nhhhhhhup: rant, pinkmilk

In real work environment if you are someone’s coach, It’s optimal to tell them to observe themselves and let them think rather than nit picking or tell them your opinion (they will shift from improvement to over-focus based on your suggestion to impress you)

• reference: the inner game with tennis

but in many times, you are not someone’s coach,
sometime you have to micromanage your peers,
and your peers need your specific feedback about their performance.

in this case, you should feedback them like how you feedback your parents’ behavior.

• e.g. calling you during work hours is like them together with your tasks are parallel DDoS your cognitive load, cause context-switching, make you break your deep work.
• draw diagram and teach your mom “the system”.
  • draw them semantic graph between your cognitive load and your mom’s presence. or draw them dfd-data_flow_diagrams to show how each time someone call you will effect your cognitive load.
• try to not doing thing personal, show them number, and feedback on why those number should be less or more.
  • e.g. why frequent context switch is bad, sometime they don’t know this.
  • e.g. how the number of them asking you about your class content is correlated with your decline in productivity and mental health.
  • maybe set some KPI or actionable goals for them to follow.
• convincing them you didn’t hate them by repeating that you are doing this because you are hoping for the best.

be emotional with your parents: not optimal, make you feels vulnerable and distracted, treat them like you are fixing and maintaining your PC or manage your AI agent.
nitpicking with your parents’ behavior: not optimal unless you do it clear.

= another joke =
my parent’s conversation pattern is more predictable than fah-sai and decision tree, so maybe I could treat them in the way that I treat my AI agent to optimize their parameter.

created on: Sun Mar 15 2026