Ben Farhner

Author: benfarhner

  • Reflections on Lent, Part II

    After the conclusion of Lent and the celebration of Easter, I’ve been struggling to coalesce my thoughts into a presentable blog post, but I’ll give it my best shot. Looking back, there were a number of things that I experienced during my Lenten fast that stood out to me.

    Resiliency

    On the physical plane, the first thing that struck me was my own resilience during the fast. I was surprised how quickly my body adapted to only one meal per day, and how little it seemed to affect me. I paid close attention to myself when working outside, moving perhaps a little slower and staying hydrated, but otherwise was still quite capable on a restricted diet.

    During Lent, I also happened to read Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, in which he discusses his experience in German concentration camps. He mentioned a similar phenomena, where the prisoners were limited to one (very meager) meal per day, yet their bodies adapted and they were still able, for the most part, to do the work that were forced to do. Obviously, I did not suffer anywhere near as much as those prisoners, but it was a poignant passage that I felt I could now, in some very small way, relate to. Man is resilient.

    Failure to Connect

    One of my primary goals during Lent was to use my physical hunger as a trigger to direct me to prayer. I actually failed pretty miserably at this—it was too easy, when hunger arose, to drink some water and continue on with what I was doing. It wasn’t until the last couple of weeks that I finally made some headway here and was able to starting connecting hunger to prayer. Nevertheless, this was really insightful for me, and now I know an area where I need to grow.

    Anticipation

    Still mostly on the physical plane but moving upwards, I had a growing sense of anticipation through Lent, looking forward to three meals a day and the celebration of Easter. Here, I was able to connect the physical plane to the spiritual much easier. I think the celebration of Easter itself being a combination of the physical (a feast) and the spiritual (a focus on what Christ accomplished) helped me in this regard.

    Isolation

    One thing that I felt was missing during my fast was a sense of togetherness. I think this is evident in Protestant denominations and particularly in America, where individualism means there is no prescribed fast that everyone in church follows, but rather, each person gets to decide if and how they will fast during Lent. The downside to this, though, is a lack of community within the fasting itself. It becomes a personal journey instead of a corporate journey, and in a way, this makes the celebration feast a personal feast instead of a corporate feast, too. So, I felt a bit isolated during Lent for this reason, which made me a bit sad.

    Midday Prayer

    Partway through Lent, a friend invited me to join him in a virtual Midday Prayer. I had never participated in the Liturgy of the Hours before, but, given my Failure to Connect, this was a perfect opportunity to institute a practice to help direct me upwards in place of a meal. We traded off the readings and prayers, and it was a very meaningful experience. I think

    Morning Liturgy

    During Holy Week, I also began doing a morning liturgy from Jonathan Gibson’s O Sacred Head, Now Wounded with my family during breakfast. Together with the Midday Prayer, these “meal replacement” liturgies really helped me refocus my attention upward by the end—I only wish I had done both of them from the beginning of Lent: a goal I now have for next year.

    Celebration

    Easter feast was special this year, not only because I could eat before dinner, but because we invited over a lot of people who didn’t have other Easter plans, and it was wonderful to have a full table for the feast. Instead of spending the day with family, who are all out of state, we spent it with friends, and we feasted well. It was a great conclusion to the Lenten season, and overall, I’m very grateful that I persevered with my fast and grateful for all that I learned during the six weeks.

    Oh, and I did fit back into my size 32 pants by the end.

  • AI, Seneca, and Jeeves

    There’s a lot of work remaining to be done, and if you want to be successful you must devote all your waking hours and all your efforts to the task personally. This is not something that admits of delegation.

    . . .

    A sound mind can neither be bought nor borrowed.

    —Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, Letter XXVII

    I recently read a P. G. Wodehouse novel for the first time, and I don’t think any other book has made me laugh out loud while reading to myself the way his did. Anyone who appreciates British humor would enjoy his works. While reading Thank You, Jeeves, however, I was struck by the way that Bertram Wooster relied on Jeeves to fill in gaps in his knowledge of quotations. Shakespeare, the Bible, other cultural references: Jeeves proved himself a wealth of knowledge pertaining to these subjects and quick to help Wooster fill in the blanks in the moment:

    “Oh? Well, let me tell you that the man that hath no music in himself…” I stepped to the door. “Jeeves,” I called down the passage, “what was it Shakespeare said the man who hadn’t music in himself was fit for?”

