Hi all!
My first baby step towards "Having More Productive Time" is rewarding walking away from my computer. I ran the following loop five times today: 1) get onto facebook or other time-wasty site, 2) flip over to Pandora (turn it on, if needed), 3) rotate computer quarter turn away from me, and most importantly 4) get up and excitedly walk towards my dog, giving him lots of cuddles, pets, and praises.
I also do this every time I get off the computer naturally. This has had the amusing side effect of having my dog start doing his hopeful come-pet-me noises when I'm on the computer. So I am also pretty much training my dog to be a distraction from time-wasting sites.
Also, I've continued wearing the bracelet I traded for during Rejection therapy. It's really bright cord, and every time I notice it, I sing-song (in my head) a silly affirmation along the lines of "Wheee, Rationality! I can do it!" while twisting my hand back and forth to make the hangy down beads bounce around my wrist, and pulling up the inspirational feelings I got from all the other campers and teachers. This generally makes me want to go do Good Stuff, or at least makes me feel happy.
I also did one of the tasks I had planned out in Valentine's class (getting a new bank card), and will plan out when exactly to go to Microcenter for a new computer battery before I go to sleep tonight.
And I installed a pomodoro timer to use during my social pressure work time that I scheduled with my roommate tomorrow. It doesn't let you on any blacklisted sites while it's set to work-time.
Time for me to walk away from my computer and pet my puppy now!
Background: I and many other attendees at the CFAR rationality minicamp last weekend learned a lot about applied rationality, and made big personal lists of things we wanted to try out in our everyday lives. I think that a regular (weekly or maybe semi-weekly) post where people mention any new interesting habits, decisions, and actions they have taken recently would be cool as a supplement to this; it ought to be rewarding for people to be able to write a list of the cool things they did, and I expect it'll also be interesting for other people to peek in and see the sorts of goals and self-modifications people are working on. Others at minicamp seemed enthusiastic about the idea, so I hope it takes off. Feel free to meta-discuss whether this is a good idea or if it can be done better.
Addendum 5/15: By the way, non-minicamp people should feel free to post too! I am highly certain that minicamp attendees are not the only ones working on interesting things in their lives.
This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of May 14th. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:
Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.
Discussion's likely to continue gradually through the week, so try to remember to check back now and then!