Qiaochu_Yuan comments on The Power of Pomodoros - Less Wrong

48 Post author: elharo 14 May 2013 10:36AM

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Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 19 February 2013 07:58:52PM *  3 points [-]

I was worried this would happen to me, so I started Beemindering my RTM tasks (and also pinning both an RTM tab and a Beeminder tab in Chrome). I have $5 riding on completing an average of 6 tasks a day. (You might object that this incentivizes me to break up my tasks into smaller tasks, which it totally does, and that is great.)

Comment author: Rubix 09 March 2013 07:19:44AM 5 points [-]

The top item in my to-do list reads: "If confused, make list! If confusion persists, make lists for lists!"

Point being, I think taskifying in order to avoid counting difficult, unpleasant tasks as one item is useful because it better mirrors reality. For (very ground-level) instance, eating enough meals in a day is hard for me to do consistently because "eat a meal" has a ton of steps: decide what to eat, find ingredients, assemble, and so on. So if I lie to myself and say it's only one step, I feel bad about being so stupid for having trouble with Just One Step, and subsequently don't do anything because I'm in an Ugh Field. If I acknowledge that if I am having trouble accomplishing something, that means it has multiple steps... well, I still do less than my fictional idealized self would do, but I still do more than otherwise.

I find that a lot of my friends have trouble grokking this because the rationalist/perfectionist ideacluster is heavily grouped. For some reason it's hard to think about what a perfect rational agent would do without, at least somewhat and unconsciously, comparing oneself to that agent.