See it accurately

Choose the subject you will carry through the course, then run the five questions on the explanation you give for it.

Produce a single page with six labelled lines: the subject in one sentence naming a person or organisation and the date it stopped moving; the explanation you give most often; what happened as a matter of fact, dated, in a version a neutral observer would sign; the conclusion you drew; one counterexample; and the specific act the conclusion allows you to avoid, named precisely enough to be reversed by one nameable thing.

Expect ninety minutes, most of it on the fact line. Write the fact line first without the conclusion in it, which is harder than it reads.

This fails in three ways. It fails if the fact line still contains an interpretation, which you test by asking whether anyone else present would sign it. It fails if the counterexample is refused because the circumstances were different, since that reasoning removes every counterexample that will ever exist. And it fails if the avoidance is written as a state rather than an act.

Show the page to one person who knows the situation and ask which line they would challenge. Record their answer verbatim, including the parts you disagree with. Two things make that easier than it sounds: people underestimate how often others agree to a request by about 48 per cent, and asking someone for advice raises rather than lowers how competent they judge you, unless you ask someone who has already told you they are not qualified.

Read your own last seven days across four records and find one contradiction.

Write your three stated priorities. Then, without adjusting them, extract from your calendar the hours that went to each, from your bank statement the discretionary money that supported each, from your message history what you repeatedly discussed, and from your own output what you actually finished. Use real figures. Approximate hours are acceptable, invented ones are not.

Name the single largest contradiction in one sentence. Then schedule one corrective action with four components: date, start time, duration, defined output. Put it in the same calendar you just audited.

This takes about two hours, most of it reconstructing the week. It fails if the read produces a paragraph of self-assessment and no scheduled hour. It fails if the corrective action has no defined output. And it fails if the money column is skipped, because that column is doing specific work: restating a cost in terms of what it displaces moved purchase decisions by twenty percentage points in one experiment, and your spending record performs that restatement on a year of your own choices.

Keep the page. Level 4 asks you to run this read again and compare.