    “Treasons, stratagems, and spoils, sir.”

    “Thank you, Jeeves. Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils,” I said, returning.

    —P. G. Wodehouse, Thank You, Jeeves

    Separately, I’ve been working my way through Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic as part of a philosophy book club. This is really my introduction to Stoic philosophy, and it’s been very eye-opening and inspiring. Here’s the tie-in: in Letter XXVII, Seneca relays the story of a man whose “memory was so bad” that he had to take similar measures to Wooster, yet even more drastic:

    But this didn’t stop him wanting to appear a well-read man. And to this end he thought up the following short cut: he spent an enormous amount of money on slaves, one of them to know Homer by heart, another to know Hesiod . . . He would have these fellows at his elbow so that he could continually be turning to them for quotations from these poets which he might repeat to the company . . . Sabinus was none the less quite convinced that what anyone in his household knew he knew personally.

    —Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, Letter XXVII

    The human tendency towards laziness manifests itself in the persistent desire to offload our work—to externalize it. I keep a to-do list so I don’t have to memorize what I need to get done throughout the day. Wooster had Jeeves as a personal valet to help with much more than just remembering quotations. And Sabinus had, by Seneca’s account, at least eleven slaves to memorize and recall the works of specific authors for him.

    But it’s that last line that stands out the most to me: he “was none the less quite convinced that what anyone in his household knew he knew personally.” And herein, I think, lies the risk of artificial intelligence, particularly the chatbot-style large language models like ChatGPT that so many are interfacing with today: with so much information at our beck and call, we no longer feel the need to retain that information ourselves, in our own minds. We can just ask our personal valet, our eleven slaves, our ChatGPT what was it Shakespeare or Homer said, or how to solve this or that sort of problem, or who such and such was.

    I think Seneca would agree with me that this easy access to so much information—and not just information now, but problem-solving, too—weakens the mind and quickly becomes a crutch. What if one finds oneself without access to the Internet, or without one’s smartphone? What if one finds oneself in a bind without Jeeves by one’s side to concoct an elaborate solution to the problem? Suddenly, the curtain is pulled back and the lack of knowledge revealed plainly, and like Sabinus, we become ripe for the picking-on. The real problem is that we can delude ourselves into thinking that we’re smarter than we actually are: we can become convinced that what ChatGPT knows we know personally.

    This is not to say that artificial intelligence doesn’t have any benefits. Certainly, there is benefit to offloading certain information or tasks: we each have our own strengths and proficiencies, our own areas of interest and expertise, and I think it’s wise to lean on others when it comes to scenarios outside of our own wheelhouses. In such situations, leaning on ChatGPT can be a boon, a timesaver, and a smart strategy. But it’s important to be able to discern when you’re leaning on others’ strengths versus outsourcing your own abilities.

    I’m admittedly a late adopter and something of an AI pessimist. But I like to look at LLMs as a tool—a tool that we’re still actively trying to create and refine, mind you. And if ChatGPT is the hammer, I’m still trying to figure out what the nail is. In the meantime, I’d prefer to focus on building my own skills and proficiencies. I’ll end with an admonition from Seneca to utilize the capabilities of our own minds to create valuable works:

    It is disgraceful that a man who is old or in sight of old age should have a wisdom deriving solely from his notebook [or his favorite AI agent] . . . What have you said? How much longer are you going to serve under others’ orders? Assume authority yourself and utter something that may be handed down to posterity. Produce something from your own resources.

    —Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, Letter XXXIII

  • The Joy of Cleaning

    Something that I’ve been musing about lately is the relationship between brewing beer and doing the dishes.

    At least in the circles that I run in, it seems that most men either don’t do, or resent doing, the dishes. I think that’s understandable, to an extant: doing the dishes is squarely in the category of a chore, and as such it’s tedious, unskilled work that never really comes to an end. It has to get done, whether one likes it or not, or else there won’t be any more clean dishes to use; but one may as well put it off in favor of more enjoyable activities until it becomes unavoidable. I seem to have landed somewhat outside of this camp, though, and I actually don’t mind doing the dishes. It’s a way that I can help out more around the house; its monotony gives me an opportunity to think and reflect, or enjoy an audiobook or podcast; and—feeding into my other quirks, perhaps—it helps me keep the kitchen organized and tidy.

