According to Ellis, people in our culture go through three normal stages of emotion (shown in Table 7-1) many times a day, consisting of an activating event in the external world, filtered through their beliefs, resulting in emotional consequences.

Engaging in the three additional steps of rational self-analysis ² shown in Table 7-2 can help you be more reasonable, and even happier.

The steps of rational self-analysis also have an alphabetic mnemonic. They constitute the three stages beyond ABC, if you take them: disputation of your irrational beliefs, aiming at an emotional effect, followed by further action to stop the cycle from occurring again.

You can use three broad classes of disputation in a rational self-analysis:

You can also dispute your beliefs with a list of cognitive distortions [Hack #58]. Sometimes just being able to nail one of your irrational beliefs as a classic example of one of the distortions on the list is enough to make it shrivel in a smoking heap.

In practice, you will usually perform a rational self-analysis in the order C, A, B, E, D, F. That is, you’ll do the following:

Let’s follow the steps of the typical rational self-analysis of a hypothetical grad student. We’ll call this person Russell, after Bertrand Russell, the famous rationalist. Our man Russell has a disability that sometimes causes him some discomfort and embarrassment, and he is trying to learn to cope with it.

One night at dinner, Russell has a sudden attack of an incurable disease called hodaddia, which he contracted from a mosquito bite on a tropical vacation several years ago. When the attack struck tonight, he collapsed in pain and turned bright mauve all over, as usual. This is the activating event.

Russell feels furiously ashamed and embarrassed. He loathes and pities himself, and then he gets depressed and needy, feeling helpless. These are the emotional consequences. He lies in bed ineffectually and demands that his roommates brew him big pitchers of hot lemonade with maple syrup, which is the only thing besides his medication that seems to bring relief.

Finally, Russell decides he’s had enough. Just this once, he’s going to analyze his thinking and clear his head. He identifies A and C.

Next, Russell dredges up his beliefs (B) that transformed the activating event (A) into the emotional consequences (C):

The effects (E) Russell wants to have in the future, instead of his normal emotional consequences, are as follows:

To achieve these effects, Russell disputes (D) his irrational beliefs as follows:

Finally, Russell decides to take some further action (F):

Suddenly, Russell doesn’t feel so bad anymore. In fact, he feels like working on a new project.

The primary cognitive distortions of self, others, and world are the foundations for many of the secondary cognitive distortions in the next section. You might think of them as clumps of thought—that is, distorted viewpoints, orientations, or ways of approaching your life rather than individual thoughts.

Table 7-3 presents some sample distortions and common triggers for each of these perspectives.¹

Most people fall prey to all of these irrational beliefs from time to time, and most people have a “favorite” one. For example, the viewpoint that has most often ruined my day is the World example.

Whereas you might imagine the irrational beliefs in the previous section as big musical themes that run throughout people’s lives, the smaller irrational beliefs shown in Table 7-4 are more like the musical notes that make up those themes.^2,3

Once you recognize these beliefs in yourself, you’ll find that it’s a relief to stop whistling those tunes.

Now that you have an idea of these little mental land mines, what can you do to avoid them or, better, defuse them?

Just recognizing them helps, but you can also use rational self-analysis [Hack #57] to mentally dispute your distorted thinking and replace it with healthy thoughts that will further your projects and make you happier.

Yes, happier. Some people believe that we cause our feelings when we think rationally or irrationally. This means that you can’t make anyone else happy—too bad. On the other hand, no one else can make you unhappy—only yourself. So see if you can put an end to it!

When you learn the Fourfold Breath, wear loose clothes or no clothes and make sure that you can breathe freely. Sit comfortably; you might want to lie down, but not if you’re prone to falling asleep easily.

First, learn belly breathing:

After you’re comfortable with belly breathing, learn chest breathing: breathing with the upper part of your lungs only. Since this is the way most people in Western culture breathe anyway, learning chest breathing should not be difficult to do. When chest breathing, only your chest should rise, not your belly.

