I was certainly guilty of this. I wanted to get the best result, whether it was hiring candidates, deciding what articles to write, or my month-long research into which action cam to buy (which was eventually stolen anyway). It’s as if my brain craved maximising outcomes, even when not feasible.

This has a name: Fredkin’s Paradox. It’s an observation by American computer scientist and physicist Edward Fredkin. He stated that as the options become more similar to each other, deciding between them becomes more difficult, and consequences become less significant.

These are three things that work for me to avoid wasting time on decisions:

• realising that it doesn’t matter and that the consequences are almost the same

• realising that time is the only resource we can’t get back

• going random or letting my gut decide for me

Next time you face similar alternatives, think of Fredkin’s Paradox: push yourself to release the urge to pick the very best option, as all these similar options are good anyway.

How do you decide between very similar options?

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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P.S. Mr. Fredkin was an interesting figure: jet pilot, computer scientist, physicist, but also a successful businessman. He created his own digital philosophy where computation and information are the fundamental building blocks of reality – Remembering the Improbable Life of Ed Fredkin (1934–2023) and His World of Ideas and Stories

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Forgetting

The art of competing, I’d learn from the track, was the art of forgetting…
You must forget your limits. You must forget your doubts, your pain, your past.

— Phil Knight (co-founder, Nike)

I often forget my limits while setting too demanding running workouts. Even though it helps me improve, it’s a painful realisation each time I can’t execute it as planned. Seems like nature likes us to forget about limits to improve, but what about forgetting in other aspects of life?

I spent a week of August in Spain. It was one of the hottest weeks in my life, with temperatures reaching 35°C (95°F) almost every day. But now, after a few weeks, I don’t remember the heat. I have only positive memories from the trip.

The cognitive bias that makes us remember the past in a much better light is called rosy retrospection. Selective forgetting seems like a good mechanism for shaping our reality: it can help us push past our limits, or turn a week of unpleasant heat into a great story about summer holidays.

When was the last time you saw through rosy retrospection?

Contributing

The measure of a life is not what you consume, but what you contribute.
Spend less time owning, consuming, taking. Spend more time giving, creating, making.

— James Clear

Creating is fun, especially while crafting sentences. That’s where I feel the sense of accomplishment.

There is a rule of thumb that only 1% of participants in an online community create most of its content. Now that AI makes it easier to generate content, the number might differ. But if I take a look at my friends, it’s still a minority of people creating regularly.

I believe that we still need authentic people sharing their unique takes online. If you are in doubt, I encourage you to try. You can be in the 1% right away.

What stops you from creating?

On a more artistic note, you may enjoy this letter from Kurt Vonnegut about creating.

“Not-doing”

In our culture, not-doing is very undervalued. It’s as if one has to always be doing something in order to justify one’s existence. But such compulsive doing is an avoidance of being, literally, one’s true nature.

— Adyashanti

For most of my life, I was convinced that spending time doing nothing could not be good. Now, my relationship with productivity keeps evolving. I prioritise balancing not-doing and doing.

Not-doing is fine. And compulsive doing might not be the best way to experience life. So, I vote for balancing it. At the other end of the spectrum, one of my most productive chapters this year came from multiplayer pomodoro, the opposite of not-doing.

What is your relationship with “not-doing”?

P.S. Try sitting for 10 minutes with your eyes closed, doing nothing, a tiny demo of meditation retreats.

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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But what is blue? It’s a wavelength of light ranging from about 400 to 500 nanometres.

Describe blue, or any other colour, to someone blind who has never seen any colours in their life. We can say it’s a certain wavelength, but we can’t describe the experience of it. Is your blue the same as mine? We can’t be sure. There is no way to check how our brains exactly perceive colours. It’s internal and private to our own mind.

This kind of subjective experience is called qualia (singular: quale). We can’t objectively compare these experiences or feelings with other people. Think of colours, tastes, sounds, and any perceptions, like feeling good or rested. These are private, just for your own brain.

There is a practical aspect when thinking of non-qualia things. As an example, let’s name a few: words, sentences, expectations. For these, we can build a common understanding. The meaning of words can be checked with other people simply by asking what they meant by that.

Have you ever felt disappointed when someone promised you something? A salary raise, a development plan, or just doing something for you, but it was not delivered as promised? In that moment, you felt the negative power of missed expectations.

One of the most important things while working as a manager, but also during any cooperation with other people, is managing expectations. Feelings about outcomes are qualia, but the outcomes themselves are measurable and can be checked. Expectations aren’t qualia, so we can ask and establish what these are. The more we define, the better.

Defining what it means for us to deliver a feature, work on quality, or have an energising weekend can save us energy, time and prevent negative emotional responses from our colleagues, friends or family.

There are qualia things, like the felt experience of blue, that can’t be fully shared with others. But there are others which we can establish by using proper communication to understand the other side. Working on defining non-qualia things helps universally.

How do you think of managing expectations?
What are your expectations?
I’d love to experience more blue colour during summertime here in the northern hemisphere.

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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As the popular saying goes: history doesn’t repeat itself, but often, it rhymes. This makes it difficult to predict the future, however, understanding paradoxes from the past can help.

William Stanley Jevons was living in England when it was deep into the industrial revolution. Long before electricity and long before code. The coal industry was booming, and many people started predicting that with the higher efficiency of steam machines, the demand would get lower. But Mr Jevons thought quite the opposite.

In his book “The Coal Question” he stated that increased efficiency will lead to higher demand which may eventually lead to depleting coal mines throughout the UK.

His assumption was correct. As steam engines got more efficient, people found new uses for them, like trains. Demand went full steam ahead (pun intended). The same happened for other resources, like electricity or water.

