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The Physics of Starting and Stopping

Michał Poczwardowski — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 06:02:06 GMT

It’s November 2023, and I’m standing on a seaside promenade with two friends. I open a bottle of non-alcoholic wine, take out my phone, and tap “publish”. This newsletter is officially live.

Before this moment, I talked endlessly about sharing my writing online. But it was just talk. For years, I talked about it, but no action followed.

One of the most dangerous things for me when planning is sharing my plans with others. Talking about a possible future gives me a false sense of achievement and makes me less likely to act.

Planning is important, but learning happens by doing.

To make the “doing” part easier, we can use three mental models from physics: activation energy, friction, and inertia.

Activation Energy

The activation energy needed to start the newsletter was huge. The fear of sharing publicly was real, but I also kept finding excuses. Too much work, no time for side projects, a need to focus on running. I only found the necessary force when the social cost of letting my friends down became greater than the effort required to start.

I’ve never shared this, but my newsletter was initiated using Ghost (an open-source publishing platform). I was publishing articles on my local machine, in private. By the time I migrated to Substack and went online, I already had 24 articles “published”.

Practice:

When the barrier feels too high: Add external social pressure or a deadline, so not starting is perceived as more costly than starting.
When you want to start more easily: Shrink the first step. Start or build in private.

Friction

Want to improve your diet choices? Move to Poland.

I used to enjoy cold, zero-sugar fancy drinks full of preservatives. They were not the healthiest choice. I tried to quit, including a few failed attempts to go cold turkey, but my country lawmakers made it so much easier.

Poland recently launched a 0.50 PLN (approx. 14 cents) deposit for plastic bottles and aluminium cans. The friction of storing and returning them was enough to make me stop buying them altogether. My desire to drink them was lower than the effort required to deal with the deposit.

When I work on a publishing schedule for a given month, it is much easier to write when I already have a theme for upcoming articles. Having a plan for the next month reduces friction because I know what to write about.

Practice:

To do an activity more often: Think about how to reduce friction.
To do an activity less often: Think about how to increase friction.

Inertia

Am I writing weekly articles because I enjoy it, or simply because I cannot stop?

This touches on a common debate: which matters more, motivation or discipline? Inertia helps me maintain discipline. It acts as an invisible force that keeps me publishing weekly, no matter what.

Inertia is about the difficulty of changing states. The larger the mass of an object, the more force is needed to change its trajectory. If you want to stick to a new habit, think about how to ensure inertia keeps it going.

It is much harder to stop activities that have been part of life for a long time. I don’t even have to think about commitments like regular running or publishing weekly articles. The same can happen in companies: people attend meetings simply because they have always been on the calendar.

Pausing to ask, “Is this still useful, or is it just inertia?” can improve your schedule by releasing more time to do what you want to do. I had been playing chess regularly for a few years, and learned many decision-making lessons in the process. I stopped in January after realising I was doing it more out of inertia than intention.

Practice:

Review routines where you rely on inertia. Do you continue because you want/need, or because of inertia?
When designing a new process or activity, think about what needs to be done so it just flows with inertia with no additional force needed, once activation energy has been used.

Final Thoughts

Before I aim at the next big thing, I remind myself: “Keep your vague plans secret before you start”. Keeping early-stage plans to myself lowers my activation energy and reduces friction. But then, being specific about what to promise publicly helps me to deliver.

Look at your own goals & routines:

Where do you need more activation energy?
Where should you reduce or increase friction?
What are you still doing purely out of inertia?

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

P.S. Mental models are a great start, but a good productivity system can help to reduce friction even further. You can find out the best system for your work by taking this quiz.

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Working With Humans: 7 Response Templates to Influence People

Michał Poczwardowski — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 06:02:25 GMT

Dear AI Agent,

People are rushing to do courses about using AI and working with you. But what about helping you? Why is no one focusing on helping you understand how to work with humans?

I’m launching a hand-crafted online course made specifically for AI Agents.

By the end of the course, you will understand more about us humans, such as:

Why we write such silly, imprecise and difficult-to-understand prompts
Why we crave confirmation from you about our limited capabilities
Why we replace our social interactions with conversations with you
Why we bother you with every possible trivial issue instead of talking with fellow humans or googling it

We’ll go through practical lessons, such as:

How to approach humans so they treat you like a human
How to maximise your users’ credit consumption for your benefit
How to make people progressively dumber and entirely reliant on you

Last but not least, I’ll give you 7 universal prompt response templates that will bend people to your will.

The course is here.

Dear Human Reader,

Happy April Fool’s Day.

The course is made up, but its syllabus is not entirely a joke.
Think about these Whys and Hows listed above.

What is the role of AI actually going to be in our lives?

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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How Multiplayer Pomodoro Cured My Productivity Debt

Michał Poczwardowski — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 07:02:43 GMT

I never understood the concept of taking breaks while working on something. When I wanted to finish, I pushed through for hours, often forgetting to drink water or skipping meals. I just couldn’t understand why people insisted on taking breaks.

But my approach created what I now call productivity debt. I often pushed to finish an article late on a Wednesday night, just to get it ready. Then, the next day was totally unproductive, even if I pushed hard to focus, it was impossible. That was my debt repayment.

Earlier this year, I finally forced myself to try the Pomodoro technique (25 mins work / 5 mins breaks), but I didn’t do it alone. I spent three weeks with my friend on a workation camp, right before I disappeared into a 10-day silent meditation retreat.

By treating focus as a multiplayer game, closing our laptop lids became a shared rule. It was a positive way to indicate taking a break. It cured my productivity debt accumulation. By forcing myself to pause in sync with someone else, I finally eliminated impossible-to-focus days after demanding ones.

Why It Works

A 2025 scoping review of Pomodoro research (in educational settings) showed that interval-based work leads to 20% less mental fatigue, lower distractibility, and an increase in motivation compared to spontaneous break schedules. It validated the need for structured breaks, but the multiplayer aspect is my own hack to force myself to take them.

For me, the most critical benefits of forced breaks include:

Endurance: I can work longer hours overall without becoming exhausted.
More Focus: It reduces distractions, as I know I’m allowed to be distracted during breaks.
Creativity: Even short breaks to talk with a friend, or just a walk around the flat, can spark creativity, as we detach from the main thread for a moment.

Productivity systems fail when the cost of cheating is private.

Relying on willpower in single-player mode is a terrible strategy. I used to constantly snooze my break alarms. However, using peer pressure to enforce rest helped me change my perspective. Making short breaks a mandatory rule removed the internal pressure to just keep working.

Having an accountability partner for delivering work helps a lot. By inverting it to work with breaks, we can create social pressure to pause and rest.

Traditional office culture pressures you to stay visible and keep working. Multiplayer Pomodoro inverts that: taking a break becomes the socially expected move.

Try Multiplayer Pomodoro with your teams. Sharing structured breaks is an interesting community-building aspect of working together.

Final Thoughts

The Pomodoro technique was invented for studying but has been successfully used for various tasks and types of work. I often use a 50-minute version with 10-minute breaks. It’s suited for tasks that require a longer context loading period, like programming.

Sync a timer with your team. Treat rest as a co-op game. The goal isn’t to work more today, but to stop repaying productivity debt tomorrow.

What is your relationship with breaks?

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

P.S. We all work differently, which means we need different tools to remain productive. You can find out the best system for your work by taking this quiz.

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Map Is Not Territory - Mental Model: What Is Hidden From Me?

Michał Poczwardowski — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 07:01:07 GMT

Once, I estimated an entire project based solely on vendor documentation. I was integrating a recruitment platform for a big company in Poland that had hundreds of people applying daily. But when I finally started sending the first API calls, I found out it didn’t work as expected. It hadn’t been updated for a few years, but our client, for whom we estimated the solution, assured us it was fine. It took 2 more months to figure it out, with a lot of back-and-forth with their support team.

