A living list of mental models, biases and other interesting things that help improve how I think.
- Not invented here syndrome: Reinventing the wheel rather than finding and using a pre-existing external solution.
- YAGNI (You Aren't Going to Need It): Don't waste resources building presumptive features now (because they may never be needed, even if you think they will).
- Premature optimisation: A type of YAGNI. Don't optimise before you need to. You might waste an extra week on optimisation that is never needed.
- Bikeshedding (Parkinson’s Law of Triviality): a committee whose job is to approve plans for a nuclear power plant may spend the majority of its time on relatively unimportant but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bikeshed, while neglecting the design of the power plant itself, which is far more important but also far more difficult to criticize constructively
- Eisenhower Matrix: "What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important." Prevent firefighting, focus on quadrant two.
- Satisficers vs Maximisers: Some people optimise for satisfaction (they are happy once their criteria have been met), while others are not happy until they believe they have made the optimial decision.
- Type 1 vs Type 2 framework: Type 1 decisions can't be reversed and as such require great care. Type 2 decisions can be easily reversed, allowing for quick, thoughtful decisions with a lower threshold of approval (from Amazon's Jeff Bezos).
- Confirmation Bias: Favouring information that re-inforces your existing beliefs. Best explained by this comic:
- Curse of knowledge: Once you know something, it's hard to imagine not knowing it (huge part of communication frustration). Further reading.
- Scream test: If you see something and you don't know what it does, remove it and see if anyone screams.
- Chesterton's fence: "reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood"
- The tyranny of inertia: Q "Why is it done like that?" A "Because we've always done it that way" :/
- Crab mentality: Pulling someone down because they're succeeding (often unconsciously).
- Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by ignorance (or stupidity).
- Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
- Planning fallacy: We suffer from an optimism bias and always underestimate how long a task (or project) will take. This occurs even when we are asked to consider as much detail as possible about the work (this is the Inside view).
- Outside view (a solution to the Planning fallacy): using an estimate based on a class of roughly similar previous cases, rather than trying to visualize the details of a process. For example, estimating the completion time of a programming project based on how long similar projects have taken in the past, rather than by drawing up a graph of tasks and their expected completion times.
- Ship of Theseus: Is an object that has had all of its components replaced fundamentally the same object? AKA Trigger's Broom: "Maintained it for 20 years. This old broom's had 17 new heads and 14 new handles in its time."
