My default on Windows: plain-text or Markdown files, stored wherever you already keep your notes, so search can find them. The Knowledge module explains how to capture and retrieve what you write.

Writing about how you feel also has a long research history. In James Pennebaker’s founding study, students who wrote fifteen minutes a day, four days in a row, about a difficult event visited the health center less often in the following months¹¹. That is a health finding, not a productivity one: do not stretch it.

Emotional intelligence

Emotions are not the opposite of intelligence. They are part of the signal set you need to read.

When you completely ignore your inner state, you often make worse decisions:

• you dramatize
• you delay
• you overreact
• you mistake fatigue or fear for strategic truth

A simple daily check-in already helps:

• what am I feeling?
• what triggered it?
• what is it pushing me to do or avoid?⁵

Morning voice journal

Voice journaling remains a simple and strong tool:

• 5 to 10 minutes
• ideally while walking
• to clear mental fog

You can use it to unload:

• what matters today
• what is cluttering your mind
• what you want to clarify before acting

The value is not a beautiful journal. It is recovered clarity.

I kept this idea from one of Emilio’s newsletters, and his most useful point is this: you do not listen to your recordings again. That would be long and tedious. The goal is to get into the habit of putting your thoughts into words as soon as you wake up, out loud, before the day does it for you. Record while walking outside if you can: you get fresh air at the same time, and if you run into someone, just pretend you are on a call.

On the PC, the built-in Sound Recorder app is enough: it records up to three hours per file while you keep working¹². For walking, your phone is still more practical.

If speaking comes more naturally than writing, the Voice Dictation lesson shows how to produce a first draft on Windows.

Tools for emotional reflection

If you want light support:

• Rosebud for AI-assisted journaling and reflection prompts
• Sphēra for more structured emotional tracking

As usual, the tool comes after the habit.

Think wider: learn outside your discipline

The reflex is to dig deeper into your own job. Yet the ideas that help you decide most often come from elsewhere: a rule from aviation, a principle from cooking, a navigation method at sea. Other fields give you thinking models your job never showed you, and that is where your brain makes its freshest connections.

Be careful: transfer does not happen on its own. The reference review by Susan Barnett and Stephen Ceci, built on a century of research, concludes that transfer to a distant context does occur, but under specific conditions, and several key conditions have not been tested yet¹³. Reading a book on aircraft systems will not help you decide better if you never apply it to a situation in your work. The gain comes when you recognize the same principle in another context, then test it.

My rule is simple: when you read outside your field, note one principle, then find a decision this week where it applies. A principle that serves no decision stays an anecdote. You do not need to learn more. You need to connect better. The Knowledge module shows how to keep those notes so you find them when it matters.

AI as a clarity multiplier

The right question is not:

• “where can AI replace the human?”

The better question is:

• “where can AI help me think more clearly, compare faster, or externalize a first structure?”

Useful uses:

• summarizing options
• comparing hypotheses
• proposing decision structures
• turning rough notes into a map or outline
• helping you generate better questions

AI is useful when it reduces fog. It becomes dangerous when it replaces judgment instead of strengthening it.

Some tools go further and rank your tasks for you. Fluidwave, for example, says it weighs your deadlines, priorities and task durations to show you what to do next. For day-to-day micro-decisions, that can be a real relief, and you are the judge of whether it works for you. Just keep the one decision no tool will make: what you choose not to do at all.

What to avoid

• rerunning an analysis when the information is already enough to decide
• scoring options before finding the biggest leak
• mistaking a reassuring task for the frog
• reopening every morning a decision you already made
• journaling for the sake of journaling, without ever rereading it or drawing a decision from it

Recommended workflow

Minimalist: five minutes of voice journaling in the morning, then one decision made before you open your inbox.

Pragmatic: the same morning routine, plus an ICE table of three options during your weekly review, on the biggest leak of the moment.

Personal system: one “thoughts on…” file per question that keeps bugging you, the four daily questions, and a longer review every two or three months to reread what you wrote.

