Principles

• A triage page for heuristics gained from experience. Not the final home — the inbox / staging area.
• Each entry: one-line trigger, one-line response, backlink to the journal where it was forged, and a status.
• Once a heuristic matures (fires a 2nd time and has a clear domain), route it out to a dedicated page or upstream to a team-owned doc. The triage page stays small on purpose.

How to use this page

• Capture freely. Anything I notice once gets dropped here. Low friction.
• Promote on second use. If a heuristic fires a 2nd time in real work, it has earned a spot on a dedicated page.
• Archive on neglect. If an entry sits in triage > 60 days without a 2nd use, archive it. The page is for active heuristics, not aspirations.
• Re-read during Friday wrap-up. Demote anything routed-out that hasn’t fired in 90 days.

Routing targets

• prioritization / scheduling → [[Priority Rules]]
• sleep / illness / movement / energy → [[Health Rules]]
• (future) work-craft pages may emerge:
  • communication → [[Communication Rules]] (TBD)
  • code review / on-call → [[Code Review Rules]] (TBD)
• Some heuristics belong outside the second-brain. Upstream to team-owned docs when the rule is not unique to me — it converts a private heuristic into team infrastructure, and the writing exercise itself is career-visible.

Status legend

• triage — just captured, awaiting a 2nd occurrence.
• routed → [[Page]] — promoted to a dedicated page; this entry kept as a stub for backlink.
• upstream → <team doc> — proposed / merged into a team-owned doc.
• archived — did not survive a 2nd use within 60 days, or superseded.

Entries

• Work craft

  • dbt deprecation 3-phase rule
    • trigger: deprecating a dbt model that other AML / BI assets reference.
    • response: phase 1 deprecate in code → phase 2 remove the .sql → phase 3 drop the BQ table. Don’t sit between phase 2 and 3 — AML references BQ physical names, so removing the .sql only stops refresh and leaves the table silently misleading consumers.
    • forged: [[Weekly Report - 2026-W17]] · Ampcode T-019da543
    • validated: W18 Calendly cleanup — 3 legacy models deleted in PR internal-aml-project#78 without re-deriving the reasoning.
    • status: upstream → holistics/dbt contributing guide (proposed). Team correctness rule, should outlive me.
  • Small P1 ships before big P2 context-switch
    • trigger: a P1 escalation lands while a small / cheap P1 task is still open.
    • response: ship the 30-min item first, then context-switch. The cheapest item is the one most at risk of slipping when escalations arrive.
    • forged: [[Weekly Report - 2026-W18]] (dbt PR #858 round 1 review slipped when BuyCo + Wamly P1 escalations landed Wed).
    • status: triage. Candidate for a future on-call / escalation handling note.

• Communication

  • Customer comms reframe — recipe, not IOU
    • trigger: a customer asks for help with a workflow / configuration.
    • response: frame as “here is the recipe, happy to pair if helpful” instead of “I’ll do it for you”. Volunteering hands-on work tends to get silence in return.
    • forged: [[2026-04-27]] · validated against W17 Showbie + Basata silence pattern.
    • validated: W18 BuyCo 14-thread triage — replies were structured as workarounds + screen-recording asks, not “I’ll log in and fix it for you”.
    • status: upstream → presales comms playbook / CS onboarding doc (proposed). Pattern is not unique to my threads.
  • Ask for no, don’t ask for yes (Mooreds)
    • trigger: needing a small decision from a busy stakeholder (manager, peer).
    • response: replace “can we do X?” with “I’m going to do X to solve Y, will take care of it Monday unless I hear differently.” Shifts cognitive load to opt-out and unblocks progress while keeping ownership.
    • forged: [[Weekly Report - 2026-W17]] · mooreds.com
    • status: triage. Tone needs to be calibrated per person — practice on smaller decisions first.
  • Concision — what is the most important thing to say? (Wes Kao)
    • trigger: writing a status update, PR description, Slack message, or stakeholder note.
    • response: lead with the most important sentence. Cut anything that doesn’t change the reader’s decision or action.
    • forged: [[Weekly Report - 2026-W18]] · Wes Kao — How to Be Concise
    • status: triage. Pair with Levels of detail in communication once read.

• Decision-making / scheduling

  • Vague task → time-block + decompose to smallest concrete next step
    • trigger: a task feels blocking / overwhelming and keeps getting deferred.
    • response: time-block a slot, then force decomposition into the smallest concrete next step. Long carry-overs often have a procrastination root, not a priority root.
    • forged: [[2026-04-30]] · Wait But Why — How to Beat Procrastination
    • validated: same-day BuyCo 14-item Notion page → 14 micro Slack threads in #holistics-buyco-external, all shipped in one Wed afternoon.
    • status: triage. Candidate for promotion to [[Priority Rules]] (pairs with the 3+ week carry-over forcing function) on next occurrence.
  • Highest-leverage triage on low-energy weeks → routed → [[Priority Rules]]
  • 3+ week carry-over forcing function → routed → [[Priority Rules]]

• Reflection / craft hygiene

  • Writing is thinking — daily journals are 100% me
    • trigger: temptation to outsource a journal entry / reflection draft to an LLM.
    • response: don’t. LLM is fair game for boilerplate / first drafts only. The reflection muscle is the differentiator.
    • forged: [[Weekly Report - 2026-W18]] · HN thread
    • status: triage.
  • Cultivate non-LLM reading sources
    • trigger: defaulting to LLM search inside Logseq for ideas / craft inspiration.
    • response: deliberately seek out blogs / RSS / newsletters from individual senior writers (e.g., mooreds.com, Wes Kao, benn.substack). Signal/noise from a curated human writer is different from an aggregated answer.
    • forged: [[Weekly Report - 2026-W17]]
    • status: triage.

Routed (kept as stubs for backlink)

• Sleep > productivity → routed → [[Health Rules]]
• Illness = hard stop on day 2 → routed → [[Health Rules]]
• No gaming after 18:00 on weeknights → routed → [[Health Rules]]
• Eat before exercise → routed → [[Health Rules]]
• Weekend discipline (1 full off-day default) → routed → [[Health Rules]]

Notes

• Re-read this page during Friday wrap-up alongside [[Priority Rules]] and [[Health Rules]].
• When the same heuristic shows up in 2 separate weekly reports, that’s the promotion signal — move it out.
• Upstreaming to team docs is higher leverage than keeping a heuristic personal. Ask: “would Thuan / a new hire benefit from this being in the team’s docs?” If yes, draft the upstream PR.