Mental Time Travel is your ability to mentally step outside the present moment, to revisit your past experiences or project yourself into the future.

By imagining past wins or visualizing future outcomes, you gain perspective, reduce anxiety, and make better decisions. It’s a powerful way to escape the emotional noise of now and access the clarity that often only time provides.

We often think we need to feel motivated before taking action. But psychology and real-world experience say the opposite is more often true:

Motivation is the result of action; not the cause.

Once you start, even in a small way, your brain begins to engage, your resistance drops, and your momentum builds. This is known as the activation energy principle; it takes the most effort to start, but far less to keep going.

Cognitive Reframing is the mental act of changing how you interpret a situation—so you can respond with more clarity, calm, and control. The idea is simple:

The story you tell yourself about what’s happening matters more than the event itself.

When you change your interpretation, you change your emotional response. This model doesn’t ignore reality—it reframes it to reduce unnecessary stress and unlock more empowering action.

View each day as four quarters (morning, midday, afternoon, evening) to make it easier to bounce back quickly from setbacks or distractions. By failing small, you can always recover in the next quarter.

Pareto's Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, is a concept that approximately 80% of the effects or outcomes result from 20% of the causes or inputs. In other words, a small portion of the factors or efforts often contributes to the majority of the results.

Occam’s razor states that when faced with several possible explanations for a phenomenon, the one that requires the fewest assumptions is most likely to be correct.

The door test is used to distinguish between decisions that are difficult to reverse or have long-lasting consequences (one-way door decisions) and those that can be easily reversed or corrected (two-way door decisions).

One-way door decisions need to be made carefully whereas two-way door decisions can be made quickly or automated using rules.

We are constantly faced with problems to solve and decisions to make. A helpful tool when faced with multiple tasks at hand is to ask yourself: What is the one thing I can do that will make everything else easier or unnecessary?

This helps unpack and prioritise the tasks at hand and determines the right sequence to do them in order to achieve maximum results with the least amount of effort.

First principles thinking is a problem-solving and decision-making approach that involves breaking complex issues or concepts down to their fundamental, foundational elements. It encourages examining a problem from its most basic components to gain a deeper understanding and arrive at innovative solutions.

Far too often, we convince ourselves that things need to be difficult and that if we aren’t in some sort of mental or physical turmoil, then we are doing something wrong or not trying hard enough. As a result, we can sometimes actively seek out the path of most resistance and intentionally make things more complicated than they need to be

Subtract to solve is a concept of removing or subtracting something to simplify a situation, or solve a problem.

Inversion involves looking at a problem or situation from the opposite perspective or considering the reverse of the desired outcome. Instead of focusing on how to achieve a particular goal, inversion prompts you to think about how to avoid or prevent the unwanted outcome.

Cost per use is an effective model to alleviate the cognitive load of making purchasing decisions.

The value of an item is directly related to how much use you can get out of it. This helps you determine if spending more money would make sense. The more you use something, the more you should expect to pay for it.