What to remember

If you want to act more intelligently:

• reduce decision fatigue
• prioritize by leverage, not noise
• make thinking visible when it gets fuzzy
• use self-reflection to correct your biases
• use AI as a clarity multiplier, not as an autopilot

Put it into practice

Exercise (15 to 30 min):

1. List the five decisions you are postponing this week.
2. Pick three and, for each, note its impact, cost, and effort in a few words.
3. Keep the option with the highest leverage, then ask which “frog” task you are avoiding with secondary occupations.
4. Draw a map, table, or decision tree for the most blocked decision: options, dependencies, next action.
5. Do the three-question check-in: what I feel, what triggered it, what it pushes me to do or avoid.

Deliverable: an ICE table for three options and a diagram of the blocked decision, with a single next action.

This week: settle one decision each morning before opening your messages.

To rank these options, read Prioritization. To place your decisions in your week, read Theme scheduling.

Chapter references (go further)

1) Mental fatigue — Boksem & Tops (2008), Mental fatigue: Costs and benefits — DOI

2) Cognitive load — John Sweller (1988), Cognitive load during problem solving — DOI

3) Why diagrams help — Larkin & Simon (1987), Why a diagram is (sometimes) worth ten thousand words — DOI

4) Heuristics and biases — Tversky & Kahneman (1974), Judgment under uncertainty — DOI

5) Emotion regulation — James J. Gross (1998), The emerging field of emotion regulation — DOI

6) Managing finite time — Oliver Burkeman (2021), Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals — Penguin

7) Ego depletion replication — Hagger et al. (2016), A multilab preregistered replication of the ego-depletion effect — DOI

8) Second multisite replication — Vohs et al. (2021), A multisite preregistered paradigmatic test of the ego-depletion effect — DOI

9) ICE scoring — Sean Ellis & Morgan Brown (2017), Hacking Growth — Penguin Random House

10) Journaling in plain-text files — Simon Späti (2024), Journaling — ssp.sh

11) Expressive writing — Pennebaker & Beall (1986), Confronting a traumatic event — DOI

12) Windows Sound Recorder — Microsoft (2026), Sound Recorder app for Windows: FAQ — Microsoft Support

13) Transfer beyond your discipline — Barnett & Ceci (2002), When and where do we apply what we learn? A taxonomy for far transfer, Psychological Bulletin — PubMed

Deep Dive: Technical concepts

Decision fatigue (mental fatigue)

As mental fatigue rises, judgment quality drops and micro-decisions become more expensive.

Scientific source: 1

Cognitive load (limited bandwidth)

Working memory is limited. Reducing non-essential load improves clarity and comparison quality.

Scientific source: 2

Visual thinking (externalize reasoning)

Diagrams and tables can make dependencies visible and reduce ambiguity compared to linear text.

Scientific source: 3

Cognitive biases (heuristics)

The mind uses useful shortcuts, but they also create predictable errors. Self-reflection helps catch them.

Scientific source: 4

Emotion regulation (clarity under stress)

Productive intelligence includes regulating reactivity so you can regain discernment before acting.

Scientific source: 5

Finitude (choosing what not to do)

Available time is finite, so every list exceeds what you can do. The useful choice is what you give up, and making peace with giving it up.

Source: 6

Ego depletion (a fragile hypothesis)

The idea that willpower drains with every effort did not survive two large multilab replications: d = 0.04 in 2016 and d = 0.06 in 2021, neither statistically significant. Mental fatigue itself remains well documented.

Scientific sources: 7, 8

ICE score (prioritizing options)

Each option gets a score from 1 to 10 on three criteria, then you compare totals. The original version scores impact, confidence and ease.

Source: 9

Reflection journal (rereading to think)

A journal pays off mostly when you reread it: seeing what you thought about the same question months ago shows you what has changed.

Source: 10

Expressive writing (putting feelings into words)

Writing for a few days in a row about a difficult event and how you feel about it was associated with better health indicators in the founding study.

Scientific source: 11

Sound Recorder (voice journaling on Windows)

The app built into Windows 11 records up to three hours per file and runs side by side with other apps.

Source: 12

Far transfer (learn elsewhere, apply here)

A principle learned in a distant field does not apply to your work on its own. The farther the destination context, the weaker the evidence that transfer happens.

Scientific source: 13