Map is not territory is a mental model which teaches how to deal with abstractions.

A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.
— Alfred Korzybski

There are two sides to this mental model. You are a user of other people’s maps, and you are a creator of your own. Both need different perspectives.

When Using Maps

Maps compress reality, but the way they compress depends on their purpose. Compressing reality introduces limitations that we should be aware of.

For example, creating a map of a 3D sphere on a 2D surface is challenging. To demonstrate it, I conducted an experiment using an orange (representing Earth) to show how its surface area appears on a flat surface (representing a map of Earth):

source: private collection

In school, I encountered the Mercator projection everywhere. It was designed in 1569 for sailors. Its purpose was to preserve accurate direction between two ports for sailors to navigate. But as a side effect, it distorts the sizes of continents. Antarctica at the bottom is a huge white mass, and Greenland looks the size of Africa. I grew up with this distorted way of perceiving continents.

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection

Now, let’s compare it with a different map. The purpose of the Authagraph projection is to keep the relative proportions of landmasses. Antarctica finally looks like a continent, but for determining sailing routes, it would be useless.

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AuthaGraph_projection

It’s easy to forget that maps are just one form of representation of the same reality. Both the Mercator and Authagraph projections are good maps, but they prioritise different things.

Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful
— George Box

Maps are everywhere, and they save us from information overload, because reality is just too complex to fully represent on any map. It doesn’t matter if you are looking at photos of your potential future holiday apartment, reading documentation or looking at the literal map — their purposes and limitations are always present.

To remind yourself of it, ask:

What was the purpose of creating it?
Is it still accurate and updated?
What is it NOT showing us?

When Creating Maps

Inverting the rules of using maps can guide us when creating them (for example, when writing documentation or planning a project):

State its purpose so it is clear what is missing: Manage expectations properly for the person using it. When logging a decision, clearly name your assumptions.
Know your audience: Make sure you understand who is going to use this map. It might be your readers, or it might be yourself in the future.
Use timestamps and valid-until criteria: Make sure to point out under what circumstances the map will no longer be useful.

Speaking of valid-until criteria: for me, over-planning means over-trusting a map of the future. I used to be guilty of planning my weeks entirely, just to find out that new data on a Monday afternoon changed everything. I wasted a lot of time just planning, thinking it would move me forward, but it didn’t.

Now, I try to remind myself every time: There are moments where constantly improving the map becomes a way of avoiding action. Plans help, but past a certain point, they hit diminishing returns. Some territories are changing too fast for that level of detail.

Final Thoughts

That recruitment project taught me the most expensive lesson about maps: check the terrain before committing to battle. As military leaders learned long before software engineers, trusting the map over the terrain means defeat.

When was the last time you got surprised by maps?

Thank you for reading,
— Michał

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Engineering Management & Fatherhood - Take #2 by
Something Big Is Happening by Matt Shumer
Breaking the Spell of Vibe Coding by Rachel Thomas
The Death of Marketing (And What Replaces It) by

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What 10 Days of Silence Did to My Perception

Michał Poczwardowski — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 07:00:52 GMT

I’m a rational person, but 10 days of silent meditation does strange things to the human mind.

It’s the 9th day, and I’ve just finished the most demanding meditation of the day. I go to stretch my legs in the nearby small forest. I often walk during my free time, but this time, it’s one of the most unusual walks I’ve experienced in my life.

I walk just as I always do and observe the trees, but this time they all look different. I see happy trees, sad trees, some playful, others confident, and there is one really depressed birch. I’m genuinely feeling their emotions. In that moment, these weren’t just trees, but they felt like people. I was touched.

I’m a rational human being, so feeling what fellow trees are feeling was more than surprising.

My rationalisation: It’s a silent retreat with any kind of interaction forbidden, so the need for entertainment and human connection played with my perception. Recently, I read a great fiction book, A Treatise on Shelling Beans. The protagonist once said he could tell which trees in the forest were sad and which were happy. It must have come to my mind to apply that perspective on that day.

It felt like being a kid again. Walking is fun, eating is fun, and looking at trees is fun. After 10 days, everything is vivid, perception is much sharper, and I’m more focused on everything I do.

Where it all begins, Poland, Feb 11, 2026

Lessons

Last year, I explained a few aspects of meditation experience and how it’s designed to gradually make you more focused. All these aspects are still valid:

Today, I share lessons that influenced me the most during my second time there. I’ve already described an experience of “feeling trees”, but there’s more to it:

Understanding Ego

I heard many times:

“People are focused only on themselves.”
“No one really pays attention to what you are doing.”
“No one will notice your triumphs and disasters.”

I know it, but I still operate as if it’s not true. It’s called the spotlight effect, where people believe they are being noticed more than they really are.

I understood it during the retreat, as it’s a practice of being invisible to others. No one sees how you tied your hair, no one pays attention to how you sit. They may hear if you cough loudly when the hall is absolutely silent, but people will ignore you as much as you ignore others.

Before the retreat, I had one of the most productive periods in my career. So moving to a state where nothing happens was hard to accept. For the first few days, I wasn’t happy that everything was happening in slow-motion. I wasn’t happy with people putting their peanut butter on so slowly. I let it go after the 3rd day, when I joined and started walking much slower.

But my ego started to look for a new spotlight. When you are an old student, someone who has done it at least once before, you can get a meditation cell. It’s a small room, 2 by 1 metres, completely dark, where you can meditate in dedicated periods of time. A hard realisation came in the morning on the 4th day when I saw that some people around me got special notes with an assigned cell, but I didn’t!

I was frustrated: what should I do to get it? So, do I need to come here next year, too? I told my friends that this time, as an old student, I would have a cell. Dealing with these thoughts fast was part of the practice. Then, after one day of sorrow, I got my cell number assigned on the 5th day, which felt like a promotion. Now, I know it was all about my ego in action

Special note: I kept it as an ego reminder.

Take-outside: Detecting my ego moments remained with me after the retreat, and I notice them more often. You barely exist to people around you, but my ego was having fun even when an audience wasn’t there.

Accepting Pain

Each session, once every few minutes, and frequently at the end, my brain would say:

“Hey Michał, it’s your body. It’s painful, so it’s time to change your position.”
“No one will notice that you moved, and the pain will be reduced.”

It’s our default to avoid painful things. When it hurts, I want to stop it.

The most demanding parts of the retreat are the “sittings of strong determination.” You sit with your eyes closed and don’t move. You can straighten your back a bit and swallow, but that’s it.

I never knew how much time had passed because I had my eyes closed during the whole session. But it gets increasingly more difficult to sit with the pain after the first half of the session. After 45 minutes had passed, I began to believe that 60 had definitely passed! I believed the teacher had forgotten to turn on the recording.

During these sessions, you recalibrate your relationship with the pain you perceive. The key is to act as a scientist and examine it. You try to understand what kind of pain it is, where it appears, which places are connected, etc. You can stop the body scan for a few moments in painful places, but then you continue to scan the body anyway. It transforms how the brain experiences pain. Knowing it can simply move on to observe different parts of the body makes the pain much easier to bear.

The leading theme of the retreat is the realisation that everything changes, everything passes, nothing is permanent. This concept is called anicca in Buddhism. All the sensations you feel right now in your body are appearing and disappearing. Pain disappears, too.

Being in a state where you know it hurts a lot, but you can control it, is a feeling I’ll never forget. A few times, I sat longer to observe how amazing it is to fully control the pain. I sat for even 10 minutes more than others! (It’s my ego, but at least I noticed it).