Next, learn to combine belly and chest breathing for a full breath:

Finally, learn to breathe rhythmically, in a fixed, repetitive pattern. This is the Fourfold Breath proper. The pattern I learned, and which I have found most effective, is 4-2-4-2, as follows:

Depending on your body’s rhythms, you might find other equivalent breath counts to be more effective, such as 6-3-6-3 or 8-4-8-4. Notice that these patterns are some variant of 2x-x-2x-x. Some teachers recommend entirely different rhythms, however, such as 4-4-4-4, or even a threefold breath such as 4-2-2 (inhale four, hold two, exhale two, repeat).¹ Feel free to experiment.

You might be able to find the right rhythm for breathing by synchronizing your breath with your heartbeat. If you do so, you’ll know it; you’ll become even calmer very quickly, and might sink into deep relaxation.

Everyone’s body and mind are different, so experiment to find the best rhythm for you. Focus your attention on your breath and your counting, making sure that all your breaths are full and the count is steady. The Fourfold Breath is not a race; focusing on doing it slowly and steadily is part of what will help you relax.

If you learn to perform the Fourfold Breath invisibly, you will be able to hack your breathing inconspicuously whenever you feel angry, threatened, or anxious. For example, I have used it at the dentist’s office, and I have used it to stay calm and friendly during job interviews.

If you train yourself to use the Fourfold Breath in stressful situations, you might find that it becomes a reflex. It was amusing to me that Frank Herbert described something similar in his science fiction novel Dune. Near the beginning of the novel, two characters are left in the desert to die. Both of them have undergone the mystical Bene Gesserit training, however, and they find that a calming breath pattern kicks in, allowing them to think clearly about their desperate situation. In this case, the fictional Bene Gesserit meditation exercises were definitely founded on fact.

Apart from inculcating a useful reflex that probably reduces the ravages of stress on your body, this hack might not produce lasting change by itself. The Fourfold Breath can be used to support deeper, more enduring techniques such as meditation [Hack #60] and REBT [Hack #57], but in itself it is mainly useful as first aid—although it is amazingly powerful first aid.

Just as you can quell a potentially fatal allergic reaction with a timely injection of adrenaline, so you can stem an unpleasant or even dangerous panic reaction with the Fourfold Breath. However, adrenaline won’t cure your allergies (though immunotherapy might), and you shouldn’t expect this exercise to cure you forever of any panic attacks you are experiencing.

On the other hand, I don’t want to undervalue the Fourfold Breath either. If you do suffer from panic attacks, insomnia, or other stress-related ailments, just knowing you have a hack that can help you control them may lead you to feel peaceful, and thereby reduce your problem’s frequency and severity a great deal. That in itself might be a life-changing experience.

Before you begin, don’t worry if you can’t meditate “perfectly,” especially if you have never meditated before, or haven’t meditated for a long time. Meditation requires discipline, but being too hard on yourself is contrary to its spirit. It’s better to get back into practice by meditating “badly” or only for a few minutes at a time than to give up completely.

Here are some instructions for a simple meditation session:

Continue the practice periodically for a few days. If you decide to take it further, try to push yourself to meditate for 20 minutes, and then 30 minutes twice a day. Meditating at roughly the same time every day can help you establish the habit.

After meditation, you might find you have a calmer, clearer mind. If you don’t, don’t worry; you might have to meditate a while before it clicks. Experienced meditators often find that their meditation practice over many years is a series of such clicks, as their meditation deepens.

The theory of insight meditation is that by watching your thoughts as calmly and neutrally as you can while not getting involved in them, you short-circuit the dreary, circular process of observing something, thinking about it, reacting emotionally to your thoughts, observing your emotional reaction, thinking about it, reacting emotionally again, and so on. If you meditate, eventually this cycle, which is like ripples in a pond, will die down naturally and your mind will become still and clear.

The purpose of focusing on your breath is to provide a neutral place for your attention when thoughts are not appearing in your mind. In later stages of meditation practice, you might use another focus, such as your walking feet.