This is Jevons paradox and it states that: when using a resource becomes more efficient, more ways to use it are found, and demand explodes.

How does this connect with AI and code?
Well, let’s assume that code is a resource.

Writing code was expensive and required years of technical knowledge and practice. LLMs have changed this, and lowered the cost of producing code significantly. How many things weren’t produced before because of expensive code? App Store app submissions jumped 84% in the first quarter of 2026. The code is cheaper now.

For the Jevons effect to be applied, the following conditions are needed:

• technological change increasing efficiency

• decreasing consumer price

• decreasing price increasing quantity demanded (when demand is elastic)

Open questions, with no answers:

• Is demand elastic for the apps business to explode?

• How will cheap access to code change the distribution of services we use?

• Will apps be custom-built for individual needs in the future?

As final thoughts, one thing is worth reminding:

The entry barrier might be shifted as the cost of experimenting is much lower, but it doesn’t change much about what we use. The question is what will happen with demand.

Solving problems and customer pains is here to stay, no matter the price of code.

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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I’m in the local supermarket looking for non-alcoholic beer. But there are too many to choose from — at least twelve and all at similar prices. It’s a low-stakes decision, but I’m still overthinking it. What kind of decision criteria should I use? Which mental model could I apply?

In situations like this, I turn into a super-slow-tortoise version of myself and use up way too many of my cognitive resources. I’m often overwhelmed by choices, especially when the options are so similar.

Here is one useful method that can be easily used for reversible and low-stakes decisions.

Go Random

Draw a card, toss a coin, or use an app (I use Randomix).

When choices are similar it’s not worth wasting your mental capacity to try and pick the perfect one. Random can be good enough. The card, the coin or the app instantly decides for you.

Ask Your Intuition

Intuition is a tricky thing that is difficult to put your finger on. You can feel it, but you can’t express it. When randomness decides for you, the result might feel disappointing. This is your intuition telling you not to go with this option.

When I’m stuck with two similar options, I flip the coin, but I don’t look at the result right away. I pause and notice how I feel in the moment. Then I reveal the coin. Feeling relief means I wanted this, but when I feel disappointment, I ignore what the coin says and pick the opposite.

Feelings of disappointment or relief aren’t always there. I don’t have any when picking non-alcoholic beers, so I just go with the result from a random number generated by the app.

Final Thoughts

A recent study suggested that we are making 122 “informed decisions” per day, but nobody really knows the exact number, as it’s difficult to calculate. However, each decision requires some energy, and you spend it while deciding on each one. Using energy on trivial things might not leave you enough energy for the important ones.

Go random if needed — it helps free up capacity for other issues. Randomix helps me with picking similar products, but also choosing restaurants, or deciding whether to buy something.

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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Daily Writing

Daily writing is the new weightlifting.

Back in the day, 90%+ of the population worked manual labor on farms. We didn’t have “gyms” because everyone was breaking their back working all day.

Once we got machines, we needed a new way to keep our body in shape - lifting heavy objects (3 sets of 10), voluntarily, at the gym.

The same thing is happening for writing. Everyone is outsourcing their thinking to AI.

The brain is a muscle, and it will atrophy if you don’t use it.

— Shaan Puri

I enjoy using the gym analogy. It’s a good warning for what may happen with AI and our thinking abilities.

Our bodies lose what they don’t use. As I wrote in my description of the mental model of atrophy: the process of deterioration is slow. Every action you take is a “vote” (my favourite analogy from Atomic Habits) showing your biology what it needs to maintain or grow.

I’m a big fan of writing; thinking on paper feels like magic to me. To see my own thoughts written down and to digest what I’m thinking is revealing. To keep my writing muscle strong, it’s important to practise daily.

Do you write? If so, how often?

Mistakes

If you’re willing to recognize your mistakes, you massively tilt the odds in your favor.

— Shane Parrish

I find it difficult to recognise my own mistakes (even after dedicating an article to them). I don’t like watching my own talks because seeing my flaws is painful. But this is how we can improve. Video doesn’t lie. What we see is the reality. However, to ease the pain, try waiting a bit before watching it back.

The way I see it is that the you in the video is a different person than the you watching it back later. Therefore, the criticism you have for the person in the video is no longer as personal.

What is your relationship with mistakes?

The Number of Hours

The number
of hours
we have
together is
actually not
so large.
Please linger
near the
door uncomfortably
instead of
just leaving.
Please forget
your scarf
in my
life and
come back
later for
it.

— Mikko Harvey, “For M” (unchanged original vertical writing of it)

It’s a philosophical cliché but it’s worth remembering: time is limited, so enjoy it.

The poem shows us how even the mundane moments in life can influence the passing of time, beautifully captured in lingering at the door or leaving a scarf behind. Life happens fast, and we all feel that it passes faster the older we get. However, these mundane moments can help slow things down.

When do you notice time passing too fast?

Thanks for reading
— Michał

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Imagine the following decision-making problem:

• you need to pick only one option

• you have N options to go through

• you need to review each one sequentially

• you must make a decision before moving on

• you can’t change your decision once made

For example, you’re hiring one new engineer to your team, and you have 12 candidates to go through. After each interview, you must decide if you will hire them or not, and this decision is final.

Solution

According to the mathematically calculated probability, assuming you have 12 candidates in random order:

• you should review 4 of them (12 × 37%, rounded to 4)

• you reject them all but remember the best

• if the next candidate is better, you hire them immediately

• if not, you continue on to the next one

This is known as the secretary problem, and the math behind it points out that the probability of selecting the best applicant is 1/e ≈ 0.368 (for a large enough sample: 0.368 is the limiting value when N→∞). It’s a probability of success, not a guarantee.

Yes, you can end up with the last candidate when the best one was in the initial calibration pool, which is why it’s a probability, not a guarantee.

