Rationality tools for the modern beisutsukai.
The goal factoring workflow automates a process which you could, in theory, do by hand in a text document or on a spreadsheet, but which quickly becomes intractable in practice.
Colloquially, the steps of the exercise are as follows:
- Brainstrom on goals that you want to achieve and actions that you're currently taking.
- Outline how these goals and actions connect/depend on each other.
- Iterate a few times through the brainstorming process to shake loose any remaining goals or actions.
- Eliminate dependency loops in the goal hierarchy in order to understand what is truly fundamental.
- Take the opportunity to notice incongruities between your stated goals, their interactions or contradictions, and your actual day-to-day actions.
- Brainstorm new and better ways of acheiving your fundamental goals.
- Incorporate the new instrumental goals and actions and reconfigure the goal hierarchy around them.
- This is the time to pause for introspection. At this point, if you still feel dissatisfied with the goal map, it's likely that you're deluding yourself about the importance or practicality of some of your goals. Take an opportunity to think about any hidden or implicit goals that you may be overlooking. (If you have completely left out a major human physiological or psychological need, it's likely that your map is going to feel wrong.)
- If you found some hidden implicit goals, incorporate them.
- Scrutinize the actions that you've provided as means to obtaining your goals. Try to find better, cheaper, more effective means of achieving the same objectives.
- Test your current plans against reality via mental "red-team" exercises.
- If you've done everything right, you shouldn't even need to do anything with the insights you've obtained. Their self-evident power will just change your behavior under the surface. However ...
- You can turn your plans into Trigger-Action-Plans at this point.