Liron comments on Humans are not automatically strategic - Less Wrong

153 Post author: AnnaSalamon 08 September 2010 07:02AM

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Comment author: Liron 08 September 2010 12:38:26PM 12 points [-]

Here's a strategic thing I figured out:

When I wake up really early, I get a lot more work done because the morning hours have no distractions and I feel like I'm ahead of the day, like I'm using 100% of the possible day.

Therefore I wake up really early now - 3-5am.

Comment author: gwern 26 July 2014 09:21:15PM *  5 points [-]

I wonder how much this differs from person to person. I tried correlating 2.5 years of data (when I got up from bed with my self-ratings of productivity for that day), and looking at the LOESS & cubic fits, it seems merely like getting up a bit after 8AM correlates with productivity but later is worse and earlier is much worse (albeit with limited sampling):

Self-rating vs rise time, <em>n</em>=841

And it's not hard to tell a non-causal or reverse-causation story: I can't be very eager to wake up and get started on work if I'm willing to sleep in to 10AM, now can I...? So I dunno. Maybe it's literally more time from simple sleep deprivation.

That said, I'll have to remember to recheck this later; I'm trying out caffeine pills for causing earlier rising, so if earlier rising itself causes more productivity, there should be an attenuated effect from the caffeine.

Comment author: Liron 30 July 2014 10:23:09PM 1 point [-]

Haha nice graph, good luck.

Comment author: patrissimo 09 September 2010 06:44:12PM 6 points [-]

In general, getting an isolated environment is really important for certain types of work, and early or late are the simplest methods of isolation given how social humans and our environments are.

Comment author: CronoDAS 08 September 2010 07:08:44PM 3 points [-]

Depending on your environment, the late night hours could also serve the same purpose.

Comment author: Jonathan_Graehl 08 September 2010 10:50:19PM 1 point [-]

I find it easy to keep working when it's late. Eventually I realize that I've become slow and tired, and I would have been better off had I gone to sleep hours ago, and resuming work after the rest. I realize that by "late night hours" you didn't necessarily mean staying awake when tired.

I also think the immediate post-waking hour is potentially valuable, in that I feel different during that time, so might work different (in a good way? I don't know). Maybe I just feel different because of what I'm typically doing, and if I sat down and worked, my state would quickly normalize.

Comment author: Liron 08 September 2010 07:25:32PM 4 points [-]

Yeah, any arbitrary hack that leads to better results is a rationality win.

Comment author: jimrandomh 08 September 2010 07:23:16PM 7 points [-]

The deciding factor there is likely to be biochemistry, not environment. Many people simply can't be very productive late at night. They run into issues like caffeine crashes, as well as other biochemical fatigue causes that're harder to identify.

Comment author: orthonormal 08 September 2010 10:59:29PM 3 points [-]

Yup. I'm one of four new hires; two of us keep a relatively normal workday, one wakes up at 5 and does all his work in the morning, and one stays up and does all his work between 10 PM and 4 AM. (Thank goodness for academia.)

Comment author: CronoDAS 08 September 2010 07:31:00PM *  3 points [-]

Me, I suck at mornings. (I got out of bed at 2:00 PM today.)