How meditation works from a scientific standpoint is only beginning to be understood. It is known that the physiological effects typically include muscle relaxation, a slowing of heart rate, a lowering of blood pressure, slowing of breath, reduction of oxygen consumption, and an increase in alpha rhythms in the brain.^3,4 However, most practitioners of meditation will tell you there’s more to it than a handful of physiological effects, no matter how beneficial. It’s something you have to experience from the inside to understand.

The book Happy to Burn,⁵ which I have found to be the most helpful introductory guide to insight meditation, outlines six phases in its meditation program. If you start with the first step and move slowly and methodically forward, you can expect to make significant progress:

You can combine insight meditation with Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy [Hack #57] to further short-circuit your reactive cycles. If your meditation makes you aware of any particularly disturbing thoughts or feelings that don’t go away after meditation, you can dispute them with rational self-analysis.

The relief that meditation can provide from the daily round can be exquisite, and the respite from the fight-or-flight reaction is probably good for your body, too. It’s very much like a taking a small vacation every day, and then again, it’s like coming home.

Self-hypnosis is a reasonably simple process, but you should take the time to plan. The following process is a basic outline for a self-hypnosis session.¹ Read over all the steps before you start, assemble whatever you need to be comfortable, and give it a little thought. Your effort will be rewarded.

Everyone has had the experience of seeing a great movie and really sinking into it. When you come out of the theater, you might feel disoriented; it’s hard to believe that you weren’t in the movie, and you’re emotionally drained because you’ve had the emotional involvement and reactions as if you were there. Basically, self-hypnosis allows you to run a movie in your mind. With practice, you can project the movie as well as get involved with it, so you can decide what movie you want to watch and what emotions and beliefs you want to elicit from yourself.

Self-hypnosis works, as the great movie does, because it allows us to see situations as almost real, with the safety of knowing that it isn’t really real. We are changed by going through the emotional reactions and experiences as if they were real. Self-hypnosis also gives us an opportunity for goal rehearsal, which allows us to imagine what having a goal would be like. By doing this, we shape our minds so that we know what it will be like to achieve the goal, which helps us know how to get there from where we are and puts us into the mindset to look for opportunities and expect success.³

What can you do with self-hypnosis besides become more confident? Many claims have been made for hypnosis, although some of them are controversial. In clinical testing, self-hypnosis has been shown effective in reducing pain, even in patients that had been very resistant to other pain-reduction methods⁴ and patients with chronic pain.⁵ In another study, subjects increased their physical exercise performance by using hypnosis.⁶ Other claims include breaking habits such as smoking, overcoming phobias, recalling forgotten information, directly controlling physiological processes such as bleeding, and eliminating infections such as the virus that causes warts. Readers of Mind Performance Hacks might also find it interesting that claims have been made that hypnosis can increase reading speed and the ability to do mental math.

Skeptics debate many of these claims, including the one that hypnosis has been shown reliable at recovering lost or repressed memories. In fact, hypnosis can be used to create false memories, and memories “recovered” under hypnosis are therefore not admissible as evidence in many courts of law. The Skeptic’s Dictionary claims (emphasis ours):

When one strips away [the] dramatic dressings [of hypnosis], what is left is something quite ordinary, even if extraordinarily useful: a self-induced, “psyched-up” state of suggestibility.⁷

This hack was written with the understanding that self-hypnosis can, at the very least, enhance your ability to perform anything you could normally do in a relaxed, focused, psyched-up, open-minded mental state, and that it’s quicker than an all-day motivational seminar, as well as a lot cheaper.

A self-hypnosis session such as the one described in the previous section should be enough to get you through a hard weekend study session or something of similar intensity and duration. In general, self-hypnosis works best for short-term goals.