Why

First, you only review at the beginning, which frees up brain resources because you don’t have to make any decisions yet. It forces you to reject the first 37% of options, but it gives you an overview of the pool, which is especially useful when exploring new domains.

In reality, scenarios shaped by the secretary problem are difficult to reproduce, but it leaves us with important lessons:

• When you stop calibrating too early, you don’t have a benchmark

• When you calibrate for too long, you risk losing the best candidate

Use the first 37% for calibration. Then the probability is on your side.

While hiring, I often reviewed a few candidates without making immediate decisions. Throughout my career, I tried to avoid making decisions until I had a good sense of the initial pool of options.

The tricky part is to know when to stop, and here the 37% rule helps.

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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P.S. You can play with visualisations of the problem at WOLFRAM Demonstrations Project. Some of my trials:

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When I travel abroad, I often rent a car, as it helps with logistics. My default is driving on the right side, so driving in LHT (left-hand traffic) like Ireland or Malta was a challenge.

Driving on the other side is one of my favourite examples of change management. These aspects are transferable to any kind of change: it doesn’t matter if you are trying a new habit or changing processes inside an organisation.

Driving Lessons

Start Small

When I approached the car, I went over to the passenger’s side instead of the driver’s side. It’s all flipped inside, except for the pedals, thankfully. I had made it easier for myself by picking an automatic car. I’d recommend this to anyone driving on the other side for the first time.

In Practice: When implementing changes, make it incremental, so it’s easier to control. When you want to learn how to walk in barefoot shoes, it’s good to start 20 minutes a day until your feet adjust. Instead of changing the whole technology stack, start with one component of it.

Follow Others

I wasn’t sure if I was up to the challenge of driving abroad on the wrong side, but I thought: I’ll just do what others are doing and we’ll be fine. And yes, following other cars on complicated crossings helped a lot. However, I ended up entering the car park exit the wrong way a few times when there was no one to follow.

I tried to remind myself every time the road was empty with no reference points: Am I keeping left?

People’s behaviours are contagious. When leading and introducing a change, find early adopters and work with them closely so others can follow them.

In Practice: If you want to change, find people who have transitioned, and follow them. It’s easier to adapt when people around you are already adjusted, share a certain hobby, or behave in the way you want to change.

As a popular saying goes: We are the average of the few people we spend the most time around.

Remind & Repeat

The airport in Dublin has impressive infrastructure for car rental companies, and the car parks are the biggest I’ve ever seen. Reminders to DRIVE LEFT and KEEP THE LEFT SIDE are everywhere, from stickers on the car windscreen to signs on the roads. I believe they were just as helpful to other tourists as they were to me.

It was difficult for the first few hours of driving, but then my brain got used to it. I only had problems with it at the start of a new day or after a long break.

But reminders work best when combined with repetition. A persistent issue was the rear-view mirror. I was searching for it up and to the right instead of the left. However, on my second “unusual-driving-trip”, I got better at every aspect of driving, including finding the rear-view mirror in the right spot.

In Practice: Communicate frequently, as one reminder is not enough. Overcommunication beats one-off messages, as people are not listening as much as you think. Repeat behaviour to get better.

Final Thoughts

Both Ireland and Malta had something else in common: many narrow roads, especially in the countryside. Driving on a different side was challenging but rewarding to see many beautiful places which were difficult to access without a car.

After my first trip, it was no longer anything scary. I described my next trip to Malta (the driving part of it) simply as a fun mental exercise to recalibrate my brain. It’s a reminder to give scary things a chance, even if you almost enter the roundabout the wrong way.

When did you last try something the “wrong” way round?

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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P.S. The majority of the world’s countries and population drive RHT (right-hand traffic). However, as I’m right-handed, it felt more natural to keep the dominant hand on the steering wheel, so the other could switch gears and make adjustments.

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Watching the performance of that song when no one recorded it felt like travelling through time to the early 2000s. I felt like the ability to enjoy the moment is one of the most important skills to practise.

The present moment is the only thing that exists. Everything else is uncertain.
The past is a blurry recording of events stored in our imperfect memory.
The future is a blurry plan which can change in an instant.
We can prepare for that, but we can’t fully control it.

The present moment is all we’ve got. / Lenses Series

Why is it important?

The stream of content is accelerating, and AI is driving more context-switching than ever. Creating content is cheap, but consuming it is still fenced by our cognitive limits. Finding balance between acting, switching and being is an important skill to practise.

I enjoy music festivals as listening is a meditation for me. Even given all the negative health effects like a loud environment and disrupted sleep patterns, it’s a net positive experience for my state of mind. I consider these lightweight versions of 10-day silent retreats:

I’ve just started reading the book Four Thousand Weeks, which starts with a header: “In the Long Run, We’re All Dead.” The number of present moments is limited, as we have just around 28,000 days to make it count.

Do you control how present you are?

Enjoy the music,
— Michał

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P.S. Here in the Northern Hemisphere, summertime is for spending more time outdoors and enjoying long days. Life and work get a bit more relaxed (often due to heatwaves in Europe). My summer writing is officially joining the relaxed club, at least for this article.

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We deal with data in the form of charts when viewing server metrics, stock prices, or temperature graphs. Two similar lines on a chart, connected by a story, can lead us to believe something that is not true.

Don’t be fooled by good-looking charts.

Correlation

Correlation is a measure of the relationship between two variables. The better we can predict changes in the second variable by looking at the first one, the stronger the correlation is.

Clients were insisting on adding 3 more engineers, expecting delivery to speed up proportionally. My favourite answer was that 9 women are not going to deliver a baby in 1 month. It comes with the simple assumption that if one developer can write x lines of code, then n developers can write n * x lines of code, which simply doesn’t work for software engineers.

