Cognitive Transition · Book One
Questions for Coming Back to Monday
“Each one takes thirty seconds to answer, as long as you don’t lie to yourself.”
Summary
Between the pending email, the ten o'clock meeting, and the half-finished report, there is a tool open in another tab. This appendix brings the book down to that height. You already have a test that fits in three words and works at any moment, and a seven-question review you do once a year to recalibrate your whole position. Between the instant and the year, one scale is missing: the week. That is the one covered here, with six short questions. None of them tries to settle what artificial intelligence will be twenty years from now. All of them ask for something more modest and harder: knowing what you do with it now, in your real work. You don't have to answer them all. It is enough that one of them interrupts the autopilot. The questions belong to the book. What follows explains how to turn them into a habit that survives March.
Extended content
Liquid part: this text keeps growing after the printed edition.
When: Monday, before email
Ten minutes, once a week, before you open your email and before you open the tool. Monday has one advantage: the week hasn't decided anything for you yet. By six on a Thursday afternoon, inertia has signed off on nearly everything.
If your Monday can't spare ten minutes (on-call duty, travel, shifts), pick another day, but the same one every week, and always at the start of the workday, never the end. A ritual that depends on remembering gets lost within three weeks. Put it in your calendar under its own name, like an appointment with someone you should not stand up.
Where: away from what you are evaluating
On paper, and in a chair that is not the one you use to work with the model. If it is open next to you, the question ends up addressed to it, and it answers with a fluency you will not have. You want your answer, slow and clumsy, not its answer.
An ordinary notebook, always the same one. What you are keeping is a series, and a series is only useful if you can leaf through it. Screens get closed; a notebook open on the desk reminds you of the previous Monday.
What to write down
Four lines per Monday. The date. The question you chose; the number will do. Your answer in one sentence. And one fact from last week that supports it: a specific email, document, or meeting.
The fact is what separates the ritual from self-deception. An answer without a fact is an opinion about yourself, and we all keep generous reserves of those. Close with one action for this week, the smallest one you can actually carry out, with a day attached. If it doesn't fit on one line, it is too big and you will postpone it.
When the answer is uncomfortable
It will happen soon, and it is the sign that the ritual works. There are four rules. Don't correct it on the spot: first write the answer the way it came out. Don't soften it with an "actually." Underline it. And if the same discomfort comes back three Mondays running, it stops being a weekly finding: it is material for your annual review, and for telling someone you trust who knows how to argue with you.
One more rule, for the questions you dodge. Skipping one is not forbidden, but write down which one you skipped. When the same one keeps repeating, you know where to look.
A worked example
Nuria is a project engineer, and she starts her notebook on a Monday in September. The first week she picks question 4. The fact that supports it is a schedule report: she accepted a delivery date because the paragraph around it was so well written, and on Thursday, almost by accident, she saw it didn't match the supplier's calendar. Her action: before sending any report prepared with the model, check the dates against the original document.
The second week she takes another question, and the third week a different one. In the fourth she realizes that three Mondays in a row she has skipped question 5. She writes that down. The answer, at last, is uncomfortable: she should keep writing up the coordination meeting minutes by hand, because that is the only moment she finds out who promised what. For months she had been leaving them to the model.
She doesn't change everything. She writes one meeting's minutes by hand each week and leaves the rest as it was. Two months in, the notebook shows her something no single question would have: Nuria's uncomfortable answers almost always concern what she has stopped listening to.
Where to go next
When the notebook has a few months in it, take it to the annual review in Chapter 11. It is the material that review needs, and almost no one has it. If a term from the book has gone blurry between one Monday and the next, the glossary is right next door.
© Pedro Mujica, 2026