However, you can use it for long-term goals as well, if you keep refreshing your suggestion. In this way, it is like meditation [Hack #60], which is also important to do on a regular basis if you want anything more than short-term results. Marty has used self-hypnosis techniques (as well as the Fourfold Breath [Hack #59]) for years to tackle chronic anxiety attacks. She uses a couple of different hypnosis techniques; some help avoid attacks, and others help her stop an attack in progress. She’s had great success with this, both in the short-term goal of stopping and escaping from anxiety attacks and in the longer-term goal of avoiding them.

Even a short-term effect can be useful if it gets you over a hurdle, and short-term effects can build into long-term effects. For example, passing that test might give you such confidence in the future that you won’t need to renew the suggestion. Marty has used her anxiety hypnosis so effectively in the moment that it has dramatically reduced her likelihood of suffering attacks over time.

Ron Hale-Evans and Marty Hale-Evans

The experiment described here was done in the lab of Elizabeth Spelke.⁴ You can potentially do it in your own home, but be prepared to build some large props and to get dizzy.

Imagine a room like the one in Figure 7-1. The room is made up of four curtains, used to create four walls in a rectangle, defined by two types of information: geometric (two short walls and two long walls) and color information (one red wall).

Figure 7-1. Setup for Spelke’s experiments — a rectangular room with one colored wall

Now, think about the corners. If you are using only geometric information, pairs of corners are identical. There are two corners with a short wall on the left and a long wall on the right, and two corners the other way around. If you are using only color information, there are also two pairs of identical corners: corners next to a red wall and corners not next to a red wall.

Using just one kind of information, geometry or color, lets you identify corners with only 50% accuracy. But using both kinds of information in combination lets you identify any of the four corners with 100% accuracy, because although both kinds of information are ambiguous, they are not ambiguous in the same way.

So, here’s a test to see if people can use both kinds of information in combination.⁵ Show a person something he’d like, such as some food, and let him see you hide it behind the curtains in one corner of the room. Now disorient him by spinning him around, and ask him to find the food. If he can combine the geometric and the color information, he’ll have no problem finding the food—he’ll be able to tell unambiguously in which corner it was hidden. If he doesn’t combine information across modules, he will get it right 50% of the time, and he will get it wrong 50% of the time on his first guess and need a second guess to find the food.

Where does language come into it? Well, language seems to define the kinds of subjects who can do this task at better than 50% accuracy. Rats can’t do it. Children who don’t have language yet can’t do it. Postlinguistic children and adults can do it.

Convinced? Here’s the rub: if you tie up an adult’s language ability, her performance drops to close to 50%. This is what Linda Hermer-Vazquez, Elizabeth Spelke, and Alla Katsnelson did.⁶ They got subjects to do the experiment, but all the time they were doing it, they were asked to repeat the text of newspaper articles that were played to them over loudspeakers. This “verbal shadowing task” completely engaged their language ability, removing their inner monologue.

The same subjects could orient themselves and find the correct corner fine when they weren’t doing the task. They could do it when they were doing an equivalently difficult task that didn’t tie up their language ability (copying a sequence of rhythms by clapping). But they couldn’t do it with their language resources engaged in something else. There’s something special about language that is essential for reorienting yourself using both kinds of information available in the room.

Peter Carruthers thinks that you get this effect because language is essential for conjoining information from different modules. Specifically he thinks that it is needed at the interface between beliefs, desires, and planning. Combining across modalities is possible without language for simple actions, but there’s something about planning, and that includes reorientation, which requires language.

This would explain why people sometimes begin to talk to themselves—to instruct themselves out loud—during especially difficult tasks. Children use self-instruction as a normal part of their development to help them carry out things they find difficult.⁷ Telling them to keep quiet is unfair and probably makes it harder for them to finish what they are doing.

If Carruthers is right, it means two things. First, if you are asking people to engage in goal-oriented reasoning, particularly if it uses information of different sorts, you shouldn’t ask them to do something else that is verbal, either listening or speaking.

Second, if you do want to get people to do complex multisequence tasks, they might find it easier if they can perform the tasks using only one kind of information so that language isn’t required to combine across modules.

