handoflixue comments on The Cognitive Costs to Doing Things - Less Wrong

39 Post author: lionhearted 02 May 2011 09:13AM

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Comment author: handoflixue 06 May 2011 07:30:53PM 0 points [-]

I've found that making an effort to minimize Maintenance Costs has greatly improved my ability to deal with inertia. For me, it's easy to ignore something once; it's much harder to ignore it when I'm aware that I'll be suffering a small cost for the duration of the delay.

One thing that has helped a lot in some ways is carrying a journal: writing something down tends to "close the loop" for me. The consequence is that unless I make a habit of checking my journal, it actually makes me slightly more forgetful, since I no longer have that "open loop" reminder.