Temporal Models

How will I feel about this in 10 minutes / 10 months / 10 years?

Productivity targets compress visits, raising misdiagnosis and burnout.

Funnels rewarded for new logos under-invest in retention and lifetime value.

Free products monetize attention, structurally aligning incentives against user time well spent.

Predicting how we will feel in the future, usually inaccurately.

Discounting algorithmic advice even when superior.

It's better because it's newer.

Saying it enough times until it sounds true.

Seat-time accountability rewards presence over engagement.

A story repeats until it becomes obviously true.

Start from the desired future and work backward to the steps that make it inevitable.

Contradictory evidence sometimes deepens the original belief.

It's true because many believe it.

We accept vague, general statements as personally meaningful.

Novices experiencing early success, often due to variance and small samples.

Charging by time rewards inefficiency and prolongs disputes.

Remembering more context around a scene than was actually present.

Decisions are constrained by available information, cognitive limits, and time.

Reading micro-shifts in another person's state — breath, color, micro-expression — in real time.

Resourcing past memories with the state you needed at the time, so old triggers stop firing the old response.

Inputs combine under conditions to produce new outputs — sometimes irreversibly.

How options are presented changes which ones get chosen.

We remember our past choices as better than they were.

Temporal illusion where the first moment after a fast event seems stretched.

Binding the future self with a present cost-of-defection to overcome impulse and inertia.

Once we say it publicly, we'll defend it past the data.

A mechanism that locks you into a future action to overcome present temptation.

Small advantages, applied consistently, become uncatchable.

Remembering past attitudes and behavior as more consistent with present ones.

Countering hostile narratives with truthful, well-timed alternatives.

Groups sometimes behave as foolishly as the worst individuals.

Underlying data distribution changes over time.

Each additional unit produces less marginal benefit.

How much we value the present over the future.

We choose more variety than we'll actually want when picking for the future all at once.

Politicians optimize for the next election, not the next generation.

Cut options by knocking out one attribute at a time, hardest threshold first.

Vector representation of content for similarity and search.

Cold-state decisions don't survive hot-state moments.

We believe we will change less in the future than we actually will.

Time is fixed; energy is not. Manage the renewable.

Time-on-app is the wrong thing to maximize for users — but the right thing for revenue.

We measure ourselves against peers, not against our past selves.

Average outcomes across the population differ from outcomes across time for one person.

Insisting on a word's original meaning over its current one.

Remembering past experiences as more positive than they were.

Costs or benefits that affect third parties not involved in a transaction.

Eye movements that loosely correlate with which representational system is active — visual, auditory, kinesthetic.

False information presented as legitimate journalism.

Presenting two options as the only possibilities.

Presenting two options as the only possibilities when more exist.

As more facts are learned about a topic, retrieving any one fact slows.

We notice what's present more than what's absent.

A solution works in the short run and creates a worse version of the original problem in the long run.

Neurological state of peak performance and engagement.

Temporal landmarks (Monday, January, birthday) trigger new behavior attempts.

How vividly we connect to our future self predicts long-term decision quality.

Believing past random events influence future independent ones.

Lifetime purpose → multi-year missions → annual goals → quarterly bets → weekly actions.

An automatic action triggered by a stable cue — built through repetition.