BookYol

Concept

Mind operating notes

Mind operating notes are a one-page set of nine short questions about your own mind, each drawn from a finding in psychology, to be asked in a second when a reaction or decision arrives. BookYol's Understand Your Mind Yol builds the page over twelve daily Stations.

The nine questions, with the idea behind each: (1) Which system answered? Did this arrive fast and confident, from what Daniel Kahneman calls System 1, or was it reasoned? (2) What does the elephant want? In Jonathan Haidt's image, the elephant is the automatic, emotional side of the mind, and the conscious rider rarely wins an argument with it, so the question is what it needs to meet instead. (3) What am I feeling, precisely? Daniel Goleman's case for naming. (4) What story have I built, and what would I need to know to be wrong? Kahneman's 'what you see is all there is'. (5) Is this a forecast of my own happiness, and who is already living it? Daniel Gilbert's advice to ask someone in the situation. (6) What will I adapt to, and what will keep wearing on me? Hedonic adaptation. (7) Do I have a clear goal, quick feedback and the right challenge for the next hour? Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's conditions for flow. (8) Is there a pause between this and my reply? (9) What is this situation asking of me? Viktor Frankl's reversal of the question of meaning. The page needs a fixed time to be read, because the moment of reaction belongs to the fast system and nobody remembers a checklist in it; a two-minute daily check does the job. The notes do not make anyone rational. They make you slightly earlier: a second before the reflex rather than a minute after it.

A real-life example

A secondary-school teacher in Konya copies the nine questions onto a card and reads them each morning before the first bell. Within a month she notices that her sharpest replies to one class come on days she slept badly, asks a colleague who has already moved schools before applying for a transfer herself, and starts holding her reply for a breath when a parent complains.

How to use it

  1. 1Write the nine questions tonight, one per line, in your own words.
  2. 2Fix a time and place for reading them; the page is useless if it depends on remembering.
  3. 3Change nothing for four weeks; judge the month, not the reaction.