Notes on thinking and looking.
Every exercise from every essay, collected in one place. Each one takes under fifteen minutes, and each links back to the essay it came from.
Exercise 1. From The Cup on the Table
Pick an object on your desk. A pen, a mug, a notebook. Spend five minutes describing it without using its category name. Note the scratch near the clip. The way the ink skips on the third letter. The dent in the corner. The smell of the paper. Then ask: what would the category name erase? Write it down. That is the compression loss.
Exercise 2. From Ten Cups, One Word
Find a category you use every day. "Email", "meeting", "exercise", "errand". Write down the thing it is for in one sentence. Then find one member of the category that the sentence does not fit well, and look at it for five minutes. Note what the category was hiding. You have just found a fault line, which is the most useful thing a category can have.
Exercise 3. From Rules That Travel
Find a rule you follow without thinking: a sign, a habit, a policy, something your workplace or school does. Write down the case it came from, as specifically as you can. If you cannot name a case, it is a slogan and you can treat it as one. If you can name the case, write down one situation where it would be wrong. That is its scope, and now you know where not to follow it.
Exercise 4. From The Queue Is Not the People
Find a queue you use. A coffee queue, a supermarket checkout, a phone line. Write down the things that go into it and the things that come out, and mark which one is the narrowest point. Then ask the question that matters: if I could widen that one point by a little, what would change? Do not answer about the people in the queue. Answer about the width.
Exercise 5. From The Shower Tap and the Thermostat
Find a small thing in your week that repeats: a task you keep putting off, a message you keep meaning to answer, a habit you keep restarting. Draw it as a loop in four boxes, with arrows going round. Then mark the delay: how long between the trigger and the response. Then mark the target: what is this loop trying to produce. If you cannot fill in the target, the loop is reinforcing, and the question is whether you like the direction it is running.
Exercise 6. From Which Lens, and When
Take a problem you are stuck on. Write it on a piece of paper, and then write the same problem five times, once for each level, in the plainest possible words. "The concrete thing that happened is..." "The pattern across several cases is..." "The rule that would apply is..." "The structure that produces it is..." "What comes back around is..." When all five are written, one of them will have something in it and one will be blank. That is the level the problem is living at, and you now know where to start.
Exercise 7. From Perfectly Optimized, Pointless
Take a process you take part in. Write two sentences. The first says what it is meant to be for. The second says what it reliably produces, in plain terms, with no words like efficiency or quality. If the two sentences do not match, write down the number that is being watched in that process, and who gets something from that number. That is the thread to pull.
Exercise 8. From Learning to Learn to Change
Take a subject you keep failing to get into. Write the answer to one question from it in one sentence, in plain words, as if explaining to a friend. No jargon, no copying from notes. Then write down what you did not know when you started, and what you would have needed to know. The gap between those two lists is your actual revision list, and it will not look like the chapter headings.
Exercise 9. From Back to the Cup
Take something you have thought about a lot, something you could explain to a friend in five minutes. Go and look at one real instance of it with fresh attention for ten minutes. Write down everything you notice, including the parts that do not fit your explanation. Then check: is there anything in your notes that your explanation does not account for? If yes, your explanation is not finished, and you have just found the missing piece of it.
Exercise 10. From Stuck at a Good Level
Take a piece of work you have been stuck on for more than a week. Write down, in one sentence each, what you have tried and what you have learned. Now look at the list. If every item is a thought rather than an observation, you have been working above the concrete. Go and look at one actual instance, with a pencil, for fifteen minutes, and write down what you see before you interpret it. The list of observations is usually longer than you expect and always less tidy than the list of thoughts.
Exercise 11. From Does It Change What You Do?
Take one way of thinking you have been using lately, and take one decision you will actually face in the next week. Write two lines. First: what would I do differently? Second: what would it cost? If the first line is blank, put the way of thinking down for now and note that you were holding it for its own sake, which is allowed. If it is not blank, you have found out whether the thinking is earning its place.
Exercise 12. From A Field Guide for Switching
Take the problem you have been carrying around. Write the level you think you are on, and its question, at the top of a page. Then answer all six questions in one line each. Then, at the bottom, write two lines: what you would do differently tomorrow, and what it would cost. If the bottom two lines are the same as the top of the page, you have found the level, and the next thing is to look at one real case of it. If the bottom two lines are empty, you have not been thinking about a problem. You have been thinking about a situation, and that is a different and more interesting thing.
Exercise 13. From The Clock Is a Theory
Write down the times of five things in your day, and for each one write what happens if you are five minutes late. Then find the one that is the most expensive to be late for, and find the person who absorbs it. That person is the constraint, not the clock. Ask them what they would do differently if the five minutes were protected.
Exercise 14. From A Door Is a Decision About Who
Walk through a building and pick three doors. For each one, write down who it is easiest for and who it is hardest for, and which direction the cost falls. Then pick the one where the answer is furthest apart and go and watch somebody use it for five minutes. You will find out something about the building that no plan shows you.
Exercise 15. From The Path Across the Grass
Find a worn track near where you work or live. Walk it and note every deviation from the shortest line, and what each deviation is avoiding. Then ask what each of those obstacles is for, and whether it is still doing that job. Half of them will not be, and that is the list of things that could be moved.
