maia comments on Group rationality diary, 9/17/12 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: cata 19 September 2012 11:08AM

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Comment author: maia 20 September 2012 05:38:37AM *  3 points [-]

I set up Beeminder recently and it's been helping me make progress on a few things:

  • Going rockclimbing once a week. I'm using this to track how much I climb every week, but me doing this can mostly be attributed to Roger and I committing to do it together on a specific day every week.
  • Doing homework / studying for about 8 hours per week. I'm hoping this will eventually cause me to spend slightly more time on schoolwork than is absolutely necessary to do my homework; I'm still calibrating how much time I should aim for per week.
  • Doing a weekly review every week. Doing this made me feel WAY better this week. I've set up a GTD system with an Incompletes note in Evernote (so I can update it whenever I have my phone on me), and knowing that I have a safe place to collect all of the nagging tasks I have to deal with and a way to know when I really need to deal with them has made me feel a lot more in control of things.

I've also set a habit of, when I'm deferring tasks, to just give myself one or two Big Action Items per day; this makes it a lot easier for me to focus on things. The combination of this, plus tracking my homework time and doing a weekly review, should hopefully allow me to get enough sleep every night; I've been doing quite well at this so far, with 9 hours almost every night. (It doesn't hurt that I have a particularly late schedule this semester, though, so hard to tell exactly what's causing this.)

I also tried out Fitocracy. I still generally update it whenever I do something active, but the amount of that has lessened since the school year started, and I don't really have enough free time to think impulsively, "I want some Fitocracy points, I'm going to go exercise." (I get TONS of points for rockclimbing every week, though.)

Comment author: [deleted] 23 September 2012 02:47:38PM 0 points [-]

What do you use to log time? I expect that you could just write down, but what's been keeping me from logging study time has been a good, clean implementation. Perhaps I ought to just put in the 30 minutes to work out some sort of implementation and try to make it habitual.

Also! I'm also on Fitocracy and I don't (yet) see the points as too big a motivator, but I use Foursquare to check in at the gym when I do go, and that does sometimes make the difference.

Comment author: maia 24 September 2012 02:31:31PM 0 points [-]

Ya, I just write stuff down. Most of my work is on paper anyways, so not much monitoring to be done.