What Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies can do for a flat week

The deck lives in a black box about the size of a paperback’s cover, and it holds a hundred-odd cards, each with one sentence on it. Pull one when a project jams and you are supposed to do what it says, even if the connection looks absurd.

That is Oblique Strategies, made by the musician Brian Eno and the painter Peter Schmidt and first published in 1975 under the subtitle Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas. The first edition had 115 cards. Eno had been handwriting his own set on bamboo cards under the name Oblique Strategies in 1974, and Schmidt had made a box of 55 printed sentences called The Thoughts Behind the Thoughts, so they merged the two. The sentences read like fortune cookies written by a studio engineer. One of the best known is “Honor thy error as a hidden intention” (spelled “Honour” in some printings and sources). Others: “Do nothing for as long as possible,” “Repetition is a form of change,” “Not building a wall; making a brick.”

The cards were built for stuck musicians and stuck painters. They work on stuck weeks too.

Why does a week go flat?

A week goes flat when nothing in it arrives from outside your plans. You choose the commute, the lunch, the playlist, the evening show, the people you text. Every choice is reasonable and every choice resembles last Tuesday’s.

Nobody has measured this as a formal “boredom budget,” so treat the next claim as an observation and not a finding: the weeks people remember tend to contain something they did not pick. A cancelled train, a wrong turn, a stranger’s question. A card does that on purpose. It is a small, scheduled accident.

The deck’s etiquette is the useful part. You can work through the whole pack, or draw one card from the shuffled pack when you hit a dilemma, and you trust the card even when its relevance is unclear. The trust does the work. You are not auditioning the card against your preferences.

What does “one card per morning” look like?

Make a pile of 20 to 30 prompts on index cards. Write some of them yourself and borrow a few from the real deck if you own it. Shuffle. After you are out of bed and before you look at your phone, draw one and put it in your pocket.

Three rules keep it honest:

• The prompt must be something you can start before noon.
• No redraws for mood. One redraw for a real obstacle.
• It takes under 30 minutes. A dare that needs a free afternoon will die in a drawer.

The prompts that work are lateral, not ambitious. “Make something worse on purpose” gets used. “Reinvent your career” does not.

What if the proof photo carried the dare?

Here is the part that makes the habit survive past Wednesday. A prompt that only you know about has no deadline and no audience. Add one: take a photo that answers the card and send it to a few friends.

If you use DontSnooze, you are already doing half of this. The alarm asks for a photo or video proving you are out of bed, and that proof goes to the friends you picked. The idea here is to change what is in the frame. Draw the card the night before, set it on the bathroom counter, and make the picture of you being up also a picture of the dare: your left hand holding a toothbrush, the card held up in the other, or the mug turned upside down on the shelf because the card said so. The app does not generate prompts. The deck does. The app is just where your friends happen to be looking.

Friends tend to play along. In one writer’s account of a month of wake-up photos in a five-person group chat, the photos soon became partly performance, and the chat cared about the joke more than the alarm. And unlike a one-time skydive, a card costs nothing, so there is no courage to build up first.

What is a seven-day plan that doesn’t use real cards?

These are my own prompts, paraphrased in the Oblique spirit. They are not cards from the deck, and the real ones are terser and stranger. Mix them into your own pile.

1. Monday. Take a route you have never taken, even if it adds ten minutes.
2. Tuesday. Eat the meal you would normally eat last, first.
3. Wednesday. Ask a person you usually walk past one real question about their day.
4. Thursday. Make something deliberately badly, then keep it.
5. Friday. Do the thing you always do at the usual speed, at half that speed.
6. Saturday. Go somewhere with no plan and leave when you notice you want to.
7. Sunday. Message someone you have not spoken to in a year with a single photo and no explanation. Across 13 experiments, Liu and colleagues (2023) found people undervalue how much a reach-out is appreciated.

Seven days is long enough to feel the difference between a week with input and a week without. Track nothing. If you want a record, the photos are it.

What goes wrong

The deck is not a cure. The prompts are small, so the effect is small: a slightly sharper Tuesday, a story to tell at lunch. If your flatness is deeper than routine, such as low mood that has lasted weeks, a card won’t reach it, and that is worth raising with a doctor or someone you trust.

The other failure is curating. People quietly remove the prompts they dislike until only comfortable ones remain, and the pile turns into another list of preferences. Add new cards weekly, and when a card makes you wince, leave it in.