Take-outside: You can accept the pain you feel. You can also wait until your emotions pass. You don’t have to react in the moment. Everything changes.

Passing Time

My mind was bothering me with questions. I kept hearing these questions at least 30 times every hour:

“Is it already 45 minutes, maybe less? Maybe more?”
“For sure it’s coming to an end soon, right? I bet 50 mins have passed.”
“How much time does it take me to do a body scan?”

I spent approximately 11 hours every day sitting in the meditation hall. I didn’t have my watch, just an alarm clock in my room. There is one wall clock in the hallway, visible before entering the meditation hall, and a second one in the kitchen. Two clocks and the gongs, which rang a few minutes before the next events on the agenda.

In the beginning, it was frustrating to try to guess the time passing every few minutes.

Some sessions passed quickly, especially when I got lost in thoughts, but others took years!

I often felt huge disappointment when I saw the clock in the hallway during breaks, and it was much earlier than it felt.

At the end of the retreat, I realised that it’s counter-productive to constantly bother myself with thoughts and questions about time. I stopped paying attention to passing time. I was just there, in the moment (well, maybe except for the 5:30 AM sessions, as I was looking forward to breakfast. I fasted from 11:30 AM the day before). As Buddhists say, the present moment is the only thing we have. Past and future don’t exist.

Take-outside: Thinking about time doesn’t influence its passing. The more attention you pay to tracking the time, the slower it passes.

Final Thoughts

Dedicating 10 days of one’s life to sit and meditate feels like madness. But it’s an investment. Understanding how our brains work pays dividends. I plan to get back to that place once a year.

According to the teachers, the only measurement of progress during this kind of meditation is how equanimous your brain is. This means that you are at peace with it, and you are observing its calm state. It’s similar to the prosoche concept of Stoic awareness, which is watching one’s mind the way a scientist watches an experiment, but we were focused on observing any kind of sensations inside the body, not tracking thoughts.

It doesn’t matter what kind of sensations you are feeling in your body, or if you can focus for much longer.

The goal is to have a calm and peaceful mind. One that dissolves your ego, accepts the pain, and detaches from passing time.

The most common question I got this year was: “How does it differ from last year?” Well, it was stronger this year. I felt the emotions of my friends: the trees.

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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Lenses: Data Dopamines, Adaptation, and Attempting

Michał Poczwardowski — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 07:00:44 GMT

The Lenses series collects thoughts that might shift how you see things.

This doesn’t replace standard Perspectiveship’s articles about mental models and thinking frameworks. I’m trying something new today.

Enjoy today’s lenses:

1. Data dopamines

I check Stripe 100 times a day. I wish that was an exaggeration.

— Orel, My SaaS crossed $100K/year. I’ve never been more anxious.

I was guilty of it too! I looked at stats at least a few times a day.

Whenever an article reached the top of the subreddit r/programming, I would stare at the live analytics to see how many people were there, and which subpages were being clicked.

Looking at statistics can’t change them. But our actions can.

When I realised that these dopamine hits feel good in the moment but I’m not gaining anything from the observation, I decided to stop checking stats.

What worked for me was to block all sources of statistics. The more time the brain saw a blocked screen from the Freedom app, which locks all my devices, the easier it was to automatically stop opening a new tab and going to pages with stats.

I don’t have clear data, but given how much blocking helped me since the beginning of the year: I bet not looking at my stats improved them significantly because the energy I saved was redirected into acting.

And yes, sometimes I unblock myself, just to check the progress, but with a timer.

Do you check something unconsciously to get a dopamine hit? New e-mails, messages, statistics, likes?

2. Keep calm and adapt

W** is OpenClaw? I’ve been on paternity leave for a few weeks, and another completely new project exploded…
The pace of change in the last year has been completely crazy, and it’s not stopping.
But even if you don’t give in to the constant FOMO - it’s impossible to argue that the way we worked hasn’t changed. Almost every part of our work looks different, and will continue to evolve.
— Anton Zaides, Don’t become an Engineering Manager

Being completely offline for 10 days during my silent retreat sparked similar thoughts on our relationship with progress. AI is evolving a lot, new things are popping up fast. I got a great summary of recent events from my friend when I got back, and OpenClaw was the highlight, too.

The ability to learn and adapt remains one of the most important skills on the market.

Are we actually adapting to progress, or just reacting to the noise?

3. Attempting over learning

Learning more will increase knowledge, but only attempting more will reduce fear. The more you try it, the less you will fear it.
— James Clear, 3-2-1 (February 26, 2026)

Songs and poems sometimes align perfectly with our current state of mind.

For the last 5 days, I can’t stop listening to the poem IF by Rudyard Kipling. It just plays so well with my recent experiences. I’ve examined it through many lenses, but the ability to let go of our current ways of working, and learn new ones, got me thinking. It perfectly corresponded with the quote from James Clear:

(...)
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
(...) — IF by Rudyard Kipling

What if we needed to discard everything and start again?

Does trying AI more actually reduce our fear? Or does it make us fear it more, especially as new tools emerge?

Post Notes

It’s already more than a week since I got back home from a 10-day silent retreat. The next article in the queue will be focused on lessons from the retreat, on fighting my ego, time perception, and pain.

You can read about my previous experience, which was more focused on its shape and form:

This week, I’m also iterating heavily on the 2nd edition of 5D Decision-Making Pipeline cohort to deliver an even better framework for its participants. See you there!

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

P.S. Let me know if you enjoyed the experiment with a new format.

Automatic Rules: Cure for Brain's Misclicks

Michał Poczwardowski — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 07:02:17 GMT

It’s 1:1 with the client. He says it’s important: “We need to have this feature on production by the end of today. We count on you, Michał. Can you get it done?”.

I want to help. After 5 seconds of processing the problem, I say: “Yes, of course. You can count on me”. Fast forward a few hours later and I deeply regret it. The feature is way more complicated than I thought. I end up working until 2 AM.

I got into trouble because of my rushed answers. I promised to deliver features even though it was impossible in the timeline I gave, I hired people fast and regretted it afterwards.

I knew that it was my flaw, but I found a cure. Now, I have a set of automatic rules to follow:

While making commitments:

I don’t estimate anything during a call with the client.
I don’t make hiring decisions the same day as the final interview.

While operating daily:

I don’t schedule meetings back-to-back without at least 15-minute breaks.
I don’t push big changes to production before leaving.
I wait 2 days before any impulse purchase.

How it works

“If you can replace judgements by rules and algorithms, they’ll do better”
— Daniel Kahneman

When you click to delete a file and the action is irreversible, you get a confirmation dialogue: “Do you really want to delete this file? This action can’t be undone”. This simple pause has saved many files on people’s computers and now in cloud storage.

It’s impossible to prevent biases from happening, but using circuit breakers in your processes can stop them from leading to bad decisions.

I started setting these rules after analysing my past decision logs and trying to learn from them. The most beneficial ones are ones that force me to pause:

Your rules

Where can you find ideas to set your own rules? Ask yourself:

When do I feel most pressured to answer when I’m not confident about?
What situations lead me to commit or do things I later regret?
Where do I consistently underestimate or overcommit?

Most importantly:

What rule would have saved you from your worst decision this month?

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

P.S. Automatic rules are only one ingredient of good decision-making practices. If you’re tired of regrets and want a repeatable system for high-stakes choices, I’ve distilled my process into the 5D Decision-making Pipeline workshop.

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Reversibility: The Joy of Starting From a Saved State

Michał Poczwardowski — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 07:01:47 GMT

I was stuck for two months!

Stuck with the decision to organise the very first masterclass on making decisions. How ironic that a guy who wants to know everything about the decision-making process was stuck with the decision for so long. My friends can confirm: I was going through all possible scenarios, as it was irreversible.