    Brewing, on the other hand, is a wonderful intersection of art and science—at least in my experience, a joy to participate in. But when you crack open the lid, when you really boil it down, brewing is mostly just… doing the dishes. The fact of the matter is that you dirty a lot of equipment during brew day that must be cleaned up, and cleaned up right away, lest your equipment become infested with mold, and, heaven forbid, eventually contaminate a batch of beer. And, so, a good portion of my brew days are actually spent cleaning things in the sink. And I don’t mind that either.

    So, I’m left now pondering whether I like to brew beer in part because I don’t mind doing the dishes, or if I don’t mind doing the dishes because I like to brew beer and have gotten used to the cleaning. Does one feed into the other? Do I, at my core, enjoy the ritual of cleaning something well, and therefore find the process of brewing more enjoyable for the cleaning? Or have I, through brewing regularly, simply accepted the necessity of cleaning, and adopted the dishes as a household chore I can tackle with some level of experience?

    It’s probably worth pointing out at this point that our temporary living situation does not include a dishwasher, so both brewing utensils and household dishes are being washed by hand. Perhaps there’s something about this manual contact with my work that makes cleaning less painstaking—perhaps even joyful.

  • Reflections on Lent, Part I

    I haven’t truly participated in Lent before this year. But several factors coalesced in the beginning of 2025 that led me to fast during this season.

    Firstly, admittedly from a vain and human perspective, I found that, after the past holiday season and for the first time in my life, I no longer fit into my size 32 jeans. My metabolism (and probably my homebrewing hobby) had finally caught up with me and caught me off guard.

    Secondly, I’ve been tangentially exploring the Orthodox church over the last couple of years, and while I still consider myself firmly in the Reformed tradition, I have found that I greatly admire the emphasis on participation in the Church calendar that exists in Orthodoxy. Lent presented the perfect opportunity to bring more of the Church calendar into my life.

    Thirdly, as I began to consider fasting for the Lenten season, I determined that I wanted to fast from something that I would actually feel—giving up social media, for example, might be inconvenient or annoying for me, but wouldn’t really impact me the way that giving up food would by leaving me physically hungry. And, in fact, that’s exactly what I landed on: I chose to give up both breakfast and lunch for the full duration of Lent.

    Parameters and Goals

    To get specific, this is the criteria I decided on for the fast:

    • No food for breakfast or lunch.
    • No beverages except bulletproof coffee and water until dinnertime.
    • No restrictions on food or drinks starting at dinnertime.

    I had a primary goal and a secondary goal for this season:

    1. For my physical hunger to draw me closer to God, particularly by using it as a signal to pray.
    2. To lose the holiday weight and fit back into my size 32 jeans.

    Reflections

    On this twelfth day of Lent, I have some initial reflections on how this fast has affected me.

    Firstly, I have been consciously trying to redirect my focus from physical hunger to prayer whenever I feel hungry throughout the day. I’ve had moderate success with this but I think I will continue to improve throughout the season as I practice this. I’m recognizing that I need to be much more intentional about my prayer.

    Secondly, I have a much greater appreciation for food. Eating only one meal per day means that meal is much more satisfying and enjoyable, even if it is comprised of simple or plain foods. God could have created us to get all the nutrients we need from breathing, but instead He gave us tastebuds and the ability to enjoy the food we eat, and I’m really appreciating that gift during this time.

    Thirdly, skipping meals frees up a fair amount of time. I’m still making breakfast for my wife and daughter in the mornings, but there are fewer dishes to wash afterward, and I don’t have to stop midday to make lunch and clean up from that. In effect, I have more time in the mornings before work, and fewer interruptions during the workday.

    Finally, because this is only a season, this fast is quite effective at building up a sense of anticipation in me. I’m already eagerly looking ahead to Easter, if only for the feasting that entails. If this was a permanent lifestyle change, it could quickly become wearisome and discouraging; I’m grateful for the seasonality and rhythm that this introduces.

    I hope that the next few weeks help me to focus more and more on Christ, and less and less on my hunger, as I attempt to shift my heart posture, both permanently and in preparation for Easter. In the meantime, as I sip the last drops of my third coffee today, I look forward to a beer and a filling dinner this evening.

  • Developing a Morning Routine

    I’ve always struggled with a morning routine. I’ve never liked getting up early, although I like being up early, and I’ve also never needed to be up early for my job as a software engineer. However, there’s enough evidence of the benefits of getting up early and having some time set aside in the morning before starting work that I’ve wanted to find a way to accomplish this for myself, so this year I set about developing a morning routine as an experiment.

