Concept
Mind operating notes
Mind operating notes are one page of nine one-second questions about your own mind, one per idea on the road: which system answered, what the elephant wants, what I feel, what story I built, is this a forecast, what will I adapt to, is there flow in the next hour, where is the space, what does this ask of me.
Twelve Stations of research become self-knowledge only if they are consulted on an ordinary Tuesday, and Kahneman's own warning applies to the page: you will not remember to use it in the moment, because the moment belongs to System 1. So the page is short, nine lines in words you would actually say to yourself, and it has a fixed time, the daily check. The first eight questions describe how automatic the mind is; the ninth, Frankl's, says the automatic mind does not have the last word. Every question is a way of widening the gap between what happens and what you do. The notes do not make you rational and will not remove the elephant; they make you slightly earlier, a second before the reflex rather than a minute after it, and the second is where the choices live. Run for four weeks before changing a line.
A real-life example
A team lead in Istanbul tapes nine questions inside a notebook and reads them at eight-fifteen on the metro. In four weeks she catches the three-second candidate judgement twice more, asks a surrogate before a transfer, and holds a reply for a breath when her director dismisses a report in front of the team.
How to use it
- 1Write the nine questions tonight, one per line, in your own words.
- 2Fix a time and place for reading them; the page is useless if it depends on remembering.
- 3Change nothing for four weeks; judge the month, not the reaction.