Failure Premortem/ Kill the company: one of the applications of inversion, in which you imagine the most important goal or project you are working on right now, then fast forward six months and assume the project or goal has failed.

Ask yourself how could you destroy your financial health.

Marie Kondo, the author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, uses inversion to help people declutter their homes.

It is a mental model, a way of thinking backward about what you don’t want to happen. It is about taking an idea upside down and thinking about what could go wrong.

Applying inversion to productivity you could ask, “What if I wanted to decrease my focus? How do I end up distracted?” 

Avoiding mistakes is an under-appreciated way to improve.