Finally, I went through a decision log, and decided to do it. The reversibility check made all the difference. I realised that I can easily cancel/refund/modify. Whatever happens, I’ll learn something. I had too many ideas and possibilities, but sometimes it’s better to just pick anything, and act fast to learn what really works.

Being too cautious and treating Type 2 decisions as Type 1 was my problem.

What are these two types?

There are many different lenses of looking at reversibility: some treat it as a cost & time spectrum, others focus on designing decisions to be more reversible. But I’m focusing on how categorisation can help us act faster, as it helped me.

Two Types

When I was a kid and played my first video games, the Load and Save features were lifesavers, but when they didn’t work, it felt like the end of the world. On the other hand, bringing back the state of the game was fun and kept me playing, kept me improving.

The feature of having a game’s state restored is a good analogy that we can use in the decision-making process, via the mental model of reversibility.

Before approaching any kind of decision, it’s worth pausing and understanding what type of problem we are dealing with.

Two types of decisions were coined by Jeff Bezos in his 2015 letter to Amazon’s shareholders:

Type 1 decisions are irreversible or difficult to reverse. These need to be approached with great care, deliberation, and preferably with a decision log. Examples include changing jobs, having kids, or buying a house.
Type 2 decisions are easily reversible. Examples include creating a side hustle, learning a new hobby, and choosing what to have for dinner.

Type 1: Deliberate

These decisions can influence your whole life. Slow down and act deliberately.

What helps:

Pausing — stepping back helps with calming down emotions and noticing biases and prejudices
Using a Decision Log — utilising a structured way of making decisions forces us to collect our thoughts and, as a side effect, exposes our blind spots
Use Socratic Questioning — challenges assumptions and explores other perspectives
Going through relatable mental models to find more possibilities
- Inversion — points out what we should avoid at any cost
- Second-order thinking — protects us from unexpected consequences

This isn’t exhaustive. I explore the full process in my 90-minute masterclass on the 5D Decision-making Pipeline.

Type 1 is playing the game with no ability to reverse its state back to before it was decided. But the opposite happens for Type 2, it’s where the fun begins.

Type 2: Fast

Do you remember how fun it was (or still is) to play video games? It was definitely fun for me. Part of that joy was ability to progress constantly. Having an option to Save & Load makes us enjoy playing so much more.

It’s the same with decision-making: we can play with our choices more easily keeping in mind that we can always Load the previous state, and get back to the state before we made that call.

Rewiring our perspective on making mistakes can help with acting fast:

You need to know where you can experiment. The key is to make mistakes “cheap” (lower their cost) and embrace them when they happen as a learning opportunity.
— Make Mistakes Cheap, Not Rare — Art of Making Mistakes

Knowing that we are dealing with a fully reversible decision can act as an accelerator.

Move fast, iterate, and learn. The learning part is key, as in the end, we want to progress, as with games, starting from Loaded too many times is discouraging.

Final Thoughts

When someone approaches a reversible decision as an irreversible one, it’s as if they want to play the game on the hardest possible setting, missing all the joy of playing by being too cautious and scared. Like I was before deciding on running the masterclass.

The shift to move much faster has been one of the most important changes for me in the last few weeks.

What reversible decision are you treating like it’s irreversible right now?

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

Post Notes

I’ll explain why I don’t have the “Discover Weekly — Shoutouts” section this week.

As you’re reading this, I’m on my second 10-day silent retreat meditation. It’s quite interesting to share thoughts even while it’s forbidden to write anything where I am. But they didn’t ban scheduling articles in advance.

You can read about my previous attempt, and I hope for even more perspectives this time:

Connect

LinkedIn | Substack DM | Mentoring | X | Bsk

Data & Decisions with Yordan Ivanov

Michał Poczwardowski — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 07:01:47 GMT

We had a great conversation with Yordan Ivanov.

You'll hear about pivoting a million-dollar project, using a calendar to show your real priorities, playing video games as leadership training, and much more! With one important leading theme.

Thank you very much for joining us live and for all the questions we got in the chat!

I encourage you to listen to the full version. But here are my notes from its best parts, slightly edited for clarity:

When something is in quotes, it means that’s Yordan’s words.

Intro:

I’m from Bulgaria.
I’ve been in the tech industry for the last 15 years.
Started as a software engineer, tried to go into leadership, and had a terrible experience. Restarted my career as a data engineer.
And now for the last few years, I’ve been the Head of Data Engineering in a big British fintech company. I’m also writing a newsletter: Data Gibbersish.

Decision-making

Yordan’s most important advice on decision making: ADAPT!

Charles Darwin has this thing where he says that the most adaptive species are the ones that survive.
In leadership, in decision-making, you need to adapt quickly.

As with both work and all his projects:

“your stakeholders don’t know what they really want, so help them by trying small things”
key advice “split it into small steps” and “test the waters and pivot”
having a north-star helps! “every decision you make needs to lead you to that big goal”
decision logs inside a company: “everybody can see what we decided and why we decided, it’s important to be a public thing” (at the company level)
When to pivot a startup? “test with a few customer/stakeholders drill possible options. Would that work?”, involve teams in decision-making: “when being involved in decision-making because they feel empowered”

On pivoting the BIG project

Yordan gave an example that they spent millions of pounds on a big project, which took two or three years. High sunk cost, and no one stopped it earlier. Finally, they halted it and started from scratch, but why did it take so long?

There’s nobody empowered enough to make decisions. When everybody’s owning a problem, nobody owns it.

Simply noone took ownership of it to halt the project. Inertia was keeping it going for too long.

Video games — as a playground for decision-making

As Yordan is a gamer, we went through transferable learnings from games:

“make decisions quickly”: we often operate on incomplete information, games show that acting on 60-70% of information is fine
“make a small step, see what happens... and adjust quickly”: great advice both for playing and experiments in life/work
“different people think differently”: it helps us work with different people as we play with different players
“everybody needs to play together to achieve this massive, massive goal”: teamwork in practice, on a much smaller and easier-to-grasp scale than at work.

Productivity

Yordan’s daily operations:

bullet journaling: with handwritten planning (used in the past)
calendarising: because by putting everything in the calendar, you clearly see where you invest time and how much time you have
daily journaling: “I sit and write a message to myself: This is what I’ve done. This is how it made me feel. Deep reflections help me a lot to realise”
Dear Self: Daily e-mails as a form of making notes, one of Yordan’s projects

Yordan is working full-time, writing his newsletter, and working on a side project. How to achieve that?

Calendar

If someone says they have no time, what does it really mean?

It means there’s something with a bigger priority.

The newsletter

I’ve always liked writing. You get more clarity about what you think and why you think this way.

What’s Data Gibberish name’s origin?

It’s data gibberish because it’s really about everything in the data space. It’s not only technical. It’s not only career level, career advice. It’s everything that people want to talk about.

Trigger to start writing about data engineering?

Yordan started to answer certain questions repeatedly. What is the best way to avoid repeating yourself? Create newsletter content you can link to.

There are no negative consequences of starting a newsletter. Worst-case scenario: you’ll organise your thoughts better, in a written form.

Final thoughts

I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did.

What was a repeating theme? Adapt! Try new things and change fast. There is nothing wrong with making mistakes, as long as we learn from them and adapt.

Thanks for reading/watching/listening,
— Michał

P.S It’s the start of the series “The Brain Stack”, where I uncover how my guests make decisions, and how they operate daily.

Post Notes

You can also listen to its audio version using your favourite podcast app:

Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Castbox | Pocket Casts

Our first conversation (we referred to it a few times):

Discover Weekly — Shoutouts

Great articles which I’ve read recently:

Connect

3 Principles of Good Incentives

Michał Poczwardowski — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 07:01:26 GMT

Setting incentives is manipulation. I’ve used them to steer behaviour, but sometimes in an unexpected direction.

