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Swimmer963 comments on Make your training useful - Less Wrong
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This article made me think of a list I've been informally trying to make, of what stupidity feels like on the inside. The point is to identify when I'm writing code poorly - as the output will probably be even more bugridden than normal, and possibly the output is appropriate to debug-by-starting-over (Though starting over violates my normal policy.)
Stupidity feels like being bored, being in pain, being distracted, wanting to do anything else than this. Stupidity feels like being unworthy of these divine (external) ideas. Stupidity feels like blind plodding obedience. Stupidity feels like lovely and/or grotesque baroque clevernesses.
Trying to stop working and recover when I notice myself being stupid might be the right move, but I think pushing through it (aside from staying up late, which is a mistake) is a better policy. You have to learn to be productive on demand rather than when you're in the mood for it.
"You have to learn to be productive on demand rather than when you're in the mood for it."
Very true, and it's part of the reason I like to arrange structured activities that force me, on a day-to-day basis, to do the things I enjoy. I could have taught myself programming (maybe) but taking a course as my elective forced me to actually write the code when the assignment was due the next morning, as opposed to when I felt like it. It's a good feeling, getting something done and knowing you did a good job, but it's depressing how bad I am at motivating myself to push through and get it done without a deadline. (I don't know if this is true of other people, but actually I've been told I'm unusually productive.)
As far as I can tell, making good use of unstructured time is very rare.
It's possible that conventional schooling makes people worse at it.
The best way to make a good use of unstructured time that I've ever found is to optimize towards highest utility. In plain terms, you have an ultimate goal, a be-all-end-all reason to be doing something, and you're doing your best to achieve this goal as efficiently as possible because each time-unit of delay is negative utility.
This takes a goal, of course, which is pretty much comparable to Step 7 of 11 For Building a Goedel Machine, if you've seen Eliezer's Summit presentation that touched that subject.