Correlation is just a statistical measure of two variables, nothing else. Two variables can be correlated without one causing the other.

Spurious Correlations

Spurious correlation occurs when two variables appear to be statistically related but have no real-world connection. The relationship is purely coincidental.

Take a look at these charts (all charts are made by Tyler Vigen, author of the database of spurious correlations):

I like to make up stories to back up the real causation behind it, but it’s all just random. It’s probable our ancestors who assumed that rustling grass meant a predator survived, which was about reacting fast, not verifying the cause.

Searching for meaning by default is a human trait, even if there is no meaning. No matter how beautiful the graph looks, it does not mean it represents causation.

Causation

Causation is the relationship between two things where one event directly influences the other. To understand reality, we need to understand causation, and while correlation can help us with this, it shouldn’t alone act as the defining measurement.

Both ice cream sales and sunburn are correlated, but it is not because eating ice cream gets people burned. There is a third invisible thing: temperature. With higher temperatures, people buy more ice cream and go outside, which may lead to more cases of sunburn. The third thing is a confounding variable. It’s the invisible force that pulls the strings on both metrics, even if they have no direct effect on each other.

Causation can run in reverse, too. It’s tempting to assume that creating dashboards causes issues, since teams with more dashboards report more incidents. But it also runs the other way: incidents cause teams to build more dashboards.

The example of ice cream consumption affecting sunburn rates illustrates how looking beyond data can help us understand reality. When thinking in systems, we treat sunburn, skin cancer, and ice cream sales as part of a larger system.

Testing Causation

Tools to test whether we are dealing with causation or just correlation:

• Isolation: Does isolating one from another influence how they behave? For example: Turning off one module after another to debug what causes the problems.

• Chronology: Does changing the order of events change how they behave?

• Systems Thinking: How does the whole complex system behave? Aim to connect and understand all the components and interactions within the system. In this example: human behaviour, the effects of weather, and the roles of ice cream and sunburn.

Final Thoughts

Correlations are valuable as they point out where we can look for solutions. But we have to understand what is happening behind the data, which is often invisible unless we uncover it. Reality is far too complex to put in a simple chart or map and assume that’s all there is.

When was the last time that you confused correlation with causation?

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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P.S. The Database of spurious correlations prepared by Tyler Vigen is an amazing source of correlations that are just random coincidences.

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We talked about mental models as practical tools, why technical people debug systems better than rooms, and what silent meditation retreats teach you about your brain.

Colette prepared an excellent written summary here:

Empathy Elevated

Live with Colette Molteni and Michał Poczwardowski - You Can Debug a System. Can You Debug a Room?

Earlier today, I had the pleasure of going live with Michał Poczwardowski : engineer, writer, and the mind behind Perspectiveship , a newsletter on mental models and decision-making through the lens of software engineering…

Listen now

3 months ago · 10 likes · Colette Molteni and Michał Poczwardowski

What kept me thinking after our live session is how important the locus of control is. It’s one of the common denominators in Colette’s writing:

Stoics explain the concept of the dichotomy of control by dividing everything into two buckets:

• Things you have full control over: Focus on these

• Things you have no control over: Ignore these

It helps while dealing with life and work. Accept that you won’t be able to influence, change, or fight against things you have no control over.

We didn’t cover that during the session, but there is one more perspective on it. The third bucket. The third possibility is things that you can’t fully control, but you can influence.

The common saying, “People leave managers, not companies”, is wrong.

We’d love to keep the best people with us, but they have different motivations, and we don’t have full control over them. This is an example of the third bucket. If someone has been driven by a company mission but it shifted due to the business environment, we can’t help it. They will leave as soon as their values and the company’s values are misaligned. We can address their motivations and try to influence how they feel at work.

The third perspective of “having some control”, but not absolute, is a valuable addition to the conversation.

Enjoy the recording!
— Michał

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Inside Reading

Commentator Ezra Klein on reading:

Part of what is happening when you spend 7 hours reading a book, is you spend 7 hours with your mind on the topics in the book, grappling with them, drawing connections, having thoughts you would not otherwise have had.

And so without that process of grappling, without those hours inside that book, it doesn’t get inside you. It doesn’t impress itself upon you. It doesn’t change you. What reading and writing and processing information is supposed to do is change you.

— Ezra Klein

This highlights the cognitive atrophy caused by the extensive use of LLMs. Real understanding is only built upon processing that information.

One of my recent reads, Deep Work by Cal Newport, could have been an article, but spending a few hours with the book helped to digest its content and trigger thoughts and experiments. Writing the article was the pinnacle of processing the content: Deep Work: Meditation, Inversion, Shutdown

What is your relationship with distilling books while reading them?

Tiller

Fear and ego—in other words, ignorance—are keeping your hand on the tiller.

Release the tiller for whatever reason, and the steering takes care of itself.

— Jed McKenna

A tiller is the lever used to steer a boat, and letting go of it is scary.

I interpret the quote as an occasional reminder to let go of control, which I usually cling to tightly. My bet on improving skills I didn’t focus on, like public speaking, depends heavily on letting go. Being on stage has so many dimensions that it is simply impossible to control everything.

Do you release the tiller at times?

Past/Present/Future

Be forgiving with your past self. What’s done is done. No sense in beating yourself up about it.

Be strict with your present self. Win the moment in front of you right now.

Be flexible with your future self. There are many paths to success. You don’t need life to be a certain way to live well.

— James Clear

I’ve recently been preparing to give a talk about 10-day silent retreat takeaways during an engineering conference.

