I have the suspicion that everyone is secretly a master at Inner Sim

There's a crucial difference here between:

• good "secretly": I'm so good at it it's my second nature, and there's little reason to bring it up anymore
• bad "secretly": I'm not noticing what I'm doing, so I can't optimize it, and never have

When I first tried to learn to do Murphyjitsu a few months back, I kept having the problem that the most likely failure scenario of any plan was "I just run out of energy and focus and/or get really anxious and can't do anything", and this seems impossible to completely reliably prevent, and so I could never get to a point where I would actually be shocked if a plan failed.

Nevertheless it's a good technique. But I've decided that my goal with it isn't to make my plan actually failproof but to make it as close to failproof as I actually can - which is actually closer to what it achieves, I just find I have to make that explicit for it to not feel like I'm fooling myself. And of course it also helps to think about what are the things that make it more likely that I'll run out of energy (e.g. too many other plans, staying up late the night before) and try to minimize those. (That part is easier to do for me now than it was a few months ago, since I am currently not swamped with more plans than I can carry out and have more freedom/ability to arrange my plans in a way that's likely to succeed.)

This was a super interesting exercise! I chose doing well in the next class in my master's degree as the goal. I have generally done well so far, but I'm working full-time while going to school (because work is paying for it), so every semester is a bit of a struggle. What was unexpected about murphyjitsuing this goal was the way in which there were basically two categories of possible problems I found. The first were the easy, well-contained problems (like "I generally submit assignments at the last minute, making it easy for technical difficulties to mess things up"). That's the kind of problem that can be solved via yoda timers, reminders etc. The second kind is the big life problems, like "I could lose motivation," or "I could have a serious health problem." These are much harder to defeat through planning, and can only be hit more indirectly. 

I found the second category of problems to be disheartening in a way, since there's not an easy way to fight them off. But they're also at least a little bit motivating, because it helps me see the connection between everything else in the bug list and this specific goal. Getting more regular sleep, going for more walks, and doing a better job of keeping up with friends will all help in little ways in guarding against these bigger risks. 

I wonder if planning fallacy (or rather, the incentive to not do anything about it by default) is mostly a social phenomenon. Telling a group optimistic estimates of how long it will take a project to get done could help improve the group's commitment to the project. Telling your teacher and your parents optimistic estimates of how long it'll take to finish your homework keeps them off your back. Etc. etc.

(Testable prediction: autism should correlate with lack of susceptibility to planning fallacy. Found a random link in support, for what that's worth.)

This technique has stuck with me since I read about it a year ago. It's very useful to do a quick pass with it - a single iteration can make a plan ~1.2x more likely to succeed. I tend to do the "pre-mortem" in my head quickly when using it.

I know I'm not using it to its full power. This time, for my central life goal, I'm going to fully write it out and iterate until I would be shocked. It might take a long time but this is worth it. Plus, I'll probably learn a lot about this technique and what does or doesn't work.

I already started but I'll probably finish up tomorrow. Since I resolved (in the spirit of Sunk Cost Faith) to comment on this every day, I'll leave this here for now and edit my comment tomorrow to include what I've learned.

edit: I did about 10 iterations of my Very Important Plan today but I'm still not done. I'll update tomorrow.

Where I find Murphyjitsu most useful is in the area of generic little issues with my plans that tend to come up rather often. A few examples:

• forgetting about working on the goal in time, due to lack of a reminder, planning fallacy etc.
• the plan involving asking another person for a favor, and me not feeling too comfortable about asking
• my system 1 not being convinced of the goal, requiring more motivation / accountability / pressure
• the plan at some point (usually early on) requiring me to find an answer to some question, such that the remaining plan depends on that answer; my dislike for uncertainty ironically often causes me then to just flinch away from that whole plan as opposed to just trying to find that one important answer

It's arguably more of a checklist than real "by the book Murphyjitsu", but still, taking a goal and going through these things, trying to figure out the most trivial and easy to fix issues with the plan, often allows me to increase the likelihood of achieving a goal by 10-20% with just a few minutes of work.