Expected Value

Productivity for Knowledge Workers

A book-shaped table of contents for productivity as practiced by a knowledge worker: foundations, self-management, goal setting, time and deep work, personal knowledge management, learning, task systems, decision making, habits, digital productivity, engineering and career practice, health, review, and an advanced operating-system layer, plus reference appendices — cross-linking existing notes instead of duplicating them.

First Principles Thinking

Reasoning up from fundamentals instead of by analogy to what's already been done — slower, and the only way to beat a locally-optimized status quo.

2 — Reversible vs Irreversible Decisions

The one-way-door / two-way-door distinction — why irreversible decisions deserve deliberate slowness and reversible ones deserve speed, and conflating the two wastes both.

Opportunity Cost

What a choice actually costs is the next-best option it forecloses, not just the resources it visibly consumes.

3 — Avoiding Cognitive Biases

The recurring judgment errors most likely to distort an engineering or career decision — see Philosophy for the full bias catalog this chapter draws on.