    This past summer, I listed to an episode of A Better Life with Brandon Turner featuring Hal Elrod, who wrote a book called The Miracle Morning. Full disclosure: I haven’t actually read the book. But, in the podcast episode, Hal shared the core principles laid out in his book, and it was inspiring to me in its simplicity and practicality.

    As I’ve mentioned before, having systems in place works really well for me, especially when they’re reduced to their essentials and kept simple. I decided to attempt developing a morning routine for myself based on the Miracle Morning principles, starting with setting my alarm for 7:30am (instead of 8am, or no alarm at all).

    In order to ensure I actually get up when my alarm goes off, I have my alarm sitting on my dresser across the bedroom, so when it goes off in the morning, I have to actually get up and walk over to the dresser to turn it off. This is the first “hack” I implemented to get myself up and going in the morning.

    Once I’m up, I’m already standing at my dresser, so I get dressed, grab my phone, AirPods, and notebook, and slip out of the bedroom (my wife is usually still asleep at this point).

    The rest of my routine consists of a list of tasks:

    • Drink a glass of water
    • Go to the bathroom
    • Brush my hair
    • Make coffee
    • Do devotions
    • Do DuoLingo
    • Make to-do list
    • Empty compost
    • Feed animals
    • Make breakfast

    Hal Elrod talks about a couple of key points to getting a successful start to your day: getting rehydrated, since we’re typically dehydrated after effectively fasting for 8 hours; and staying on your feet for as long as possible first thing in the morning. I’ve found now that if I skip drinking a glass of water first thing, I feel noticeably parched.

    I’ve revised my routine a couple of times now, and I’m still working out some kinks, such as if and when to make breakfast, and if it should be for just me or for my whole family (who usually aren’t up yet). The beauty of a system is that it can be iterated upon and optimized, and it gets me a little excited that I can play around with it and constantly tweak it to make it work well for me. One really cool feature of this morning routine is that I’m essentially building a habit, and with habits, you can do habit stacking. So once I had a basic framework, it was easy to tack on additional tasks that I’d like to get done in the morning (like emptying the compost).

    So far, my morning routine has been surprisingly successful. I’ve slowly set my alarm earlier and earlier since I started, and I’m now waking up at 6am and have a lot more time before I start work—in fact, I’m writing this blog post before anyone else is awake.

    I’ve also been trying to focus on enjoying the ritual of my morning routine, rather than viewing it as a highly optimized list of tasks to get done as quickly as possible. Slowing down and being more intentional about each task helps me to be more thoughtful about the work and have a greater appreciation for what I’m doing.

    As I continue to optimize my morning routine, I’ve begun thinking about developing an evening routine to support my morning routine—things like filling the kettle the night before and tidying the house to prepare for the next day. More on this in the future.

    If you’re curious for more discussion about morning routines, I also talked about this on my podcast.

  • Restoring a Vintage Coleman 413G Camp Stove

    Restoring a Vintage Coleman 413G Camp Stove

    The Coleman 413G camp stove as it was when purchased.
    The Coleman 413G camp stove as it was when purchased.

    In addition to my Coleman 220J pressure lantern, I also picked up a vintage Coleman 413G camp stove at the same flea market for $25. This is the larger of the two classic Coleman pressure camp stoves—I’d like to get the smaller 425 at some point as well.

    The plunger with the original leather pump cup.
    The plunger with the original leather pump cup.

    The stove was in pretty decent shape to start with. As with the lantern, I immediately noticed that the pump wasn’t holding pressure and appeared to also have the rubber pump cup, so I ordered a replacement leather pump cup for it as well. However, it turned out that the stove actually already had a leather cup, it was just almost black with oil and age. So, I was able to clean and oil it and bring it back around to building pressure successfully, and now I have a spare on hand in case it fails down the road.

    The old 3-piece filler cap alongside the new 1-piece cap.
    The old 3-piece filler cap alongside the new 1-piece cap.

    The tank had one of the old 3-piece filler caps (although not one of the notoriously dangerous ones), and I went ahead and replaced it with a new one-piece brass cap just to be safe and ensure it holds pressure.

    The underside of the old 3-piece filler cap with rust and worn-out gasket versus the new 1-piece cap.

    I gave the whole stove a good wipe-down, then cleaned up the exposed metal parts with a wire brush and steel wool and applied Ballistol to keep them rust-free.