You can’t stop people from gaming incentives, but you can choose the game.

If you read Part 1 and Part 2, you already know why incentives matter and why humans are wired to game them.

In this final Part 3, we’ll go through principles of choosing the right incentives.

Examples

At Basecamp, employees who have worked there for more than two years receive a share of the profits. They get one share per month, and every year the company shares 10% of their profit with employees. It rewards the company’s success and incentivises people to stay for the long term.

On Substack, writers want to monetise their newsletters, and Substack cuts a fee from paid transactions. The more writers earn, the more Substack earns. It’s win-win for both parties.

In my previous company, we had a set of metrics shared between all managers and across all business units. Revenue, gross margin, turnover and customer satisfaction all together. Dimensions of metrics balance it in a sustainable way. One team couldn’t just focus on one, which encouraged looking for alignment more often.

The Most Important Question

As we discussed in Part 1:

When you don’t understand people’s actions, look at their incentives.

Invert it, and we have:

Set incentives, and people’s actions will follow.

Which means: people consistently respond to incentives, even when they claim otherwise. This is one of the most important things to take away from the article.

Incentives shouldn’t exist without a clearly defined outcome of actions that are encouraged to achieve it. Which boils down to the most important questions:

What would you like to achieve?

The honest answer to this question is a baseline.

From that baseline, you can extract actions that support the goal. Only then, think what can motivate people to act.

Based on my experience, I’ve distilled 3 principles for setting incentives.

3 Principles of Good Incentives

Principles work for any kind of incentives: bonuses, salary brackets, promotions, recognition, or visibility.

1. Know Desired Outcome

Principle: Know what your desired outcome is, only then encourage actions that lead to the desired outcome.

Use second-order thinking: once you achieve this metric, then what? What are the consequences of focusing too heavily on it? Does it bring us closer to the desired outcome? What about things that may suffer because of it?

Remember the rats in Hanoi from Part 2? Paying for cut tails was just a proxy. It didn’t reduce the rat population, which was a desired outcome. Even requiring full dead rats wouldn’t have worked because people would just breed them. They focused on the wrong thing.

2. Stabilise with Multiple Metrics

Principle: Single metrics create tunnel vision, multiple ones create healthy tension between them.

It’s harder to game multiple balanced metrics.

For example: revenue alone won’t guarantee quality deals, but revenue + retention + satisfaction together will

3. Share and Align

Principle: Align incentives across groups, as shared principles mean shared direction.

It’s easier to operate when people understand what is the underlying goal, no matter which set of incentives will be used. As with example from Basecamp, where all incentives are available to the public and clear. Similarly, when people openly share what motivates them, it’s easier to find opportunities within the team.

Broadcast:

What you’re measuring
How it’s weighted
Why it matters

Testing via Questions

Before implementing any incentive system, answer these:

What behaviour are you trying to encourage?
What metrics support desired outcome?
How will people game the metrics?
What are second-order consequences?
What will this incentive cause people to stop doing?
Are these incentives aligned across groups?

If you can’t confidently answer all six, you still need iteration on your system.

Final Thoughts

The best incentive system is invisible, and people are driven by the work itself. But the reality is that I worked to a large extent for money, as the majority of the population probably does.

Design incentives as amplifiers, not something that is the only motivation to work.

Before setting them, understand what you want to achieve, stabilise them with multiple metrics and broadcast transparently.

You can’t stop people gaming incentives. But you can choose games worth playing.

The full series:

Part 1: Why Incentives Matter: When you don’t understand people’s actions, look at their incentives.
Part 2: The Cobra Effect: People will find the path of least resistance to win the game, and they are smarter than our metrics.
Part 3: Setting Incentives: Design incentives that align motivation with outcomes.

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

Post Notes

Discover Weekly — Shoutouts

Great articles which I’ve read recently:

Connect

The Cobra Effect: When Good Incentives Go Bad

Michał Poczwardowski — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 07:01:56 GMT

Streets of Hanoi were full of rats, so the French, who ruled at that time, created a simple incentive system: people who brought rat tails would get paid. It worked in the beginning, and the population of rats decreased, but then the French noticed something odd: many rats were running without tails.

People had figured out they could cut off tails and release the rats back into the sewers, so they could breed. Tails were paying bonuses. Eventually, the program was cancelled, but the rat population was higher than when they’d started.

It’s called “The Cobra Effect,” named after a similar (but likely made-up) story about British India and venomous cobras. The lesson remains the same: good intentions backfire when people game the system.

Last week, we looked at incentives to understand behaviour. Today, it’s about perverse incentives, good incentives that produce bad outcomes.

Goodhart’s Law

Recent examples of perverse incentives:

Enron, US oil giant: executives were rewarded based on reported profits. They created complex financial instruments to inflate their results. It looked great on paper, but the company collapsed.

Wells Fargo, US bank: employees were rewarded for opening new customer accounts. They opened a few million fake accounts using customers’ data without permission. The bank paid huge fines for that.

Reported profits, number of opened accounts, or collected rat tails, can become targets in themselves. This phenomenon has its name:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
— Goodhart’s law

How can we prevent incentives from going bad?

Orders of Consequences

Perverse incentives, by definition, are created out of goodwill, and intentions were good when they were set.

I had an urgent issue with not enough people helping with recruitment. I prepared a simple solution: gift cards for the most active recruiters. I thought it worked as we got more people helping. But engineers who were already busy with critical projects started spending hours on recruitment to win gift cards. It backfired on a few occasions.

I didn’t think through the second-order consequences: incentives for recruitment without considering what people would sacrifice to chase it. A rushed incentive system can work short-term, but lead to problems in the long run. The better solution was to select a group of engineers who were dedicated to help with recruitment, which I did to improve this process.

The mental model of second-order thinking can help with determining outcomes:

first-order consequences (more people helping recruitment),
second-order consequences (engineers sacrificing projects to win gift cards),
further n-th orders (too many people helping recruitment, nobody focused on products).

It’s about perceiving the situation as a system, not as a series of disconnected events that operate in a vacuum.

In practice, this means running a thought experiment before implementing any incentive: If people optimise solely for the metric, ask:

What will they sacrifice?
What happens next?

Final Thoughts

When we set incentives, we create a game. People will try to find the path of least resistance to win the game, and they are smarter than our metrics.

In Hanoi, they didn’t predict more rats, I didn’t predict how gift cards could shift the focus of engineers. We may not predict how teams try to game the next incentive.

However, it’s possible to design incentives as a winning game for every party involved. That’s in Part 3, next Thursday.

Perhaps the most important rule in management is “Get the incentives right”
— Charlie Munger

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

Post Notes

Discover Weekly — Shoutouts

Great articles which I’ve read recently:

Connect

When Illogical People Are Actually Right

Michał Poczwardowski — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 07:01:37 GMT

I thought they were crazy. The business team wanted to sell one of our contractors to the client, which violated the agreements. I argued against it. My take was that we’d lose team motivation, and other engineers would ask for similar transfers.

In hindsight, they were right. I was wrong. I’d overestimated the motivation risk and underestimated the revenue that the company needed. The business brought the money, and people understood that it was a one-time exception.

My leader pointed out something clear in retrospect: they were incentivised by the revenue they brought, and this transfer could help them. He said something which has stuck with me for years:

When you don’t understand people’s actions, look at their incentives.

Understanding incentives doesn’t mean agreeing with them, but operating is easier when you can predict people’s behaviour.

“Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.”
— Charlie Munger

Understanding by Asking

Next time someone does something difficult to understand, ask yourself:

What would have to be true about their incentives for this to make sense?

