After every time cleaning my dining room, I would spend far too much time trying to reposition the (circular) dining table just so so that all of the chairs would fit around it with room to back up and not hit a wall. It took four years for it to occur to me that rotating the table and the chairs 45 degrees would make this a trivially simple problem.
Why reposition the table if it's circular?
At today's meetup in Tortuga, we were supposed to discuss something we're currently being irrational about. In retrospect I could probably have done better than the item I picked (for example, it now occurs to me that I'm probably currently being irrational about bedtimes and sleep-cycle stuff)...
But the key point is that while straining my brain to think of something I was currently being irrational about, but hadn't fixed yet, I noticed myself being irrational in small ways too.
For example, I was sitting on the floor in a way that was beginning to strain my left thigh, but wasn't standing up and finding a chair...
So I stood up and found a chair.
I think it might be a valuable exercise to spend an hour practicing rationalist mindfulness, constantly asking yourself, "What am I currently doing that is not rational?" as though you had to find something to fulfill your obligation to an LW meetup.