Remove any trigger that produces action less than 80% of firings — below this threshold, the trigger trains you to ignore it

Why This Is a Rule

Every time a trigger fires and you don't act, you're training a dismissal response. The neural pathway goes: trigger fires → evaluate → dismiss. After enough dismissals, the pathway shortens: trigger fires → dismiss (no evaluation). This is the same habituation mechanism that makes you stop hearing a ticking clock — repeated stimuli that don't produce action get filtered out by the brain.

At 80%+ actionability, the dominant association is trigger → action. The trigger means "do something" and your brain treats it as a genuine signal. Below 80%, the dominant association shifts toward trigger → dismiss. The trigger becomes noise, and recovering signal status requires starting from scratch with a redesigned trigger (One week of zero firing = mandatory redesign — change salience, timing, modality, or context specificity immediately).

The 80% threshold is specific to Define agent success as 80%+ firing rate, not subjective satisfaction — felt reliability systematically inflates actual performance's success criteria and Start triggers conservatively — 3-5 daily activations, not 30 — build trust through relevance before expanding sensitivity's calibration principles. It's the point where the trigger reliably produces action often enough to maintain the trigger-action association without erosion. It's not perfection (100%) — legitimate context mismatches will occasionally prevent action — but it's high enough that the "this trigger matters" association dominates.

When This Fires

• During monthly trigger audits (Monthly trigger audit: Is it firing? Do you respond? Is the behavior still relevant? Is calibration correct?) when evaluating which triggers to keep
• When you notice yourself routinely dismissing a notification or cue
• When deciding whether a trigger needs recalibration (Classify trigger firings as true/false positives for one week before adjusting — single instances are noise, patterns are signal) or removal
• When designing new triggers — set the 80% threshold as a deployment criterion

Common Failure Mode

Keeping low-actionability triggers "just in case": "I only respond to the posture reminder 30% of the time, but at least it catches me sometimes." The 30% response rate means 70% of firings train dismissal. The trigger is net negative — it's eroding your responsiveness to triggers in general, not just to this specific one. Alert fatigue spreads from one trigger to your entire trigger system.

The Protocol

(1) For each active trigger, calculate actionability rate over the past month: (times you acted) / (times it fired). (2) ≥80% → keep. The trigger is reliably producing action. (3) 50-79% → recalibrate (Classify trigger firings as true/false positives for one week before adjusting — single instances are noise, patterns are signal, When false positives exceed 30%, add guard clauses — context checks that must pass before the action executes). Add guard clauses, adjust timing, or increase salience to reduce false positives. (4) <50% → remove or completely redesign. The trigger is training more dismissal than action. Remove it entirely, then redesign from scratch if the behavior is still desired. (5) A trigger system with 5 high-actionability triggers is far more effective than one with 15 triggers where half are ignored. Quality of triggers over quantity.