    Putting the Coleman 413G camp stove to work!
    Putting the Coleman 413G camp stove to work!

    With some fresh fuel in the tank, it was time for a test firing. The stove lit up right away, and after re-pumping the tank, I was able to get a nice, blue, almost invisible flame on both the main and secondary burners. This larger stove model will fit 2 12″ cast iron pans on it, which should work out really well for family camping trips. It fried an egg easily: success!

  • Restoring a Vintage Coleman 220J Lantern

    Restoring a Vintage Coleman 220J Lantern

    I recently picked up a vintage Coleman 200J lantern at a flea market for $20. I had been looking for some vintage camping gear for a few weeks and this was exactly what I wanted. My goal is replace some of my more modern camping gear with older equipment that, while perhaps a bit bulkier, is more reliable and rebuildable and will ultimately last a lot longer.

    The 220J lantern with missing glass and old mantles.
    The 220J lantern with missing glass and old mantles.

    The lantern is a Coleman model 220J manufactured in November 1976. It has a dent on the side near the bottom and the paint is chipping off in places, but it’s otherwise in pretty decent shape with all the parts. Unfortunately, as soon as I got it home and started to clean it, I dropped the glass globe and it shattered. That’s the first thing I added to the list of parts to buy, and, thankfully, Old Coleman Parts has replacement original globes with the same red logo on them.

    Soaking the new leather pump cup in Ballistol. The plunger with the old rubber pump cup can be seen in the background on the left.
    Soaking the new leather pump cup in Ballistol. The plunger with the old rubber pump cup can be seen in the background on the left.

    The second part I bought was a leather pump cup. I had noticed at the flea market that the pump didn’t build pressure, and when I pulled the plunger out, I confirmed it was one of the rubber pump cups that deteriorate over time. The leather pump cups, from what I’ve read, last much longer and just need to be oiled occasionally to stay in good shape. To break in the new leather pump cup, I soaked it in Ballistol to lubricate it and make it more pliable.

    Plunger assembly with old backing plate and new leather pump cup and clip.
    Plunger assembly with old backing plate and new leather pump cup and clip.

    Then I disassembled the plunger and, after some trial and error, found that the old backing plate worked with the new leather pump cup and new clip. The leather pump cup comes with a new backing plate too, but maybe it doesn’t work with all models.

    The 220J lantern with mantles and a new globe.
    The 220J lantern with mantles and a new globe.

    I gave everything a good wipe down, lightly scrubbing at rust with steel wool and a wire brush, and coating any exposed metal with Ballistol to protect it. Then I put on new mantles, carefully installed the new globe, and put the hat back on.

    The new mantles warming up on the Coleman 220J lantern.
    The new mantles warming up on the Coleman 220J lantern.

    Following the instructions printed on the lantern body, I pumped up the tank, which successfully built pressure with the new pump cup, and lit the lantern, which started right up! Once the new mantles were fully ignited, it glowed nice and bright and put off a pleasant warmth. It’s hard to beat a classic Coleman lantern.

    P.S. Another great resource for learning about and restoring these old pressure lanterns and other Coleman gear is Old Town Coleman. They have user manuals, parts diagrams, and lots of other useful information.

    P.P.S. I also bought and restored a Coleman 413G camp stove.

  • The Lazy Engineer

    They say that necessity is the mother of invention. Perhaps, then, a certain type of laziness is the fun uncle? Like I said in my first post on optimization, as an engineer, I’m driven to optimize, to make things work better. But I think there is a secondary force in operation here: a drive to work less—at least, to work less on uninteresting things.

    One could make the argument that this is actually still a form of optimization, just at a higher level: that I’m optimizing my time to work more on interesting things and less on uninteresting things. This sort of meta-optimization is at the core of what I am calling the Lazy Engineer (the group of which I consider myself to be a member).

    The Lazy Engineer doesn’t want to waste time on uninteresting tasks, therefore he optimizes those tasks to automate them and free up more of his time for interesting tasks. But there is an even higher level to this meta-optimization for the Lazy Engineer: he also doesn’t want to waste too much time optimizing, so he optimizes his optimizations for time spent.

    The guiding principle for this meta-meta-optimization is the Pareto principle, also commonly called the 80/20 rule. In this context, the application is this: find the 20% of a task that accounts for 80% of its outcomes, and build a system around that. Don’t waste time optimizing for the remaining 20% of outcomes, because that last 20% will take 80% of the time to optimize.