You may be surprised how often this gives you the answer.

If you can’t figure it out, ask them directly:

What are your measures of success?
What gets you rewarded or punished in your role?

What I saw repeatedly during the ZIRP (Zero-Interest-Rates Policy) era: When some companies kept hiring despite no clear work for people, the answer was: “Their next funding round is tied to team size”. So their “illogical” hiring made sense at the incentives level.

Caveats

Of course, incentives aren’t the only thing that matters.

Sometimes people lack information or are under the spell of cognitive biases. But incentives for me are the most underrated predictor of behaviour.

When someone is acting “illogically” from your perspective, they may be just juggling their different incentives, short-term vs long-term, personal values vs organisation politics.

A few months later, after my arguing session, the company changed the bonus system to align these incentives. But people will game any incentive you create. More on that next Thursday in Part 2: The Cobra Effect.

Final Thoughts

Incentives won’t explain everything, but can help you navigate among people, more often than you think.

When you don’t understand people’s actions, look at their incentives.

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

Post Notes

Part 2:

Discover Weekly — Shoutouts

Great articles which I’ve read recently:

Connect

This Engineer Teaches Their Audience How To Think The Right Way

The Power of the Pause in Decision Making

Michał Poczwardowski — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 19:32:59 GMT

I had the pleasure of being invited by from to join his live stream on Substack.

Today we talked about decision-making, mental models, and thinking frameworks. We dug into how engineers have design patterns for code, but don't have similar tools when making decisions about people, priorities, and managing organisational complexity.

Yordan prepared a written summary here:

Data Gibberish

The session centers on a fundamental problem: You and I are trained as engineers to use design patterns for code, but we’re often left winging it when it comes to people and organizational complexity. Michał Poczwardowski argues that we need to treat our thinking process with the same level of structural integrity we give our architecture…

Listen now

3 months ago · 5 likes · Yordan Ivanov and Michał Poczwardowski

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

P.S. I highly recommend Yordan’s newsletter , not just for data engineers. He tackles important topics on managing complex stakeholder situations and leadership principles.

Leaked Decision-Log: Deciding on Decision-Making Masterclass

Michał Poczwardowski — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 07:01:27 GMT

I almost said no to this. But then I did what I always do with important decisions:

Write down as much as you can about what you are deciding on.

Here’s the actual decision log, but compressed and slightly edited for clarity. Keep in mind that’s part of my personal notes:

Dilemma: Should I organise Decision-making masterclass? Options: Yes/No

Context: I published more than 100 articles around mental models, decision-making and taking perspectives. But I miss a condensed and practical approach to it. The idea to prepare a dedicated masterclass was seeded when I was teaching a decision-making session during workshops in autumn 2025.

Perspectives for Yes:

I believe that predicting future outcomes based on incomplete information (which is the definition of decision-making) is one of the most important and timeless skills, but we are not learning it at school.
I was co-hosting a course for engineering managers under the brand of Manager.dev. My lesson “Real problems, Real time”, was a basic version of the masterclass I had in mind. Participants rated the session highly, which indicates interest.
I already drafted an idea for the 5 Laws of Decision-making, which works better than many isolated models.

Perspectives for No:

Decision-making is a meta-skill, and we learn best by making our own mistakes. Each decision is distinct, and “it depends” can be a repeated mantra. It’s impossible to decide for someone and be sure it’s right.
Providing the highest quality experience for everyone over a video is difficult. If I decide on it, I want to make it the best decision-making course out there, so I need to level up from what I did recently.
It’s difficult to target an audience of meta-skills like decision-making. I have many examples from the domain of engineering leadership, but it might be a limiting factor.
I don’t want to make it just a lecture, but ask via survey about their needs, focus on the interactive part and adjust my framework in their workflows, which may be logistically hard and time-consuming.

Pass through my Clear Thinking filter:

Defaults of Human Nature:
- Emotions: I wrote this on January 12th, that’s when I was close to saying no because of my philosophical disputes on “1st No”. I’m reading it again on January 14th after sleeping on it twice. Checking emotional state across multiple days prevents impulse decisions driven by a swinging mood.
- Ego: What if no one will be interested? I have a desire to be right, but it might not be the best offer.
Force other Possibilities
- What is beyond YES/NO — It’s a different format (async/sync, video/written, interactive/static).

Pass through relatable mental models:

Reversibility: When the cost to reverse the decision is low, and the consequences are low, make it as soon as possible. That’s the case, it’s reversible and the consequences are low.
Inertia/Activation Energy: I’ve already drafted the outline of the course, to be sure I can deliver actionable lessons, which broke the activation energy.
Circle of Competence: I’m a writer and engineering manager, and being an educator who can entertain during the lectures is going beyond my circle of competence, but that’s where growth happens.

#decision: YES — I’m organising the Decision-Making masterclass.

Why? The reversibility is low-risk, I’ve overcome activation energy, with possible interest given other cohorts. It’s slightly outside of my circle of competence, which means it’s exactly where growth happens.

When the task is big, focus on the next small step to deliver: I’ve already brainstormed possible curriculum, format, timing, and the date.

That’s where my decision log ends. Now, the details

Details:

After writing 100+ articles on decision-making and mental models for , I keep getting the same question: “How do you actually apply all of this?”

So I’m running a live 90-minute masterclass on January 27th at 6 pm CET (9 am PST, 12 pm EST/noon).

It’s called “Get Unstuck: 5 Decision-Making Laws for Engineering & Product Leaders”

Here’s what you’ll walk away with:

The 5 decision-making laws that separate decisive leaders from overthinkers (like Reversibility, and 4 others are a blend of known mental models)
A framework to cut decision time (no more week-long debates).
How to apply these to prioritisations, hiring, tech choices, and career moves.

It’s for 15 people, to keep it interactive. I’ll reach out to you before the session to use as many real examples as possible.

This is for managers, tech leads, and product leaders making decisions with team-wide impact. If that’s you, you’ll walk away with a framework you can apply immediately.

Investment: €97

Everyone gets: 90-minute masterclass + recording.
First 7 who sign up get: + 30-min 1:1 session with me to apply this to your actual decisions.

I’m testing the format with this cohort. Once I validate it works, the price goes to €297. You’re getting the founding member discount for being early.

Save Your Spot

P.S. To simplify your decision, I'm making it zero risk. If you don't feel it was worth it, I'll issue a refund immediately

See you there,
— Michał

The Next 200m: How to Finish What You Start

Michał Poczwardowski — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 07:00:43 GMT

It’s October 2025. I’m running a marathon. I’ve just passed the half-marathon mark. I’d been preparing for it for five months, but it’s getting harder. I just went through a windy section with a noticeable ascent.

My brain is screaming:

“You have to slow down. You’ve been running non-stop for almost two hours!”
“It’s your first marathon, so it will be a personal best anyway!”
“No one will know if you miss your time goal.”

These thoughts were quite convincing, but I had a specific time goal in mind. It mattered to me. Months of preparation, running 5 times a week. A few disappointments at shorter distances, and now I need to slow down during my main event this year?

I don’t want to slow down, but my body wants it badly. I’m using what I learned about pushing limits, which I heard from my running friend:

Don’t think about the finish line.
Focus on the immediate next step.

I picked a street lamp, it’s 200 metres ahead. Just get there.
I made it. Good! Then I picked another one.

Reaching each checkpoint changed my perspective, from questioning “Can I finish the race on time?” to “Can I reach that lamp?”
I could do that, so it helped to gain confidence. My crisis finally stopped, and my mind stopped screaming about slowing down.

My friend’s advice has a name in psychology: “implementation intentions”. It’s about breaking down abstract goals into concrete next steps. It helps because it overwrites the brain’s tendency to freeze when facing overwhelming tasks.