A recurring theme during the retreat was that the present moment is the only thing that exists. Everything else is uncertain. The past is a blurry recording of events stored in our imperfect memory. The future is a blurry plan which can change in an instant. We can prepare for that, but we can’t fully control it. The present moment is all we’ve got.

During the meditation retreat, you exercise this feeling in an amplified way. You go through the schedule and focus mostly on sitting for 11 hours on the floor with your back straight. Winning the moment there is about surviving the struggle.

What is your relationship with this trio of past, present, and future?

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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This effect applies to many non-perishable things, like technologies or ideas. It states that life expectancy is proportional to current age. To put it simply: when something exists for X years, it’s likely to survive another X years.

I use this simple heuristic to think about the future, and to decide what to write about. The way we think and communicate is unlikely to change because of how our brains are structured.

Here are three useful lenses through which to apply it:

Skills to Acquire

Technologies change rapidly, and no one can state with certainty how far AI will progress, but there are useful skills to focus on that pass the Lindy test. These are skills that have been with us for thousands of years.

Writing, communicating, public speaking, the ability to work with people, and problem-solving are all likely to stay. These skills are Lindy-proof because they depend on human biology, not technological progression.

Publishing Channels

You are reading this article in an email or on a website because those mediums pass the Lindy test.

The first email was sent in 1971, and it’s still the main medium for managing online accounts and receiving content. These mailboxes are here to stay for another 50 years. It’s not as strong an indication as writing (thousands of years) or spoken language (hundreds of thousands).

Today’s social media content distribution evolved into a model where a handful of companies control what users see and consume. I lean towards media where the change in algorithms is not going to influence my readers.

Inevitable Change

The world changes, and new technologies replace old ones. It’s not a rule that if something is with us for X years, it’s always going to be there for us.

While Lindy is a valuable heuristic for evaluating technology, it also serves as a great reminder: timeless skills like reading and writing simply change their medium. They remain relevant.

ChatGPT launched in November 2022 and has been around for about three and a half years. Lindy predicts it will survive at least another three and a half. I bet it’ll be much longer than that.

The Lindy Effect is a valuable heuristic for predicting what endures, but it is a clue, not a guarantee.

What are the relevant skills that are likely to stay with you for the next X years?

I hope you’ll find the Lindy Effect useful to guide your focus.

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

P.S. The series How I Met Your Mother used a term called Date-Time Continuum, introduced by the character Barney Stinson. It perfectly mirrors the Lindy Effect: never make plans further into the future than you’ve been dating.

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I write a lot. I publish these articles weekly. During my time as a staff engineering manager, I sent hundreds of important messages to hundreds of engineers. The quality of our communication influences the quality of our work, with writing at its centre.

Now, producing and writing content requires much less effort with AI. LLMs are taking over both sides, creating text and summarising it. The situation is that AI is sitting in the middle of human communication.

MIT study from 2025 stated that using AI to write essays weakens brain connectivity and memory recall, leading users to feel detached from their work and unable to remember what they wrote. The study was conducted on a small group but warns us about the cognitive decline.

We are losing skills that we are not using, and that’s atrophy. I listed timeless skills to focus on practising and saving from decline. Writing is here to stay, and should be protected from decline.

The private version in the form of journalling or documenting your own decisions is about understanding yourself. It’s equally important to be understood by others. Same tool, different challenge.

Here is a timeless writing framework that will help you communicate clearly. It consists of 3 steps:

1. Prepare (Why/What/Who)

2. Write simply

3. Remove unnecessary words

   

Writing Framework

1. PREPARE (Why/What/Who)

You don’t need to prepare if you’re writing for yourself, but writing for others is different. We lack the full knowledge of what others know or think. Preparation gives you a perfect start for framing the communication.

Think about the basics:

• Why are you writing the communication?

• What would you like to achieve with the message?

• Who is your audience?

Why

There must be a reason why you started writing. Find it, and when it’s important, then include it in your message.

When the reason for your writing is to vent your frustration, it is better to wait until you have calmed down. Being aware of the purpose is the starting point for writing and setting its tone. You would write differently to celebrate success than to give a heads-up that the company is not doing well.

Example reasons:

• Because your team missed a deadline and you need to write an update to stakeholders.

• Because you are frustrated by the work of the supporting team and want to share feedback.

• Because a new bonus scheme is going to be introduced and you want to give your team a heads-up.

Sounds silly to state the obvious? Maybe, but writing things down helps to clarify and name what we’re dealing with.

What

You have to know what your goal is so you can work towards achieving it. Defining your goal gives your message direction.

Imagine that your goal is to communicate that the team needs to level up their estimation skills, as they have been significantly off for the last three sprints. However, you end up just praising their good work with only a vague comment on estimation skills, and no reader sees it as an important issue after reading the message.

Examples of starting goals:

• The goal is for your team to follow new rules.

• The goal is to successfully communicate the change.

• The goal is to share praise and make your employees feel recognised.

A clearly stated goal helps you focus on one thing.

Who

When writing for others, it’s difficult to predict their interpretations. You’ll use different words while writing for someone technical vs. a business person.

“We migrated to Flipper, a new feature flag gem on our Ruby backend.” This is clear for Ruby developers, quite clear for engineers (gems are Ruby libraries), but difficult to understand for non-technical people in the company.

Examples of different audiences:

• Business people in the company: non-technical and without an understanding of engineering.

• The support team: interested in learning all the scenarios that you have already tried out before engaging with them.

• Fellow managers: know most of the things that you know and have similar context.

• Your engineers: highly interested in what happens in your team, and technical.

Each of these example groups requires a different level of detail, different context and vocabulary. It’s important to understand what they know.

The more you know about your audience, the better, because it helps you avoid things that they will not understand.

