At its heart, Tempo is about understanding the underlying ebbs and flows of rhythms, emotions, and energies that punctuate our life, and using this understanding for making better decisions. From the book:

Decisions punctuate our thoughts and actions and set the pace of our lives. They drive, and are in turn driven by, energy and emotional experience - the ebb and flow of anxiety, lethargy, excitement and impatience - and lend to our experience of time a choppy, emotionally charged tempo. This notion of tempo is the central concept we will use to organize this book about decision-making.

You’re in a particular tempo when you decide to respond to a text now or later, when you’re multitasking at your laptop in the coffee shop, when you’re cooking in the kitchen, when you’re meeting with friends at a party, when you’re indulging in your existential musings, and when you decide to sleep in or not. This varying tempo is the common trait in these wildly different activities, and the idea is that understanding this tempo will help you regulate it and use it to your advantage.


Tempo Doodling

A useful skill to practice in your free-time is ‘tempo detection’, which you can do by what VGR calls ‘tempo doodling’. I will not go into the specifics here, but the summary is that empty circles are positive events, whereas shaded ones are negative. An example and representation follow:

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The Skill of Timing (Temporal Logic)

Imagine driving onto a highway. First, you merge from an exit onto the highway; you then go with the flow of the traffic, neatly maintaining an appropriate distance from the other car; occasionally, you decide to speed up or slow down or switch lanes; and once in a while, you zig-zag through lanes, set the pace for another lane, and feel as if you’re Lewis Hamilton.

The skill of making timely decisions in a unique context is similar like driving on a highway. You first examine the environment (eg looking at the highway). You then develop “situational awareness”, which is getting attuned to the dynamics of the environment (eg gauging the pace of cars). As you get attuned, you take action (eg driving onto the highway). Taking action allows you to “load the right mental model” of driving (eg driving at 65miles/hour).

In other words, good decision-making in some contexts is also characterized by:

  1. Merging,
  2. Going with the flow,
  3. Pace-setting, and
  4. Dissonance

Replicate this thinking into the kitchen, or a work meeting, or in the cafe, or at a party (when you want to talk to someone you admire) and you’ll understand how widely applicable the skill of timing indeed is.

When the tempo of the highway is slow, you get emotional. You try to add force by changing lanes. You try to vary the tempo. Which is akin to monotony or boredom or statements like “New York City is too fast for me” or “San Francisco is too slow for me”.

We all naturally crave a steady variation in the tempo of life, and accordingly make decisions. The book beautifully captures this understanding of timing, tempo, and emotion through many examples, and helps make explicit what you intuitively felt was always the case.

Other Interesting Ideas: Calendar Art and Mnemonic Visualizations of Time