This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for March 1-15.
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 cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating.
Next diary: March 16-31
Immediate past diary: January 16-31
Since the end of last year I've been maintaining a reading log. It's a simple notebook in which I'll infrequently add entries for beginning or completing a book.
I generally don't have much success at manually logging activity in my life, but reading happens on a timescale that makes it pretty robust to a logging granularity of "whenever I can be bothered". If I rediscover the notebook after having lost it for a month, it's a straightforward, non-arduous task to balance it out with whatever I've started or finished reading in the interim.
The main benefit is focus. I have a bad habit of starting to read something, and then abandoning it to something else in spite of still finding it interesting. I now know exactly how many books I have "open" at any given time, and I'm more likely to want to complete and "close" that entry in the log before moving onto another one. It's also satisfying to have a record of completion.