Mechanism

Find out through what sequence of steps or bottleneck the outcome actually arises.

Every January you start the personal project that matters most to you, the book, and every March it's dead again. You've labeled the pattern laziness and bought another productivity planner. But "laziness" is a name, not an explanation. Somewhere between intention and abandonment there's an actual sequence of steps where the thing breaks, and you've never traced it.

Mechanism is the evidence job of finding out through what sequence of steps, interactions, or bottleneck an outcome actually arises. Knowing that something happens is different from knowing how. The cue is a recurring outcome you can predict but not explain, where your interventions keep failing because they target the label instead of the process. The operation: walk the chain event by event using real history. January: nightly writing after dinner. February: two late work nights break the streak. Then the missed days accumulate shame, opening the file starts feeling bad, and avoidance completes the collapse. The bottleneck isn't discipline, it's that your system has no way to resume after a gap. What changes is that the fix becomes obvious and specific: a restart ritual, not a better planner. Mechanism-hunting is overkill when you only need to know whether something works, not how.