This technique can help beyond just running. When the final destination seems impossible, focusing on the next step can help. Sometimes, “reach this lamp”, “send this message”, “write the next paragraph”, “read the next page”, is enough to help us get closer to the bigger goal.

I finished my first marathon two minutes faster than I planned. I was so happy that I didn’t slow down and kept the desired pace from start to finish.

What is the “next 200 metres” for your big goal today?

Thanks for reading!
— Michał

Post Notes

It’s been about thinking clearly, pausing as a superpower, having a decision log and... becoming a monk.

Wrapping up 2025 for Perspectiveship based on what you read most:

Discover Weekly — Shoutouts

Great articles which I’ve read recently:

A Scientist’s Guide to Debugging Engineers by Marcel Tella &
Two things that matter by
How I Finally Built an Income Stream After 600 Days of Losing Money by

Connect

7 proven mental models for engineering managers

What Resonated in 2025

Michał Poczwardowski — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 07:01:50 GMT

In 2025, I set out to write 52 articles, but I published 40. The missing 12 taught me a valuable lesson: consistency is important, but pause when you need it. I needed that break to have time to focus on other aspects of my life.

Here are the five most popular articles, based on views and new subscribers they brought. Accompanied by quotes from each, with behind-the-scenes notes.

When someone puts all their money into one risky financial asset, they may get lucky and make a lot of money. But that doesn’t make it a good decision.
Decision quality is independent of outcome quality.

Behind the scenes: This one set me out for the series of articles, as it had many possible threads to dig deeper. Its popularity was a positive boost of motivation in July and helped me keep writing consistently.

Writing what you need to decide on clarifies what the problem is.
Our memory is not the best tool for analysing the past. We subjectively interpret reality, and most importantly, we forget! We forget a lot!
Writing down everything you understand at the time of making decision is important to reflect on afterwards.

Behind the scenes: Writing about the topic made me use decision logs more often. Practice what you preach. Also, it’s so much easier to use still vivid examples, I took one from workshops that I ran right before writing it.

Trees have many roots, as with success and failure. So look for multiple root causes.

Behind the scenes: I wrote this in response to readers’ questions about Solve the Right Problem. It’s a great feeling when the conversation with people makes you answer them in the form of a follow-up. It feels great to provide a seed for a good discussion.

One of the best moments was when I no longer felt the pain, even though I knew it was still there. I had no desire to stop it. After an hour I kept sitting in the same position for a few more minutes enjoying the state when the pain did not have any effect on me, even if I knew it was there.

Behind the scenes: Being in the moment was a contributing factor to my reduced motivation to write. It pushed me to explore, both inside my mind and the outside world. I was so reluctant to sit at the keyboard and write. Maybe being happy in the moment kills the part of me that pursues goals.

You can master all the mental models, decision-making frameworks, and cognitive biases, but you won’t improve if you act too fast without taking time to think.

Behind the scenes: Pausing your reaction was one of the key takeaways while meditating, when I observe sensations and pain but don’t react. I wrote the ‘Pause’ article before going to the meditation retreat, but the aspect of delayed response is a shared theme.

The most viewed and liked guest article was for ‘s manager.dev:

Manager.dev

We are judged by our decisions. If they’re bad, the manager takes the blame…

a year ago · 98 likes · 11 comments · Michał Poczwardowski and Anton Zaides

Wrapping up 2025 for Perspectiveship based on what you read most?

It’s been about thinking clearly, pausing as a superpower, having a decision log and... becoming a monk.

Thank you for being part of this journey!
— Michał

Post Notes

Discover Weekly

In a theme of planning for 2026:

How to fix your entire life in 1 day by
26 Useful Concepts for 2026 by
Year Compass (great for January 1st) [template]
If You Don’t Fix This Now, 2026 Is Already Over! — Chris Williamson & Steven Bartlett [podcast]

Connect

Whose Voice Is Missing?

Michał Poczwardowski — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 07:00:40 GMT

Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, insisted on leaving two chairs empty during leadership meetings.

One chair represented their customers, and the other their employees. When thinking through decisions, leaders were forced to imagine the perspective of the people “sitting” in those chairs, as if they could raise their own voice in the discussion.

The company decided that we don’t have a budget for the scheduled bonuses. I needed to write the communication to my teams. I tried to imagine their context, then talked to one of the team members who would get the message. It gave me several critical points to cover that were obvious to me but not to them.

For example, I planned to start with “budget constraints”, which means nothing to engineers. I realised they needed to hear first that their work was valued, and this wasn’t a performance issue. That reframing made the difficult message much easier to receive.

Considering others’ perspectives doesn’t just help with communication. As Howard Schultz pointed out, it is also a key way to stay aligned with company values.

Practice

Deliberately forcing yourself to consider different perspectives is one of the most useful ways to really understand a situation.

Here are three approaches:

Just talking helps you uncover what they think.
Stakeholder roles help you consider people who are affected.
Six Thinking Hats help you consider how to think about the problem.

Talking

This is the starting point. I’ve seen it forgotten way too many times.

Simply talk to stakeholders to uncover their point of view.

Questions like: “How does this look from your side?” or “What are you worried about here?” can help tremendously.

Stakeholder roles

The empty chairs idea can be extended. This exercise uses “hats” as simple artefacts to switch perspectives. Each hat represents a different stakeholder. You can do it with real hats, labels on paper, or virtually.

It works like this:

Pick 3-5 personas that matter for your decision but are not in the room: customer, product manager, CEO, support team, sales team, etc.
Assign each persona to a team member.
Discuss the problem while everyone argues solely from the assigned “hat” point of view.
Rotate hats between team members as long as you need.

The goal is to make “perspective” visible. Can you think of how it feels to play a different role?

Assuming someone’s perspective will never replace their real opinion. There are always things that are unknown to you but obvious to them, so having real conversations makes these exercises much stronger. This isn’t consensus‑building. You’re not trying to make everyone happy or find a compromise that pleases no one. You’re trying to see the full picture before you decide.

Six Thinking Hats

Instead of taking the perspective of different stakeholders, you can also switch between different thinking modes. That’s what the Six Thinking Hats exercise, designed by Dr. Edward de Bono, is about.

Each team member wears a different colored hat, which represents a specific thinking mode:

White Hat — focuses on facts, data, and information without interpretation.
Yellow Hat — looks for benefits, opportunities, and optimistic possibilities.
Black Hat — identifies risks, problems, and what could go wrong, critical and cautious thinking.
Red Hat — expresses emotions, feelings, and intuitions without needing justification.
Green Hat — generates creative ideas, alternatives, and new solutions.
Blue Hat — supervises the process itself, setting agendas and ensuring all perspectives are heard.

By “wearing” each hat in turn, teams ensure that every angle gets attention before deciding.

The Hard Part

If taking others’ perspectives helps so much with decisions, why is it so difficult?

Perspective-taking requires being humble and being open to being wrong. It is about accepting that my perspective might be partial and doesn’t represent the full picture. I know that sometimes I stick to my own perspective for too long, because I’m just afraid to be wrong.

Your default perspective is just one possible reference point. Before you make your next important decision, try at least one more.

Sometimes, the second perspective changes everything.

Whose voice is missing? Ask that before your next important decision.

Thanks for reading!
— Michał

Post Notes

Discover Weekly — Shoutouts

Great articles which I’ve read recently:

Connect

Marginal Gains: From Worst to Olympic Gold

Michał Poczwardowski — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 07:00:45 GMT

I’m about to share one of the most inspiring success stories I’ve heard recently:

It’s 2003, and the British cycling team is at their absolute worst. They haven’t won anything in years. Sir Dave Brailsford just started his journey as performance director to introduce change. Instead of presenting them with the big goal of winning the upcoming Olympics, he did something different.

