Separate observations from interpretations

The idea

What you saw and what you concluded from it are distinct and must not be fused.

Your colleague showed up twelve minutes after the meeting started. Within one second, you had a reaction: she does not respect the team's time. That reaction felt instant, felt obvious, felt like something you observed. But you did not observe it. You observed a person entering a room at 9:12 for a 9:00 meeting. Everything after that -- the disrespect, the carelessness, the pattern you are now constructing from the last three weeks -- is interpretation. And you fused the two together so fast that you cannot tell where the data ended and the story began.

An example

Your coworker did not respond to your Slack message for four hours. That is the observation. 'She is ignoring me because she is upset about the code review' is the interpretation. Write both down — separately. The observation is stable. The interpretation is a hypothesis you can test, revise, or discard.

Where it goes wrong

You write the observation and the interpretation in the same sentence, believing you are being objective. 'He was rude in the meeting' feels like an observation, but it is already an interpretation. The observation is: 'He interrupted me twice and did not make eye contact.' Until you can reliably tell the difference, every downstream conclusion is built on unstable ground.

Make it stick

For the next three days, when you capture anything into your notes, tag it as [OBS] or [INT]. Observation or interpretation. Force the label. You will notice how rarely your default captures are pure observations — and how often what you record is already a story about what happened.