ParrotRobot

The empty cache problem I used to be terrible at starting on even moderately complex tasks. I was okay while “in the zone” in something, but if I had to start anything that involved reading any significant length of notes… I would be tempted to scroll Twitter first and waste 10 minutes. Even without any distractions, I’d feel quite uncomfortable. It wasn’t pleasant. This happened even when I was restarting a task, even when I had taken notes to “help” remember the important things. Why didn’t that help? I eventually realized it wasn’t that I didn’t have enough information; it was that the information wasn’t in my mind. It wasn’t in my working memory, my “mental cache”. I’ll call this the empty cache problem. The challenge was how to reliably get from having the idea of a thing in my mind, to having enough context in my mental cache to start making progress and overcome the twinge of starting. I’ve found one particular approach to be particularly effective for myself: “freewriting in my head”. Compared to alternative methods, of which there are many, this “freewriting in one’s head” method is relatively simple, it is very flexible, and it can be carried out anywhere. In this post, I’ll describe the basic logic of the method and the key rules of thumb that make it effective for me. Force filling my brain To effectively orient myself to a task, I “freewrite in my head” (or “cogitate”) by challenging myself to mentally generate a stream of relevant words about the topic. The basic idea, generating a bunch of words in order to think, is not novel. It exists in the time-tested practice of freewriting, is implicit in all writing, and exists as well as in more recent ideas like language model chain-of-thought. The main novelty is the medium — one’s mind — and the rules of thumb that I’ve found to be important for getting a good result. The basic logic behind “freewriting in one’s head”: * Your mind has a cache with a large number of slots, and you need to popula