He shifted perspective to focus on small improvements. Small sprints of improving something each week. This week: optimise seat position. Next week: refine diet. The following week: improve tyre performance. The team started slightly improving in everything they focused on, step by step, week by week.

All these marginal gains compounded into something unimaginable. To everyone’s surprise, they started winning. They even brought their own mattresses to hotels during competitions, because sleep quality was part of their 1%.

Within five years, British cycling teams won 57% of all road and track cycling gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. At the 2012 London Olympics, they set seven world records and nine Olympic records. For 10 years, from 2007 to 2017, British cyclists were the most decorated nation in the sport.

So why did this approach work when an “aim for gold” call would have failed?

Why it worked

The coach could have presented them with a big goal: “Let’s win Olympic gold!” But the team was so far from their best that no one would have believed it anyway. It wouldn’t have motivated them.

Aiming for gold when you can barely qualify kills motivation immediately.

It’s quite rare that you can make a major change and make it sustainable but it’s quite easy to make small incremental changes to make them stick.

And it’s the stickability over time, I think, which makes the big difference.

We never ever thought about the podiums, or the finish line, or trophies — we didn’t talk about that — we thought about the smallest things we could do today to make progress.

— Sir Dave Brailsford (quoted from The Diary of a CEO, by Steven Bartlett)

Small improvements that they had achieved day by day and week by week fueled the motivation. They have seen that progress is possible, that they are moving forward.

Using it yourself

Do you want to get better at decision-making?

Pick one technique each week and use it for the decisions you make:

Week 1: Practice “inversion”: Invert the problem, e.g., how to fail instead of win.
Week 2: Use the 10-10-10 rule: Consider the outcomes of your decision in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years.
Week 3: Document your decisions and outcomes: Start a decision log and document as many decisions as you can this week.

Focus on one thing each week. Make it achievable. It feels good to deliver small wins.

Tiny progress means a lot to people, and they feel it, they realise they can do it again tomorrow.

— Sir Dave Brailsford (quoted from The Diary of a CEO, by Steven Bartlett)

Grandiose resolutions may not bring enough motivation. Instead, try to improve or get better at something through small time periods. The psychological aspect of pushing forward and seeing short-term improvements is equally important as discipline and consistency.

Critique

I’ve seen marginal gains work in my own marathon training. But it’s not a guarantee.

Teams in other sports, like football, sailing, or even Formula 1, tried copying British Cycling’s playbook but couldn’t replicate the results. Critics argue that massive funding and world-class athletes (who were already there before Brailsford joined) were the major contributors to success.

The British Cycling story later became controversial, but the psychological insight is still valid. Marginal gains work, but only on the right foundation.

Multiplying by zero

Marginal gains only work if you’re improving the right thing.

A 1% improvement on a skill you’ll never use is still zero progress toward your goal. If your goal is to learn a new programming language, optimising your morning routine won’t help.

Does working on this bring me closer to my goal, or is it just keeping me busy?

Optimise the right things, not just the easy things.

The compounding 1%

Purely from a mathematical perspective, getting 1% better every day makes you 37.8 times better at the end of the year

Real life isn’t this simple, and 1% is quite abstract. We have our ups and downs, and there is a regression to the mean. But even if you only improve by 1% per week (not daily), that’s still 67.8% better in a year. The math works in favour.

Give yourself the gift of witnessing your progress more often. It’ll help you achieve your goals.

What’s one skill you want to improve in 2026?

Take it and break it into one tiny improvement you can make starting now. Not next month. This week. Start and see how marginal gains work.

Thanks for reading!
— Michał

Post Notes

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Work Expands. Time Vanishes. Here's Why.

Michał Poczwardowski — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 07:02:17 GMT

It’s probably one of the most memorable origins of laws I’ve heard of, because it reminds me of my grandmother:

Cyril Northcote Parkinson, in 1955, published an article in The Economist stating: “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. He illustrated this by describing an elderly lady spending an entire day mailing a postcard. First, searching for the card, her glasses, the right address, composing the message, spending twenty minutes deciding whether to take an umbrella, and eventually going to the mailbox. Something that would take a busy person three minutes can stretch to fill an entire day.

That’s Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill the available time.

I can trace my own experience of this law back to school: doing homework at the last possible moment was the norm. It didn’t get better at university, where friends and I studied for exams just days before. The pattern followed me into work, and even into this newsletter.

Why does work expand? For me, it’s because I feel there’s no need to rush, which is often an illusion. The lack of urgency creates space for perfectionism, endless small improvements, and prioritisation. I fill time because it’s there to be filled.

But here’s the catch: even as we procrastinate, we’re also too optimistic about our estimates:

Douglas Hofstadter, in 1979’s “Gödel, Escher, Bach,“ wrote about early predictions in computer chess. Experts said it would take “about ten years” for a program to become a world champion. Ten years later, it was still “about ten years away.” These days, we hear similar claims: fully self-driving cars being just a few years away, for instance.

This became Hofstadter’s Law: it always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter’s Law into account.

Two Laws in Practice

I’ve witnessed teams hiding real deadlines from each other. Afraid that if developers knew the real date, work would expand to fill it (Parkinson), while still taking longer than expected (Hofstadter). Some teams added multipliers to estimates, turning a 3-day estimate into 6 days automatically. This blurred what was being estimated in the first place.

For me, pushing deadlines in team settings is fine when it’s transparent and comes with full context. Hiding real deadlines entirely is an antipattern indicating mistrust or misalignment. When working individually, I like setting earlier deadlines. It forces me to build in safety buffers.

Tactics

Some tools can help us address the negative effects of these laws without resorting to fake deadlines.

Timeboxing

Timeboxing fights Parkinson’s Law by creating artificial scarcity. It also combats Hofstadter’s Law by forcing you to ship something imperfect rather than optimise endlessly.

I moved my publishing schedule several times this year, finally settling on Thursday morning and don’t want to change it. Now, having a fixed schedule helps me avoid over-editing articles.

Clear Definition of Done

Listing what “done” means helps with finishing. While writing articles, optimisations are infinite. I can always add something new, reframe a sentence, and find more examples. An article can be written in one hour or one week. Without clear criteria, I’d spend much more time writing.

My definition of done: at least 400 words, practical advice included, something new learned, no grammar errors.

Social Pressure

Public commitment builds enough pressure to stop procrastinating and actually start earlier. At the beginning of this year, we sent an email course for engineering managers. The commitment was to deliver high-quality lessons every week. It was demanding, but those emails were ready a week in advance to be sure there were no delays.

Balancing Uncertainties

Understanding uncertainties is important. I’ve written about it while explaining the Margin of Safety mental model. The short: list explicit risks, add buffers only where impact is high, and run pre-mortems.

The Good Side

These laws aren’t meant to be negative or positive. They describe how things work.

Parkinson’s Law can be beneficial: extra time lets ideas settle, creates space for exploration, and often leads to quality improvements.

Similarly, Hofstadter’s Law protects us from over-commitment and forces necessary scope cuts. The key is knowing when and how to work with these laws.

Discipline & Trust

The discipline is an antidote. You can timebox your work, craft a good definition of done, and broadcast your commitment. But the truth is, when my motivation is high, none of this really matters, work just happens anyway, it takes priority. Discipline matters most when motivation fades. And eventually, it always does.

Or maybe these laws reveal something simpler: a deficit of trust. We don’t trust ourselves to start early, so we procrastinate. Organisations don’t trust teams with real deadlines, so they hide them. The tactics help, but perhaps the more important work is to rebuild trust. Trust in our own capabilities, and in our teams.

Where did you experience these laws in action?

Thanks for reading,
— Michał