2. WRITE Simply

When you are speaking, you use much simpler words. Apply this to writing. Because of a cognitive load, we want to be energy efficient when speaking. Complicated words and complex sentences use more brain resources than simple ones. When your reader is tired and low on brain resources, it is difficult to understand complicated communication.

Simple words do not reflect a simple mind. It’s the exact opposite.

What is easier to understand?

We are revising the protocol for merging pull requests: henceforth, a single approval will be requisite for a merge, as opposed to the previous stipulation of two. This adjustment reflects our increased confidence in your expertise and is intended to expedite our processes.

or:

“We are changing the current rule for merging our pull requests: you now need at least one approval to merge your changes, instead of two approvals — we trust you, and we want to move our things a bit faster.“

Our brains think using stories. To lower cognitive load, write as the brain operates. Use an active form instead of a passive one. So, “I pushed to production” instead of “The production has been updated by me”. It is easier for the brain to follow.

The style and structure of the message are important, and for more than a few sentences:

• Put the most important passage first.

• Organise it in a readable format, and avoid a wall of text.

• Use three to four sentences per paragraph.

3. REMOVE Unnecessary Words

Many words do not add important information. The fewer words you use, the less processing power your reader needs to understand the message. Just like a garbage collector in a runtime environment, use your common sense to run one over your text.

Simplification makes it easier to understand and saves time for readers.

Example: “We are changing the current rule for merging our pull requests: you now need at least one approval to merge your changes, instead of two approvals — we trust you, and we want to move our things a bit faster”

After removing (subjectively) unimportant words: “We are changing the rule for merging pull requests: you need one approval, instead of two— we trust you, and we want to move faster”

Every day, when I write simple messages using tools like Slack, I pause before clicking the send button and remove unnecessary words. In this article, I removed a few dozen words.

Summary

The Lindy Effect is a phenomenon that states that the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things is proportional to their current age. If the technology of writing has been with us for a few thousand years, it’s likely to stay for another few thousand years.

When writing for others, prepare and think about why you need to write the message, what your goal is, and who your audience is. Then, keep it simple and write as you speak. Finally, remove words that are not needed.

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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The Circle of Competence is a mental model that reminds us of the boundaries of our knowledge. Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger used the term to support investing in assets that they deeply understand, but it has wider applications.

Everything we know lies in this green circle. That is our Circle of Competence. Outside of that, the slightly bigger circle stores all the things that we just think we know. The gap between those two circles is where ego and overconfidence live.

Inside The Circle

When a task seems easy, but you end up spending hours instead of minutes finishing it, you may have wandered outside your Circle of Competence. Inside the circle, we know what to do. We have expertise. Operating inside the circle gives us confidence that may lead to overconfidence.

The problems happen in areas where we think that we have the knowledge. We can use others’ perspectives to check whether our understanding is correct.

The Forest and Its Specialists

Thought experiment: imagine the forest as a natural piece of land covered by dense trees, using the perspectives of:

• Lumberjacks: the forest serves as a source of raw materials. They are skilled in the proper methods of chopping wood, storing it, and using it as a material.

• Biologists: the forest represents life, trees, insects, and the entire ecosystem within its layer of forest litter. Their focus is on organisms that inhabit it.

• Runners: the forest offers an excellent area for trail running. They are familiar with all the ideal courses for their 10k runs, knowing the terrain.

Each of these groups has its own Circle of Competence, and the forest is a complex system. When dealing with a problem that touches a complex system, help might be needed. Ask others with different specialisations.

Biologists can map the ecosystem in detail, but they can’t tell you how to fell a tree safely. You don’t have to learn everything. You just have to know who to ask.

One group acts as generalists: Foresters. They have enough overlapping knowledge of the groups to manage the forest. Sometimes, being a generalist helps you know exactly whom to ask.

While working with your teams, solving problems or planning your career, try to understand the perspectives of different groups and their circles.

Final Thoughts

I was focused on writing software, not solving problems. Being aware of your limits, and of what you truly know, guides your growth. The best solution might be outside of your expertise.

How often do you question how much you know?
Where is your circle drawn?

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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Enjoy today’s lenses:

1. Small Problems Compound

Often we fail to improve our lives simply because things don’t get bad enough. If your new job is hell, you’ll leave it, but if it’s just unsatisfying, you’ll likely grind it out. Thus, small problems often threaten our quality of life more than big ones.

— Gurwinder Bhogal

That’s activation energy. Small problems don’t trigger the threshold required to change, and that’s why they’re dangerous. We stay in the wrong place because there is too much energy required for a change.

Treating small problems as big ones is how quality of life compounds.

What makes a small problem finally cross the threshold?

2. Cultural Geology Shifts

Culture is observational

You cannot install a culture of experimentation. You can only model it.

Culture isn’t what’s written in the employee handbook or posted on the lobby wall. Culture is what people observe — who gets celebrated, who gets promoted, who gets fired, and why. Everything else is decoration.

Geology works this way too. Ninety-nine percent of the change to a landscape happens in one percent of the time — earthquakes, floods, eruptions. The slow steady stuff barely moves anything. Culture is identical. Most of what you do day-to-day barely registers. But a handful of moments — specific, visible, impossible to misread — reshape the terrain completely.

— Marc Randolph, The Real Reason Innovation Dies Inside Big Companies

When it happened, the first round of tech layoffs was a seismic shift. I still vividly remember when the CEO secretly announced the plan among leadership, which was unthinkable even a few minutes before that.

What shapes culture in your surroundings?

3. The Flow of Luck

Luck flows through people and travels by conversation. The people you talk to determine the opportunities you find.

Keep talking to the same people, keep finding the same opportunities. Start talking to new people, start finding new opportunities.

If you want different luck, start walking into different rooms.

