Directly related to Programmable Attention.

Coined by Andy Matuschak. First read it in his notes here:

I feel it put a name on the idea that I had been thinking about after first revisiting Anki and Spaced Repetition in 2021/02. With Spaced Repetition, Memory is a choice. That same idea translates to consumption in the form of Incremental Reading. From there, I imagine that this Cognitive Optimization way of interacting with information may have even larger implications (the size of those implications has expanded thanks to Andy Matuschak coining this term).

An interesting question: Why do we decide when to do anything at all? Surely, some things require timely action, but perhaps fewer do than we admit. This has been done with email to some degree already with products that “hide” emails from you until certain hours of the day. If we let prioritization and Cognitive Optimization dictate when we do more things in our life, we may be more effective and be fighting ourselves less to do things we don’t feel like doing.

More Ideas, 2021/03/10

From Andy Matuschak notes on Spaced Repetition creating a sense of Wu Wei

The idea of removing the burden of choice is critical here, and I’m sure there are many interesting product applications of this.

The way I use Reminders could be an example of this, with tradeoffs of course: Spaced Reminders