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Reading list

The ideas behind Trellis come from people who thought hard about attention, memory, decisions and learning. Each link goes to the original work or its publisher. Trellis is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them, and the badge says how strong the supporting evidence is.

Attention and priorities

• Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (2021) Practitioner experience
  An essay-length argument that you cannot do everything, so the real skill is choosing what to neglect on purpose. Reflective and persuasive, but philosophy and reporting rather than evidence from trials.
• Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989) Practitioner experience
  Habit 3, "put first things first", separates what is important from what is urgent and asks you to spend time on the important work that never shouts. A popular framework from the author's consulting practice, not a tested one.

Capture and review

• David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (2001) Practitioner experience
  A method built on capturing everything that has your attention, deciding what each item means, and reviewing it regularly. Widely used; the claims come from the author's coaching practice, not controlled studies.
• E. J. Masicampo and Roy F. Baumeister, Consider it done! Plan making can eliminate the cognitive effects of unfulfilled goals (2011) Backed by published studies
  Laboratory experiments (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology): unfinished goals intruded on unrelated tasks, and making a specific plan for them removed the interference. Student participants in a lab; we found no large replication, so treat it as suggestive, not proof for everyday life.

Meetings and decisions

• Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts (2018) Practitioner experience
  A former poker player's case against "resulting", judging a decision only by how it turned out, when memory rewrites what you knew at the time. Writing the reasoning down when you decide is the practical way to protect against that. Draws on decision research; the advice itself is a practitioner's.
• Michael Nygard, Documenting Architecture Decisions (2011) Practitioner experience
  The short record software teams keep for each significant decision: context, the decision, its status and its consequences, so later readers can see why. Software practice, widely adopted, not studied in controlled trials.

Notes and knowledge

• Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes (2017) Practitioner experience
  Explains the slip-box (Zettelkasten) habits of the sociologist Niklas Luhmann: write notes in your own words and link them to what you already know. Draws on learning research, but the method itself is a practitioner's account.
• Tiago Forte, The PARA Method: The Simple System for Organizing Your Digital Life in Seconds (2023) Practitioner experience
  Forte's way of filing information by how actionable it is (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives), the basis of his book Building a Second Brain (2022). A practitioner's system, not tested in studies. The year is that of the linked page, last updated 2026.

Playbook and checklists

• Alex B. Haynes and colleagues, A surgical safety checklist to reduce morbidity and mortality in a global population (2009) Backed by published studies
  New England Journal of Medicine. Across eight hospitals, inpatient complications fell from 11.0% to 7.0% and deaths from 1.5% to 0.8% after a 19-item checklist was introduced. It compared the same hospitals before and after, so other changes over time cannot be ruled out. Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto, was its senior author.
• Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right (2009) Practitioner experience
  Argues that experts fail more often by not applying what they know than by not knowing it, and that a short written checklist guards against that. Examples from surgery, aviation and construction; checklists suit routine, repeatable steps better than open-ended judgment.
• David R. Urbach and colleagues, Introduction of surgical safety checklists in Ontario, Canada (2014) Backed by published studies
  New England Journal of Medicine. After Ontario required checklists in 101 hospitals, the adjusted risk of death in hospital or within 30 days was 0.71% before and 0.65% after, a difference too small to count as real, and complications did not clearly fall either. Its authors suggest that how a checklist is introduced matters.
• Ray Dalio, Principles: Life and Work (2017) Practitioner experience
  One investor's written rules, each drawn from a decision or mistake. A vivid example of keeping personal guidance, but a single person's account of one firm's culture, and parts of that culture have been criticised; there is no controlled evidence his rules work for anyone else.

Reflection and learning

• Benjamin Harkin and colleagues, Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence (2016) Backed by published studies
  A meta-analysis of 138 experiments (Psychological Bulletin): prompting people to monitor progress toward a goal improved goal attainment on average, and helped more when progress was written down or shared. It studies monitoring prompts in general, not weekly reviews or any particular app, and results varied.
• Giada Di Stefano, Francesca Gino, Gary Pisano and Bradley Staats, Learning by Thinking: How Reflection Can Spur Progress Along the Learning Curve (2014) Backed by published studies
  Harvard Business School working paper 14-093 (earlier titled "How Reflection Aids Performance"): two lab experiments and a field experiment with trainees at an outsourcing company, where those who reflected for 15 minutes at the end of each training day scored about 23% higher on the final test. A working paper, and it does not show that every reflection produces good advice.
• Peter F. Drucker, Managing Oneself (1999) Practitioner experience
  Harvard Business Review (first published 1999, reprinted 2005). Drucker's feedback analysis: when you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect, then compare it with the result nine or twelve months later; he says this shows where your strengths lie. A management classic built on observation, not an experiment.