Matt Webb and Tom Stafford

Start with an objective, a choice or decision that you need to make, in which the right decision is far from clear. A decision that has many competing factors to consider is ideal. This decision is to be the focus of the exercise. You’ll be gathering information from yourself that will help you make that decision. It’s a bit tricky, because you’ll be playing the role of both interviewer and interviewee.

Find somewhere comfortable enough to sit, but not the most comfortable chair in the house, and have a pad of paper to make notes on. If you’ve already collected some written information, quickly scan through it to remind yourself of what you already have.

Start out with easy questions to which you know the answers and, ideally, feel good about. The questions need to be related to the overall objective, but the purpose of asking them is to warm up and get answers coming easily.

As you get into this, gradually switch to deeper questions. The questions should be prompting you to think about different aspects of the decision. Remember, you’re gathering information about the decision, not actually making the decision at this point. Resist the temptation to approve or disapprove of an answer. That can get in the way of gathering the information, whereas maintaining your journalistic objectivity can help.

As an interviewer, the question in your mind as you listen to each answer should be “Do I need to know more in that direction?” As you’re doing this, notice whether you’re making useful progress. Since you’re both interviewer and interviewee, the process should be more of a partnership than an adversarial game—in other words, more like a typical newspaper interview than a typical job selection interview. Nevertheless, as interviewer, keep your wits about you and make sure your interviewee isn’t dodging any of the questions.

Here is the crucial part. If you find you’re moving away from the key objective, use more focused questions, known as closed questions, for which the answers are a simple “yes,” “no,” “I don’t know,” number, date, or name. When you ask a closed question, you need to be ready to follow up with more questions, since you’re looking for a short answer.

Conversely, if you feel something is being left unsaid, or some aspect of the decision is not being considered, go for more open questions, questions that give more opportunity for more expansive—and more surprising—answers. It’s perfectly possible to surprise yourself with the answers you might find. The key is a balance between the open and closed questions. In your role as interviewer, you must actively adjust that balance. You want to keep getting information, but ensure that it stays sufficiently on-topic and relevant to your overall task.

Give yourself a time limit—say, 40 minutes. At the end of that time, bring the interview process to a clean conclusion, take a short break, and then review what you’ve learned from the process.

The ritual described is a bit artificial, and you can gain much of its benefit more simply after some experience by recognizing in your own thinking what subgoals you are setting for yourself or what questions you are asking yourself. More creativity will come with the open questions, more focus with the closed ones. The formal interview process, however, will help you develop and strengthen these skills.

Here is an approximation to an interview with myself. I wrote it from the interviewer’s perspective, as if it were between two people and spoken out loud. In actuality, it was unspoken and I was both the interviewer and interviewee. The problem I chose to explore in the interview was a challenging one—coming up with a birthday present for my sister.

Tell me some things about your sister. What’s she like?

An open question, and not too difficult. A good place to start. However, there was a problem straight away. The interviewee quickly shifted to talking about things his sister isn’t interested in, implying that this makes finding a present more difficult. To get him back on track:

And what interests her? What do you talk about with her?

Prompted to mention specific interests, the interviewee fairly rapidly came up with five general areas.

Do any of these provide good opportunities for presents?

More problems. The interviewee’s response to the question was noncommittal. He seemed reluctant to engage with the question. Perhaps the question was too open and needed a tighter focus. One option was to now home in on just one of the interests and see where that led. Instead of narrowing the search so much so soon, I instead tried:

How about something that combines two of the five interests that you’ve identified?

With some more encouragement, this led to a mix of “off the wall” ideas, and some that might be promising. Instead of evaluating here and now whether the ideas were good or bad, the follow-up questions I asked were to gather more information about these ideas. These were mostly closed questions, questions about where to buy, type, color, approximate cost—questions about practicalities. However, these didn’t turn out quite as closed as I intended. In particular, the “where to buy” question led the interviewee to a similar, and in his opinion slightly better, idea for one of the possible gifts. Now, noticing that time was nearly up, I asked the interviewee whether he wanted to add anything to what he’d said already. He didn’t, so I brought the interview to a close.

