I no longer suffer from information overload.
This is a little bizarre to say. I’ve not cut down on tools, nor have I bought new software. My workflows — whilst somewhat under-optimised (can they ever be truly ‘perfectly optimised’?) — are still mostly the same.
I noticed a typo in the article:
This requires you to spend a lot of time on CT (Crypto Twitter), which is a cesspit of scammers and emotionally compromised, slightly mentally unstable individuals.
The above emphasized text should read extremely 
Something I’ve debated but not tried - is writing out all of the current active interest and lines of inquiry which feel alive to me
There’s a lot! And they’re maybe not all very closely related. But it strikes me that I probably could take a stab at writing them down …
Is that a part of your “system” here? (System seems like a stretch, more philosophy than process?)
What a useful concept and question.
A key insight from this for me was understanding why outcome orientation is better than strong filters – a particularly useful one being it enables the consumption of opposing viewpoints that would have otherwise been filtered out, in turn creating an echo chamber that is counterproductive to developing dialectical views.
I am curious if the Outcome Orientation practice, over time, helps to refine and clean unconscious thought patterns. In other words, the source of our original thoughts becomes better trained for usefulness, causing certain thoughts or thought patterns that are not outcome oriented to atrophy. Potentially a similar mechanism in play as in Waitzkin’s MIQ exercise in channeling the unconscious mind.
I haven’t really found the need to do this, because it turns out that constant practice of outcome orientation immediately surfaces the next question: “which is currently the more important outcome to pursue?”
It forces you to continually balance desired outcomes against each other. Of course you may have a problem developing a healthy ordered list of priorities (for me the problem is always “should I do entertainment or should I work on / make progress towards outcome X?”) but at least it forces me to reckon with this tradeoff explicitly, whereas before I would be doomscrolling Twitter because I wanted a break, without full consideration of whether this was the best entertainment option available to me.
The ‘full list of interests’ thing I tend to do very irregularly. But … thinking back to the past 7 months of practice, one good thing about Outcome Orientation is that when I do list out my interests, usually at the start of the year, it becomes a really easy exercise to stack rank … and in some cases explicitly deprioritise.
Yes, absolutely!
I’ve found myself slowly disengaging from useless “stalk some person out of envy” type of behaviours — which I am ok admitting to doing. Mostly because Outcome Orientation forces me to face myself: “why am I doing this?” I ask, and then I don’t like the answer: “because I want schadenfreude”. So now I still do it, usually when I’m tired and cognitively compromised, but I do it less, and it’ll taper off to zero over time.
There’s a similar practice I do that’s kind of like an inverse of this. When I start having bad/unpleasant/stressful feelings, i ask the question: “why am I feeling this way now.”
It’s hard to articulate the benefits of this. In a similar way to the "What is the outcome I am trying to achieve here?” question, I find it helps keep proper focus when feelings start taking you on unproductive paths.
For example: someone is criticizing your idea or opinion and you feel self-defensive, perhaps a little angry; are those feeling because it challenges your ego? or the idea that you are “correct” on the topic, or smart? Maybe deep-down you know some of the criticism is true and you’re not ready to face it yet.
The immediate reaction to the feeling tends to lead to escalation and a worser place before the situation resolves, if it resolves at all. But by pausing and understanding the “Why” you’re feeling that way, it’s easier to engage in productive conversation and criticism.
Or let’s I’m feeling really anxious in the morning; is it because something happened that still remains open and unresolved? Or is there something in the near future that I know has the potential to be really stressful? Or maybe I just didn’t get enough sleep the night before (this is culprit more often than you’d expect).
I think everyone does some version of this, but on the other hand I think having a proper pause and digging deeper than the initial reactions and thoughts takes a bit more conscious effort.
Reading Outcome Orientation immediately brought to mind the Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) framework, particularly the job story format. For those unfamiliar, JTBD helps separate context from form—a concept borrowed from Christopher Alexander’s idea of form-context fit. In Alexander’s world, “form” might refer to how a building responds to its environment. For PMs and designers, it’s how software interfaces adapt to user needs. In the context of Cedric’s article, “form” is how we respond to the situations life presents.
Outcome orientation, to me, feels like the act of prioritizing and separating between emergent and long-running job stories for your own life. It helps identify the most important jobs you’re trying to get done, clarifying which deserve your focus. Life constantly presents us with new situations that motivate action in pursuit of certain outcomes.
If we’re not careful, we can fall into the trap of impulsive job stories. Take this one, for example, written in the form of a Job Story:
The natural response? Consuming AI-related content, whether it’s actually useful or not. But not just reading content, you can go to conferences, talking to people, watching videos. All of those are valid responses if we decide to prioritize the above job story.
Outcome orientation challenges us to pause and ask: Is this job story truly worth prioritizing? It’s less about reducing information intake and more about filtering it through the lens of what actually moves the needle for us. It’s a way to frame and prioritize your own JTBDs.