Exercise 16. From Money Is a Shared Story That Works
Take the last three things you paid for and write down what each one actually is, in words, with no numbers. A coffee, a seat on a bus, half an hour of somebody's attention. Now write down, for each, who had to agree for the exchange to happen and what they gave up. Most of the value in those three exchanges was not in the object and not in the number. It was in a chain of people who do not know each other and are all willing to keep the arrangement running.
Exercise 17. From A Staircase Is a Rule Made of Wood
Go up a staircase you use often and count the steps without looking at your feet. Then walk down it and count again, and notice whether your body guessed the number. If your body guessed right, the rhythm is doing its work. If it guessed wrong, the stair is asking more of your attention than it needs to, and you now know which stair in your life is asking for it.
Exercise 18. From The Exam Paper
Take the last piece of work you marked. Read the comment you wrote and ask whether any part of it could have been produced by a rubric and a number alone. If the answer is no, then the comment is doing something the mark cannot, and it is worth asking what would be lost if the comment were dropped. If the answer is yes, then the mark is doing all the work, and it is worth asking whether all the work should be doing that.
Exercise 19. From One Stove, Six Dishes
Next time you cook for a few people, do not start with a recipe. Start with a clock and a list of what has to be hot at the same time. Then write down, for each dish, how long it takes and whether it needs you standing there. Then find the gaps and put the things that do not need the stove into them. You will find the evening gets noticeably shorter, and you will find out which dish was the one eating your time.
Exercise 20. From The Phone in Your Pocket
Open the settings on your phone and turn off every notification that is not from a person. Count them first. Then put the phone in a drawer, out of reach, for one evening, and do something that takes the same time and has an ending. Notice how much of the evening you thought about it. The number of notifications you turned off is the size of the arrangement you had built without deciding to build it.
Exercise 21. From Making the Stone Stony
Find the most ordinary object within reach. Set a timer for two minutes and describe it without using its name or the name of any part of it. If you get stuck, that is the point, and the stuckness is information. When the timer goes, look at it once more with the name back in your head. You will have a new sense of how much the word was doing for you, and for the price of two minutes.
Exercise 22. From The Map Is Not the Territory
Take a plan you are currently working from, or a chart, or a set of notes about a project. Write down what it does not cover. Then go and look at one of the things it does not cover, for five minutes, with no notes from the plan in your hand. Whatever you find is either a problem the plan has not solved or a thing the plan did not need to solve. Both are worth knowing, and neither is visible from the plan.
Exercise 23. From Zoom
Take one thing that is going wrong in your work. Write down the question you are actually asking about it. Then write down the question you would ask if you were five times further away, and the question you would ask if you were five times closer. Answer the further and closer questions, not the original one, for ten minutes. Most of the time the original question is the wrong one for the job.
Exercise 24. From Drawing What You See
Draw something without looking at the page for ten seconds at a time, and go back to the object between glances. You will be surprised by how much you did not know. Then, without measuring anything, mark the three points on the drawing where your proportions are most wrong. Those three points are what you were not seeing, and they are different every time you do it.
Exercise 25. From The Noun That Froze a River
Take a noun you used three times today to describe something that is not going well. Write it at the top of a page. Then write, underneath, three verbs that could replace it, each of which implies an action by somebody. Work, waits, drifts, repairs, argues. Now write one sentence using the verb that fits best, with a name in it. The noun was a thing on a list. The verb is a thing somebody did today, and that is a much better place to start.
Exercise 26. From Wholes No Part Contains
Take a recurring annoyance. Write down the local rule that every person involved is following, one line each. Do not write what they should do, write what they are actually doing. Then change one of those rules by a small amount, in a way you could actually implement, and watch what happens to the annoyance. If the annoyance is emergent, one rule will move it. If it does not move, it was never emergent, and you have learned something more useful.
Exercise 27. From Then What?
Take a decision you have already made and have not looked at since. Write down what you expected to happen. Now write, in one line each, what you expect happens next, and what happens after that. Then go and check the first of those lines. It is the first one that is usually wrong, and finding that out is worth more than the whole chain would have been.
Exercise 28. From The Form Makes the Poem
Find a rule you work under. Write down what it is, exactly, and then write down what it is for. Then write down a version of the rule that would serve the same purpose and be easier to live with. If you cannot write the third line, the rule might be doing something you have not noticed, and that is worth knowing. If you can write it, try it for a week and see what the work looks like on the other side of the wall.
Exercise 29. From Fast Variables, Slow Variables
List every number you or your team watches regularly. Beside each one, write the shortest possible answer to what would have had to be true a year ago for that number to be different today. Then mark each one with the year in it. Most of them will be marked this year, which means they are fast, which means they are symptoms, which means they are not where your attention belongs.
Exercise 30. From Every Metaphor Is a Borrowed Map
Write down a metaphor you use about your work. Then write down the one case where it would be clearly wrong, and say what is different about that case. Then write down a second, opposite metaphor for the same situation. Keep both, and use whichever one fits the part of the work you are in. A single metaphor is a straight road. Two of them is a crossroads, and the crossroads is where the thinking is.
Exercise 31. From The Meaning of Empty Space
Take a page you have written, or a drawing you have made. Pick one mark, one line, one clause, and one element of the layout, and remove each of them in turn. After each removal, look at the space that is left. At least one of the four will turn out to be doing less than you thought, and the space where it was will turn out to have been doing something all along.