At this point, I took a brief break and then I came back and went through the ideas, junking the nonstarters. That left just four. Of these, two were on the expensive side, too risky to get for her without asking her first whether she’d like them, but they were definite contenders. One of the ideas I hadn’t a clue where to get: “Try eBay, perhaps?” The fourth was a bit on the mingy side. As I’d have been pleased to get one decent idea, I thought that was a good and useful result.

The hack works because interviewers have refined the art of interviewing through a great deal of experience. Putting someone at ease at the start of an interview is essential to getting good information from him. Interviewers also know from experience that they stop getting accurate information from a candidate when they show strong approval or disapproval of the candidate’s responses. The most verbal parts of thinking appear to be an abbreviated form of conversation, so similar principles apply.

The key part of the hack is having a search strategy and using it consciously. Open questions widen the search area, and closed questions home in on details to keep the search on track.

James Crook

The neutral point of view, as Wikipedians define it, has a very distinct meaning. According to this standard, neutral and unbiased do not mean the same thing as objective. Objectivity implies a kind of God’s-eye view, which is impossible for finite intelligences, whereas the neutral point of view simply means not taking sides (however hard that might be). Here’s a brief summary of the official Wikipedia policy:

Unbiased writing does not present only the most popular view; it does not assert the most popular view is correct after presenting all views; it does not assert that some sort of intermediate view among the different views is the correct one. Presenting all points of view says, more or less, that p-ists believe that p, and q-ists believe that q, and that’s where the debate stands at present. Ideally, presenting all points of view also gives a great deal of background on who believes that p and q and why, and which view is more popular (being careful not to associate popularity with correctness). Detailed articles might also contain the mutual evaluations of the p-ists and the q-ists, allowing each side to give its “best shot” at the other, but studiously refraining from saying who won the exchange.¹

Let’s try to clarify the basis for the neutral point of view.² The NPOV attempts to state facts and only facts. A fact is a statement about which no serious dispute exists, such as “Saturn is a planet” or “Submarines can dive underwater.” On the other hand, an opinion or value is a statement about which some dispute exists, such as “Writing graffiti on walls is wrong,” or "The Lord of the Rings is the best book of the 20th century.”

If you wish to communicate from the neutral point of view, describe disputes, don’t engage in them, even if you agree with one side. (This might be thought of as the NPOV golden rule.) For example, instead of saying, "The Lord of the Rings is the best book of the 20th century,” which is a value or opinion, say, “In a 1997 survey by the British bookseller Waterstone’s, The Lord of the Rings was voted the best novel in English of the 20th century, capturing about 5,000 votes from the 25,000 people surveyed.” This is a fact; you have converted an opinion into a fact.

In a similar way, you can convert other values and opinions to facts by attributing them to identifiable spokespeople or populations. When you do, be sure to explain the reasons why the people who hold those opinions do so, make clear which is the majority view and which are the minority views, and don’t imply that one side or the other is correct. Remember, “Writing graffiti on walls is wrong” is an opinion, and “78% of Americans agree with the U.S. Anti-Graffiti League that writing on walls that don’t belong to you is wrong, 12% believe it to be ‘a righteous act of civil disobedience and self-expression,’ and 10% state they ‘couldn’t care less’” is a fact.

Finally, describe opinions in a positive, sympathetic way, especially if you disagree with them. Who knows? You might be wrong, and you’ll be glad one day when someone who disagrees with your minority opinion treats it respectfully.

Leaving aside the Wikipedia, if you apply these principles to the thought and communication in your own life, you may find yourself becoming a calmer, less contentious, and more understanding person. Is learning the NPOV guidelines worth the effort? I claim it is, and that’s a fact.