— James Clear

This year, I’m committed to improving my public speaking. I’ve already heard that “I’m lucky to present”. Well, maybe it can be defined as lucky, but I also tried to increase my chances. I submitted as many CFPs as I found, talked to people who presented, and tried to improve proposals with each submission.

It’s a great reminder that increasing your surface area can help you, as long as your actions are aligned with your desired direction. It can mean meeting more people, going to new places, or self-distributing your content.

What are you doing to increase the surface area of your luck?
I’m betting on more conversations and more rooms.

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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Back to the present day. This morning I saw calculations of integrals in a magazine, and I realised that I’m no longer able to solve any of them. It was possible 17 years ago, but I lost it.

In biology, there is a mechanism called atrophy, where an organism actively loses what it doesn’t use.

Living organisms have to be extremely resource-efficient. The fittest survived over the years of evolution. It’s not just about physical capabilities, but also cognitive ones. I was able to solve integrals and didn’t need to use the calculator for bigger numbers. Now I can’t do any of it.

Thought experiment: Which of your cognitive or professional skills will atrophy in the next 3 years if you don't use them?
My three: writing code without AI, negotiating salaries, and reading dense text end-to-end without skimming.

I work on articles with my English teacher, but also with AI to iterate over them via “act as a professional editor” prompts. I don’t let it write by itself. I found seeing perfectly crafted sentences discouraging, as I’m often not that clear. Formulating my thoughts in a written form is my baseline. Thinking on paper, without any LLM involvement, is my default, and I don’t want to lose this practice.

Atrophy doesn’t happen overnight. The process of deterioration is slow. Every action you take is a “vote” (my favourite analogy from Atomic Habits) showing your biology what it needs to maintain or grow. The next time you write a prompt, think about what kind of atrophy it can cause.

Vote wisely.

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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P.S. Consider this wordplay: You might win an “AI-trophy” for early and extensive adoption, but the hidden cost might be “AI-atrophy”, the slow cognitive deterioration.

P.P.S. Decision-making is the cognitive skill I guard the most from atrophy. On June 2nd, I’m running a live masterclass where you can work on a real decision you’re stuck on. You can join here.

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To get a fresh perspective on what I can improve, I read a book, “Don’t Say Umm”, which is packed with exercises. My take after finishing it and putting it into practice:

Self-Awareness

At first, I didn’t like watching recordings of my meetings. Which makes sense, for the majority of our existence on this planet, as a species, we weren’t able to do so. It’s unnatural. We’ve never experienced ourselves from the outside. It’s also unfamiliar to hear our own voice, as we hear it differently when we speak.

When I got promoted to a manager, I started speaking more, and many meetings were recorded. My English wasn’t at the level that I wanted, so I watched selected ones (without any sensitive data) with my English teacher. It was a game to hunt as many mistakes as I could. Spotting my own mistakes and then learning new phrases to prevent them improved my language.

Exercise:

Record yourself while speaking, then watch it with no sound. Then listen to it one more time, but with audio only. Then both with video and sound. How do you perceive yourself? Splitting dimensions can help with focusing on selected elements.

Analysing recordings helped me to pause more but also notice my monotonous tone (that’s a work in progress). Transcripts helped me see how exaggerated my use of “So..” is.

Pausing

Michał, it’s quite ironic.
In your talk, you preach the value of pausing (as it’s a decision-making superpower).
And the most important feedback I have for you is that:
you need to pause more, you speak too fast.

That’s what I heard from a speaking coach after my first dry-run, a month before the conference.

Speaking fast is efficient. I can say much more in a short time, right? But spoken words per minute is not a good metric. The real metric is how much of what you said was actually understood.

Think about your audience. You might introduce new concepts to a tired crowd. Speaking fast makes the material more difficult to process.

Exercise:

Take LEGO bricks. One brick represents one thought. When you finish it, connect one to another, don’t say anything, while physically connecting the pieces. The act of connecting them is a sweet-spot pause moment, not too long, not too short. It gives your audience a moment to digest what you have just said. I used Post-it Notes for that, by connecting them, or a Rubik’s Cube, where I would do one random twist after each thought.

This trick improved my delivery. I didn’t have any props with me on stage, so instead, I was doing a certain hand gesture to remind myself about these tiny pauses after each thought.

Simulating Mistakes

Mistakes will happen when you are giving a speech. These are a source of additional stress. “Oh, I messed this up,” “The slide is wrong,” “I forgot to add something,” etc. These are inevitable.

You can’t predict exactly when mistakes will happen, but you can prepare for those moments.

Exercise:

Set a random timer which rings after 60 to 200 seconds. Adjust the span to the talk length. I googled an online random timer, surprised that it’s a thing.

Then I prepared a list of fallback phrases, like:

• Let me rephrase it.

• Oh, it’s important to also add this...

• Remember the reversibility mental model? Let me load the previous slide

When the timer buzzed, I pretended that I had made a mistake and used one of these fallback phrases.

During my recent talk at the ELC conference, I missed one important thing which I wanted to add to the slide, as otherwise the story wouldn’t be complete. My brain picked one of the prepared phrases automatically.

I wrote about rewiring my relationship with mistakes in a separate article:

Final Thoughts

It’s not just about speaking on stage. We talk to people every day. What if your communication could be a bit more engaging, precise, or easier to understand thanks to these drills?

What stops you from speaking in public? Sounds scary? You can start by writing a newsletter. It’s easier to talk about something you have written down and repeated many times.

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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P.S. I spoke at ELC in Prague, and I know that some of you were there listening live. Thanks for that!

P.P.S. I’m looking for more opportunities to practise: May at Infoshare, and in June at Devoxx. Current stats: applied to 8 conferences in 2026, accepted by 3, rejected by 3. If you know any related events in Europe, let me know!

