This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of September 17th. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:
- Established a useful new habit
- Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief
- Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations
- Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior
- Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something
- Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life
- Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you
- Tried doing any of the above and failed
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.
Thanks to everyone who contributes!
Previous diary; archive of prior diaries.
(Sorry for being late, I don't even have an excuse at all! Oh well.)
I set up Beeminder recently and it's been helping me make progress on a few 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.)
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.