If your candidate for "do something different" is "pay more attention to mundane experience", then you need to define specific ways we can do that. If you literally just mean we should consciously try to elevate the level of mental attention with which we attend to daily tasks, then that's Zen. Hard Zen. Back during my Zen phase, I used to try this. Even a few minutes were unbearably difficult. It may be a valuable technique, but if it's really what you mean it needs more respect and rigor than you give it here.
For what it's worth, the bulk of my learning and improvement was from a more limited form of this: specifically, I decided never to force myself to do anything - i.e., never to override my natural impulses in order to get myself to do something. Instead, I vowed to always seek to understand what my resistance consisted of, and change that directly, instead.
That's a more narrowly-focused approach to studying "mundane experience", and it gave me immensely greater insight into what procrastination actually is. It also means that over the long haul I've spent less and less time fighting myself, and more time with my natural impulses being to do that which is "best" for me in some larger sense.
That having been said, I've recently realized that almost all of my work in this area has been focused on fixing "not doing what I should" and almost none of it has been on fixing "doing what I should not"... like, for example, reading and replying to LW comments and losing track of how much time I'm spending on it. ;-) So, I have a new area to begin research in.
Now this, I am interested in. Think you understand enough about how you did what you did to be able to communicate it? That is, to explain more clearly about how to find understanding of my resistances and change them directly?
Thanks.
"The most instructive experiences are those of everyday life." - Friedrich Nietzsche
What is it that the readers of lesswrong are looking for? One claim that's been repeated frequently is that we're looking for rationality tricks, shortcuts and clever methods for being rational. Problem is: there aren't any.
People generally want novelty and gimmicks. They're exciting and interesting! Useful advice tends to be dull, tedious, and familiar. We've heard it all before, and it sounded like a lot of hard work and self-discipline. If we want to lose weight, we don't do the sensible and quite difficult thing and eat a balanced diet while increasing our levels of exercise. We try fad diets and eat nothing but grapefruits for a week, or we gorge ourselves on meats and abhor carbohydrates so that our metabolisms malfunction. We lose weight that way, so clearly it's just as good as exercising and eating properly, right?
We cite Zen stories but don't take the time and effort to research their contexts, while at the same time sniggering a the actual beliefs inherent in that system. We wax rhapsodic about psychedelics and dismiss the value of everyday experiences as trivial - and handwave away praise of the mundane as utilization of "applause lights".
We talk about the importance of being rational, but don't determine what's necessary to do to become so.
Some of the greatest thinkers of the past had profound insights after paying attention to parts of everyday life that most people don't give a second thought. Archimedes realized how to determine the volume of a complex solid while lounging in a bath. Galileo recognized that pendulums could be used to reliably measure time while letting his mind drift in a cathedral.
Sure, we're not geniuses, so why try to pay attention to ordinary things? Shouldn't we concern ourselves with the novel and extraordinary instead?
Maybe we're not geniuses because we don't bother paying attention to ordinary things.