Mental Model
Reconnection After Distance Protocol
A structured protocol for reconnecting with a partner, friend, or family member after a period of emotional or physical distance (travel, conflict, busy seasons, or drift)
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Cognitive Move
Record
Optional last step: jot the one line worth keeping from this return, the dose and what it actually bought you, so the next comeback starts smarter. Deliberately optional and small, because tracking every session turns a return into constant self-surveillance.
Cognitive Move
Record or artifact audit
Reconcile the logs, messages, transactions, or drafts against each other to see what actually happened.
Cognitive Move
Recover a lost output
Turn something now discarded as waste into a useful input for the next turn.
Cognitive Move
Recovery and resilience
Assume it will fail anyway, and build the road back before you need it: a queue where odd cases wait for a human, a time limit, an undo, a backup way of doing the job by hand, and one practice run of that backup while nothing is broken.
Mental Model
Recovery Capital Framework
Recovery capital, conceptualized by William White, encompasses total resources for sustaining recovery: social capital (supportive relationships, sober networks), physical capital (finances, housing, health insurance), h…
Mental Model
Recovery Day Design Protocol
A protocol for designing deliberate recovery days that actually restore energy rather than the pseudo-rest of collapsing on the couch with screens
Mental Model
Recovery Science (Loehr & Schwartz)
Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz's 'Corporate Athlete' model, drawn from their work with elite athletes, argues that sustained high performance depends not on working more but on alternating strategically between energy expen…
Cognitive Move
Recovery time and evidence
Set a deadline for bouncing back, and name the observable fact that proves it happened. How long may the degraded version run before full function must return, and what would someone else be able to check?
Mental Model
Recreational Skill Building
Recreational skill building is the pursuit of competence in non-professional domains—learning guitar, rock climbing, woodworking—not for career advancement but for the intrinsic satisfaction of mastery free from professi…
Cognitive Move
Red
Names the line that ends the plan or sends it up the chain. Reserve it for breaches you refuse to trade against, like safety or a broken commitment. Unlike amber, it buys no more evidence. Require a repeat or confirmation first unless the harm is severe.
Mental Model
Red Team Analysis (Adversarial Thinking)
Red teaming is deliberately adopting the adversary's perspective to stress-test your own plans, assumptions, and defenses
Mental Model
Red Team Your Own Decision Protocol
A structured self-adversarial protocol for stress-testing a decision you've already made (or are leaning toward) by systematically arguing against it
Cognitive Move
Redepend
Map which tasks must come before which, so the real bottleneck and critical path stand out from the pile of visible work.
Cognitive Move
Redimension
Swap the variables you describe things with, turning labels into continua, averages into distributions, and traits into states, so hidden differences become visible.
Cognitive Move
Redirect the path
Keep the necessary function but send it through a safer person, channel, or route.
Cognitive Move
Reduce handoff
Before you carefully design a transfer of work between people, check whether that transfer needs to exist at all, because the cheapest handoff is the one you delete.
Mental Model
Reductio ad Absurdum
An argument that derives a contradiction or an incompatible consequence from an assumption together with accepted premises, thereby showing that the set cannot all be retained.
Cognitive Move
Redundancy
Count how many separate paths connect two parts of the graph. Where several independent routes exist, losing one person or tie changes little. Where only one route exists, that single link is a failure point worth naming before it breaks.
Mental Model
Redundancy Design Principles
Redundancy design provides backup capability so that failure of one component doesn't cause system failure
Mental Model
Redundancy in Communication
Redundancy supplies overlapping information that can improve resilience to specified loss or error
Mental Model
Reed's Law (Value of Group-Forming Networks)
David Reed's extension of Metcalfe's Law: while Metcalfe's Law says network value grows as n² (the number of possible connections between pairs), Reed's Law says the value of group-forming networks grows as 2ⁿ (the numbe…
Mental Model
Reference Class Forecasting
Predicting outcomes by finding the relevant reference class (similar past situations) and using their distribution of outcomes as your starting point
Mental Model
Reference Request Framework
A protocol for requesting, preparing, and managing professional references that actually strengthen your candidacy