    Essentially, as a Lazy Engineer, I’m seeking that tipping point to maximize the effect of optimizations before reaching diminishing returns, and then calling it Good Enough. This goes back to the idea of seeking out the core principles of a task and focusing on optimizing those, effectively ignoring secondary outcomes and fringe benefits. By cutting out the fat and the fluff, these meta-optimized processes become simple, lean, and efficient. Perhaps one could call it Minimalist Optimization, but I think it’s more fitting to call it Lazy Optimization: the favorite tool of the Lazy Engineer.

  • Optimizing Pool Care

    Three years ago, we suddenly became “pool people”. When we purchased our current house, it came with a very large in-ground pool, and, of course, pool care duty fell to yours truly. I have now spent the last three years learning water chemistry, fine-tuning variable speed pumps, and fighting suction to take care of this pool, not to mention replacing—and paying to replace—various parts. They aren’t kidding when they call pools money pits.

    To optimize my pool care routine, I’ve been compiling a list of principles and developing a system to remove a bulk of the burden of “figuring it out as I go.”

    First, I have a Google Doc with core information and principles for pool care. These include things like the size of our pool (37,000 gallons), how many 3″ chlorine tabs to add at a time, and how many pounds of sodium bicarbonate to add to our pool to raise the alkalinity 10 ppm. I can use this document as a reference whenever I need to make adjustments to the water. It also has a schedule for pool care activities, such as how frequently to brush the sides or shock the pool.

    Second, I have a spreadsheet that I use to track how much of what chemicals I’m adding to the pool and when, as well as my purchases of those chemicals. This allows me to calculate total and average usage and cost of each chemical over the course of the pool season. My goal here is to help refine my understanding of the water balancing needs of our pool, which will be reflected in the first document, and also to help prepare for next season by allowing me to buy more chemicals in bulk rather than running to the pool store on a regular basis throughout the season.

    Finally, based on the schedule of various tasks outlined in the first document, I have actual calendar events on my calendar to help me stay on top of the pool care regimen. Currently, I just have a single recurring daily event for “Pool care,” and then reference the document to see which specific tasks I need to do, but my plan to refine this a bit further with more specific calendar events based on the schedule to avoid having to reference the document while I’m out at the pool.

    This system is definitely still a work in progress and not complete, but it has certainly helped me stay more on top of pool care this season compared to previous seasons, and my hope is that, as I continue to refine it, it makes future seasons even easier (and hopefully cheaper, too).

    I have to give credit to Swim University, run by Matt Giovanisci, whose articles, cheat sheets, and videos have really simplified pool care for me.

    I also have to give credit to our local pool store, who take care of opening and closing our pool each season, installed our new liner, and supply our chemicals. They have been very helpful when I’ve run into issues with the pool or had questions about balancing the water.

  • Optimizing with Systems

    In my last post, I talked about the value of leveraging systems to effectively automate optimizations. I’d like to dig more into the concept of systems and how they can be set up and used effectively.

    A system may be defined as “a set of principles or procedures according to which something is done; an organized framework or method” (Oxford English Dictionary). When designing a system to optimize a process, I try to suss out the core principles of that process—to break it down to its bare necessities—and build the system around those. Everything else is gravy. If I can turn those core principles into direct, specific action steps, often on a specific schedule (think S.M.A.R.T. goals), then I have a practical system that I can use to perform that process reliably, repeatedly, and without expending a lot of brain energy.

    When I talk about automating optimizations, I’m not so much talking about having a machine do it all for me (although that is sometimes very helpful), but rather triggering automatic thinking. If I can develop a system, which becomes a routine, which becomes a habit, and I can perform the process with minimal conscious decision-making, then I would consider that process automated in this context. Consider driving home from work on your normal route, and arriving home not remembering any of the drive itself—that’s automatic thinking: the commute home has become an unconscious habit that doesn’t require very much conscious decision-making.

    Whenever I find myself doing a process repeatedly, especially if it requires decision-making, I try to turn it into a simple system. Usually, I document that system somewhere (a notebook, a Google Doc, etc.) and fine-tune it over time until it’s working well for me. Developing a system is most definitely an iterative process, refining it until it reduces more friction than it creates.

    Here are some books that have been very useful to me as I think about developing systems: