In 2025 I’ve decided I want to be more agentic / intentional about my life, i.e. my actions and habits should be more aligned with my explicit values.
A good way to do this might be the ‘5 whys’ technique; i.e. simply ask “why” 5 times. This was originally introduced at Toyota to diagnose ultimate causes of error and improve efficiency. E.g:
There is a piece of broken-down machinery. Why? -->
There is a piece of cloth in the loom. Why? -->
Everyone’s tired and not paying attention.
...
The culture is terrible because our boss is a jerk.
In his book on productivity, Ali Abdaal reframes this as a technique for ensuring low-level actions match high-level strategy:
Whenever somebody in my team suggests we embark on a new project, I ask ‘why’ five times. The first time, the answer usually relates to completing a short-term objective. But if it is really worth doing, all that why-ing should lead you back to your ultimate purpose… If it doesn’t, you probably shouldn’t bother.
A simple implementation of this can be with nested tasks. Many todo-list apps (such as Todoist, which I use) will let you create nested versions of tasks. So high-level goals can be broken down into subgoals, etc. until we have concrete actionables at the bottom.
Here’s an example from my current instantiation of this:
In this case I created this top-down, i.e. started with the high-level goal and broke it down into substeps. Other examples from my todo list are bottom-up, i.e. they reflect things I’m already intending to do and try to assign high-level motives for them.
At the end of doing this exercise I was left with a bunch of high-level priorities with insufficient current actions. I instead created todo-list actions to think about whether I could be adding more actions. I was also left with many tasks / plans I couldn’t fit into any obvious priority. I put these under a ‘reconsider doing’ high-level goal instead.
Overall I’m hoping this ~1h spent restructuring my inbox will pay off in terms of improved clarity down the line.
Implementing the 5 whys with Todoist
In 2025 I’ve decided I want to be more agentic / intentional about my life, i.e. my actions and habits should be more aligned with my explicit values.
A good way to do this might be the ‘5 whys’ technique; i.e. simply ask “why” 5 times. This was originally introduced at Toyota to diagnose ultimate causes of error and improve efficiency. E.g:
There is a piece of broken-down machinery. Why? -->
There is a piece of cloth in the loom. Why? -->
Everyone’s tired and not paying attention.
...
The culture is terrible because our boss is a jerk.
In his book on productivity, Ali Abdaal reframes this as a technique for ensuring low-level actions match high-level strategy:
A simple implementation of this can be with nested tasks. Many todo-list apps (such as Todoist, which I use) will let you create nested versions of tasks. So high-level goals can be broken down into subgoals, etc. until we have concrete actionables at the bottom.
Here’s an example from my current instantiation of this:
In this case I created this top-down, i.e. started with the high-level goal and broke it down into substeps. Other examples from my todo list are bottom-up, i.e. they reflect things I’m already intending to do and try to assign high-level motives for them.
At the end of doing this exercise I was left with a bunch of high-level priorities with insufficient current actions. I instead created todo-list actions to think about whether I could be adding more actions. I was also left with many tasks / plans I couldn’t fit into any obvious priority. I put these under a ‘reconsider doing’ high-level goal instead.
Overall I’m hoping this ~1h spent restructuring my inbox will pay off in terms of improved clarity down the line.
Somewhat inspired by Review: Good strategy, Bad strategy