The concept of mental models was probably first brought to my attention by Shane Parrish of farnam street.
Different mental models I subscribe to
- Regret minimization framework
- Take actions to minimize the regret for future self
- Fear setting by Tim Ferriss
- This is one of my favorite exercises to do, but not sure if it is a mental model or an actual excercise.
- Follow the steps mentioned here
- First principles for long term decision making
- Strip down the problem to the lowest form and strip your mind of all the pre-existing solutions. Handy for product managers but I don't think I'm applying this a lot
- Pareto Principle for medium term decision making
- The 80/20 rule. Everyone should know this already
- Parkinson's law
- Work expands to fill the time alloted to it. Often found this to be true. So I try to time box my activities.
- ICE model for short term decision making
- Impact, complexity and effort
- Two minute rule
- If an incoming action can be done in two minutes or less, do it right away rather than putting it on a to-do list, because it will take up even more time to organise and review is later
- Always write when making important decisions
- Mind easily fills the gap in our thoughts when they are well in our minds. If you write it down, you'll be able to identify the gaps in your thoughts much easily
- Reversible or irreversible decisions
- Bezos introduced this to me as well. If a decision is reversible, we can make it fast and without perfect information. If a decision is irreversible, we had better slow down the decision-making process and ensure that we consider ample information and understand the problem as thoroughly as we can.
- Inversion
- More of a mental excercise. Imagine you want to achieve the opposite of your goal and then ensure you do not follow those steps. Simple enough, I'll try to practice this more as well.
Additional Reference
- https://fs.blog/mental-models/
- https://www.julian.com/blog/mental-model-examples
- Super Thinking