Here is an example of a biased text made neutral by application of the NPOV. The following text is excerpted from the home page of AGHOST (the Amateur Ghost Hunters Of Seattle/Tacoma), which you can find at http://www.aghost.us:

A.G.H.O.S.T. is the most advanced technical paranormal research group in the Pacific Northwest. During paranormal investigations, our team combines hi-tech equipment with qualified psychics, research and training for successful results. We work with the basic investigative tools such as cameras (35 mm and digital), audio and video recording devices, and EMF detectors, as well as the most advanced computerized surveillance equipment including infrared motion sensor cameras. Each member of our investigation team has been thoroughly trained in their areas of responsibility. AGHOST has earned the respect of some of the most important names in the paranormal field.

We, the ghost hunters, have made it our quest to provide substantial evidence that we are not alone in the dark. What is it that goes bump in the night and gives you the feeling of being watched when you’re all alone? With the work of ghost hunters today...the TRUTH will be found.

Here’s the text after applying the NPOV guidelines to it:

A.G.H.O.S.T. is a research group in the Pacific Northwest that investigates phenomena we suspect have a paranormal origin. Our investigatory team uses equipment such as 35mm and digital cameras, audio and video recorders, electromagnetic field detectors, and Geiger counters, as well as surveillance equipment including laptops with infrared motion sensor cameras and other sensors.

Our team also includes members who claim to have psychic abilities, and we listen seriously to what they tell us. We train all members of our investigation team in their special areas of responsibility, and the results they obtain sometimes surprise the journalists and skeptics who accompany us on expeditions. AGHOST has also earned the respect of such prestigious investigators of the paranormal as Pam Psychic, who said, “AGHOST has shown positive proof of more ghosts than any other amateur ghost-hunting group I know of,” and Sam Skeptic, who said, “Although I don’t believe in ghosts myself, I respect AGHOST. They don’t jump to conclusions.”

Although many of the ghost hunters of AGHOST believe in life after death, we recognize that not everyone does. However, even skeptics experience an eerie feeling from time to time when they hear a bump in the night or feel as though they’re being watched when they’re alone. As ghost hunters armed with twenty-first-century technology and a team we trust, we believe it is our duty to find the truth behind mysterious occurrences.

The altered version of the AGHOST promotional material relies more on facts than opinions. Should AGHOST ever adopt such an approach on its home page, in my estimation, the loss of “true believers” who would find the more neutral approach repugnant would be more than offset by the influx of skeptics and merely curious people who would find it refreshing.

Make a plan and stick to it. Periodically remind yourself somehow, such as with an exoself [Hack #17], of what you need to be doing. Planning from the top down (from the forest to the trees in it) and not from the bottom up (from the trees to the forest) is important. In terms of the Getting Things Done system, asking “What is the next task?” should flow from “What am I trying to accomplish?” instead of the other way around.

It is crucial to assess how much of a tendency you have toward both positive and negative momentum. If you have a strong tendency toward negative momentum, avoid doing anything that isn’t part of your master plan and don’t spend too much time on small tasks, planned or not. On the other hand, if you find you have a tendency toward positive momentum, make maximal use of the Swiss cheese method described earlier.

Here is a story about putting the brakes on some negative mental momentum. I recently bought a used laser printer that didn’t have enough memory to print duplex and didn’t come with PostScript installed. I ordered some more memory for the printer from eBay, but meanwhile, I had a 200-page PDF file that I wanted to print four-up and duplex. I woke up one day with the intention of writing hacks for this book, but decided I would “just” print the file duplex manually. I thought I knew the right PostScript utilities on my GNU/Linux box to create a four-up PostScript file that I could then print duplex by splitting it into front and back pages. Of course, my various PDF, PostScript, and GhostScript utilities didn’t want to talk to one another, so I had to learn about some PostScript cleanup and compatibility utilities, and when those didn’t work right....

Suddenly, it was 6 p.m. I looked up and said to myself, “This is ridiculous! You’ve done it again!” I had become entranced by the beetle on the bark. Fortunately, I was able to remind myself of my goals for the day and to shake off the evil enchantment under which I had allowed myself to fall. The situation even crystallized some thinking I had been doing about the concept of positive and negative mental momentum (leading to this hack), so not all was lost.