P.P.P.S Thanks for the “Don’t Say Umm” book recommendation.

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Irreducibility is a mental model from systems thinking. It points to where further optimisations aren’t possible without breaking something. It reminds us not to waste energy optimising something that has already hit its floor limit.

The irreducible version of this article is just one sentence:
Irreducibility is the point where simplifying further breaks the thing itself.

Writing at Work

Communication with words can serve as an example of irreducibility in action.

As simplification progresses:

• “Hey man, can you please assign yourself the task we talked about on a call, it’s number 42”

• “Please assign yourself task number 42”

• “Take task 42”

• “Take 42” — The last one breaks understanding. We don’t know what to take, unless tasks use a specific recognisable ID like PR-23 in some task management tools.

The last working example, “Take task 42”, is irreducible: remove any of those 3 words, and the sentence loses its meaning.

Removing unnecessary words aims to create an irreducible message. It’s about finding the right, and possibly, the lowest number of words that convey the meaning (”Remove” is the last step of my simple writing framework).

Irreducible communication is about delivering information.

Debugging Irreducibility

When dealing with process/project/situation:

• What are the irreducible constraints here?

• How to identify when we are reaching the floor limits?

• What can’t be compressed?

Example: Onboarding Process

What are the constraints with onboarding:

• the capabilities of people who need to acquire knowledge

• time available for the process

• availability of people they need to talk with

These constraints can’t be removed. I’ve onboarded hundreds of engineers. Watching videos at x2.0 speed may save some time, but some things just can’t be compressed:

Trust is not engineered. It’s built on how they behave, communicate, and operate. It’s built only when you work together. That’s onboarding’s irreducible floor.

Final Thoughts

Simplification or optimisation is different from irreducibility. The latter is about removing things until you can’t remove any more. But no further, or you break the meaning.

The perspective of irreducibility is a reminder that when you find an irreducible component, don’t bother with trying to optimise it. It helps you understand what really matters.

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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We need disconnected long periods of time, where we can do work to achieve great things.

Deep work is where important breakthroughs happen, where you connect ideas and explore new perspectives. This newsletter exists because of it. On the opposite side is shallow work. Small tasks which don’t require much attention. Creations of deep work are rewarding, shallow ones just bring an illusion of being productive.

This year, I’m chasing every possible moment of productivity. Except for a 10-day silent retreat, where I took a valuable break.

To be completely honest, I wanted to be productive even during my silent retreat. I started to write articles in my mind, but because you’re not allowed to write anything down, I forgot everything. Then, frustrated by this fact, I gave up. It was the correct thing to do to focus on meditation and being there in the moment.

Silent retreat meditation taught me one powerful benefit: presence. Focus sharpens as a side effect. When I got back to the outside world, I was the most razor-focused on everything this year.

Unusual focus remained for a few days. Deep Work offers many tools to dive into. These three are the ones I tried myself:

Concepts

Productive Meditations

I run around 30 to 40 km every week. What happens with my thoughts? These often drift, with no clear direction around the latest context of my life.

Cal Newport proposes a different way to spend activities like taking a shower, having an easy run or a walk, anything that doesn’t require dedicated focus. The author encourages you to aim your thoughts at a specific problem.

So, I started trying “productive meditations”, and even though it requires discipline to bring thoughts back, this practice works. This paragraph has been largely drafted in my head while walking. I decided on the shape and form of my recent public speaking speech during one of my long runs.

However, I need to point out an important thought-habit. Give your mind permission to wander every day. Sitting for 10 minutes with eyes closed and doing nothing is a great habit, even without doing any meditation activities like scanning your body or doing visualisation.

Inverting The Time Block

I tried to put everything into a calendar, but it rarely works for me. I use calendar slots only for meetings and appointments. I practised calendarising for a while after reading Winning the Week, but it’s not a thing I can stick to. I prefer to keep working until I finish, rather than keep everything in assigned time slots.

There is one type of calendar block that works for me: distraction blocks. Unlike work slots, you can cut these short without regret. By inverting the time dedicated to work, we have time dedicated to distractions.

I have two calendar blocks, each lasting an hour, for the time dedicated to distraction. The Freedom app runs these slots automatically. Outside dedicated time, it blocks every distraction. I don’t have any push notifications, so I don’t know about new messages or new emails. These slots are my time to check messaging apps and all blocked notifications.

Time blocks dedicated to distractions made me much more focused, as my brain knows the rewards are coming at some point. To close open loops, I keep adding to my 'Later Actions' note for anything that can wait.

Shutdown Rituals

The Zeigarnik effect is a phenomenon stating that people remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.

The author of the book described his own “Shutdown ritual”. The theory behind it is that spending 10-15 minutes reviewing all pending unresolved issues and moving them to the next day releases our brain from the need to keep track of pending issues.

Committing to a specific plan for a goal may therefore not only facilitate attainment of the goal but may also free cognitive resources for other pursuits.

— “Consider it done!”, Masicampo & Baumeister

It works for me. Before closing my laptop, I capture pending tasks and sketch quick notes for the next morning. It feels much better when I don’t have to remember what to pick up in the morning.

Final Thoughts

I first came across the ideas in Deep Work two years ago, thanks to a Tech Books article. That was enough to get the main ideas. The full book still feels relatable and goes deeper. It took me longer to get to it, but it was worth it.

Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.

— Winifred Gallagher

Train your focus. Tame your distractions. You can learn it.

Thanks for reading,
— Michał

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Discover Weekly — Shoutouts

Great content which I’ve read/watched recently:

• TED: How I created OpenClaw, the breakthrough AI agent by Peter Steinberger

• Engineering Manager’s thoughts on AI by

• Substack Almost Killed My Product. Here’s What I Did by

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