Experiments

Goal criticIt is a year from now
and this failed. Why?

There is a technique from organisational psychology called a pre-mortem, and it is one of the few planning interventions with a genuinely good evidence base. Instead of asking what could go wrong — which people answer defensively and vaguely — you state that the thing has already failed and ask why. That single change of tense produces markedly more specific and more honest answers, because explaining a fact is a different cognitive task from predicting a risk.

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Name the goal and it will assume it failed.

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✦ How to use it

Three things that make it work.

1
Answer as though it already failed

The past tense is the whole technique. It produces more specific answers than "what are the risks?" ever does.

2
Read the top two stories

They are ranked by plausibility given what you have described, not by how bad they would be.

3
Do one countermeasure this week

Each is small now and impossible later. That asymmetry is the entire value of running this early.

This runs one on your goal. It takes the conditions and works out which failure stories are most plausible, in order, with the countermeasure for each.

The point is not pessimism. It is that the failures you can name in advance are almost all cheap to prevent now and expensive to fix in month seven.

✦ The limit

An answer is not a record.

This works something out and then forgets it. It cannot tell you whether the number moved, because it has no memory of the last time you ran it and no idea what you did in between. Every calculator on the internet has that limit, and if it has never bothered you then this one is yours for free for good.

EvyOS is the same structure with the work recorded against it. Send the result across and it becomes real goals, tasks or habits with their dates — then the next answer is computed from what actually happened rather than from what you remember typing.

Questions

Goal critic, answered.

A planning technique where you state that the project has already failed and work backwards to why. The change of tense matters: asking "what could go wrong" gets defensive and vague answers, while explaining a fact gets specific ones. It is one of the better-evidenced planning interventions there is.
The opposite — it is the cheapest possible insurance. Almost every failure it names costs an hour to prevent this week and cannot be fixed at all in month seven, and naming them early is what makes them preventable.
From the conditions you described: hours, dependencies, novelty, horizon, whether anything is measured, and whether you have tried before. Every rule is visible in the result, so you can disagree with a specific one.
The roast is blunt about how the goal is *written* — no number, no date, no hours. This assumes the goal is fine and asks how the attempt fails anyway. Different question, different output, and worth running in that order.
Before you start, and again at the halfway point. The second run is more useful than people expect, because by then you know which of the stories was true.

Keep the answer.
And the record of doing it.

Goals, projects, tasks, habits and skills in one system, with the work logged against what it belonged to.

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