Why they're called firings
Judgment Trainer is a small iOS app I built for myself. You write down a judgment you want to get better at. It could be a rule, a bias you keep falling into, a question you should ask before deciding. The app puts it on a spaced schedule, the same mechanism flashcard apps use, and hands it back to you every few days so it stays available at the moment you actually need it.
That much is a flashcard app with an unusual deck. The part I care about is what happens after.
The word
When a neuron sends a signal, it fires. Fire the same path enough times and the body wraps that axon in myelin, a fatty sheath that makes the signal faster and more reliable. Cells that fire together wire together. That is what practice does at the physical level: it is repeated firing, on purpose, so the wrap gets thicker.
But rehearsal is a weak signal. The strong one is the real thing: the moment a judgment you wrote down shows up in your actual life, at an actual decision, and you notice it in time. In the app, logging that moment is called a firing. It is the single highest-signal thing the app records, and it is not a practice rep. It is evidence that the wrap is working.
What one looks like
Here is a judgment I captured in June, lightly edited:
Working out needs a location, a time, and some kind of pressure to ensure follow-through.
It fired four times over two months. The first firing was an admission: I had none of the three. The second was a plan to look for a gym on the way to work. The third was luck, a friend inviting us to join hers. The fourth, at the end of August:
Been going regularly and it’s helping.
Four firings, two months, one real change. No streak, no badge. The app didn’t do the work. It kept the judgment in front of me until the world handed me a chance to use it, and it gave me a place to write down that I had.
Why a public log
I am the first user and, so far, the only one. I do not use the app every day. I have a notification at eight in the morning that I mostly ignore, and I remember to practice when I get a seat on the train. That is the honest state of a product whose whole pitch is follow-through.
So this site has a receipts page. Every night it pulls my own event log and counts the week: days active, judgments captured, practices, firings, deck size. Counts only. The text of my judgments stays on my phone. If I stop using the app, this page will say so before I do.
The next post will be about the half of my firing notes that turned out to be promises to myself, and the feature that is built to ask, a week later, whether I kept them.