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Pablo_Stafforini comments on Open thread, 14-20 July 2014 - Less Wrong
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Three weeks ago I came up with a simple productivity technique that I've been using with great results, and thought I should share it here in case it is of help to others. I could write a couple of paragraphs describing how it works, but I think that by taking a look at this spreadsheet you can very quickly understand the idea. In short, I list everything I want to do each day (using a rather fine-grained criterion of act individuation) and motivate myself to do those things by a combination of points and streaks. (Many of my dailies relate to nutrition or health, but this is just contingent on my own goals and interests.) The system grew out of my dissatisfaction with some of the best existing tools I had tried, like Beeminder and HabitRPG, and I find it works better than those.
I'm happy to answer questions or incorporate suggestions.
(Note that the spreadsheet I link here is a copy of the one I actually use; it is not updated and does not, therefore, reflect my current progress.)
Looks like in a month or so, your easy-to-keep items will outstrip all others. Maybe the value should grow logarithmically over time, not linearly?
The streak count is not incorporated into the value associated to a task; it is an independent metric. But I'm not sure if this is what you were referring to. If not, can you elaborate? Thanks.
Yes, that was what I was refering to and I really should have thought of seeing whether the realized values match up with what I was thinking. I thought it was a neat idea to give yourself some incentive to keep a habit running once you've kept the streak up for a while.
A couple of questions about your individual situation -- just curious:
1.) What are your morning and night routines like?
2.) Do you think it's valuable to break your don't eat up by food, or just have one junk food category?
3.) Why not sleep during the day? I had previously been in a habit of napping and found it useful, and it's generally regarded as healthy. The only reason I don't nap now is because I have a standard 9-to-5 (well, more like 10-to-7) job.
4.) Why so much caffeine in the coffee and tea? It seems like this would just promote tolerance, which seems bad.
5.) What are the benefits of eating dark chocolate? Olive oil?
Hi Peter,
Here are my morning and night routines. I try to be quite detailed; don't underestimate the value of checklists.
I originally had a single generic junk food category, but the problem was that when I ate one type of junk food on a given day, I had no extra incentive to abstain from eating other types of junk food for the rest of the day. Individuating dailies with a more fine-grained criterion provides an effective way of dealing with this problem.
I have sleep problems and wanted to see whether sleeping only at night would help. In addition, I read studies suggesting that people who sleep during the day, esp. those who take long naps, tend to die earlier, though these are correlational studies and it's unclear what causal inferences we can draw from them.
I once estimated that my total caffeine intake from drinking two cups of coffee and six cups of green tea was about 300 mg, which I believe is within safe and normal levels. I drink green tea primarily for its health benefits, though, so perhaps I should switch to decaf. As for coffee, there are studies suggesting that low to medium doses have neuroprotective properties, though I'm not sure this is due to the caffeine itself or other properties of coffee.
Olive oil is a very good source of monounsaturated fatty acids. The benefits of dark chocolate are, I think, modest and not that well documented; see here. I eat it primarily because I find it delicious.
I solved that problem by tracking how many pieces of junk food I ate rather than a binary of whether or not I ate junk food on that particular day.
Yes, I considered that approach. But the vagueness involved in the notion of a "piece of junk food" was such that I found I had considerable latitude in determining how many pieces of junk food I ate on a particular day. By contrast, deciding whether I ate a certain type of junk food at all is usually quite straightforward, and not subject to rationalization. As Jon Elster wrote:
(Of course, you may not have a problem if you are sufficiently self-disciplined, as you seem to be.)
Yeah, that seems right.
I tend to define it roughly as "250 calories of something that is devoid of nutritional value and consumed primarily for taste".
I actually find a slight caffeine dependency useful in reminding me to put the kettle on and make a proper breakfast in the morning.
Looks like a cool system. Curious what you count as being a slip-up in your "sugar" category, since you have a day that's red for cake but green for sugar. Presumably the cake contains sugar (and probably your 10g of dark chocolate does too?) - do you just mean sugar by itself?
By sugar I mean "added sugar", as used to sweeten drinks. I have control over whether I put sugar on my coffee, but not on the sugar present in most other foods, including cakes, so it makes sense for me to deal with the two separately. If on a give day I eat cake but don't add sugar to drinks, I would mark the 'cake' daily as a failure and the 'sugar' daily as a success.
Incidentally, I eat 100% dark chocolate, which doesn't contain any sugar.
As a cheaper alternative to 100% dark chocolate, I drink unsweetened* cocoa made as follows:
Best tasting cocoa powder I've found in the UK is Cadbury Bournville. Some supposedly premium brands (eg. Green & Blacks) taste much worse, bland with a slight burnt taste. Color seems to be a good indication of taste - lighter color generally tastes better.
I like drinking cocoa made as follows:
Isn't this exactly how cocoa is normally made? Either like that or with hot milk instead of boiling water. What would anyone do differently with that sort of cocoa?
Ah, makes sense! The chocolate sounds cool.
Have you always enjoyed 100% dark chocolate, or did you have to train yourself to do so, and if so how? I'm not particularly interested in eating less sugar, but somewhere around 95% it goes from tasting rich and bitter and fragrant and wonderful to tasting bitter in a way that just doesn't register as food, and I want to know if there's a way to overcome this. I have a similar situation with unsugared black tea, with a single exception that involved LSD.
You should brew tea properly. The bitterness in black tea comes from tannins and you can easily control their extraction during brewing.
For black tea:
Use good quality loose-leaf tea, preferably the orange pekoe cut. The tea dust in teabags oversteeps (and becomes bitter) very quickly.
Time the steeping of the tea leaves in boiling water. The usually recommended five minutes is often too long (if you'll be drinking your tea without milk). Try three and a half minutes to start, then adjust as desired. The less time you steep, the less bitter will the tea be (while caffeine generally extracts in the first 30 seconds or so).
Once the tea has steeped for the proper time, pour the tea off the leaves into another teapot (or a cup, etc.). Do not let tea sit on the leaves.
Experiment with different teas as well. Tea from Assam (often sold as Irish Breakfast) is the most tannic. Tea from Darjeeling, for example, is much less so.
Good advice that I'm already following. I do enjoy Darjeeling with hardly any sugar, but it just doesn't satisfy my "wake you up in the morning" desires the way Assam does. Even with Darjeeling, though, unless I add at least a small amount of sugar (maybe 1/4 of what I'd put in Assam) it's just fragrant water and I don't perceive it as having flavor.
No, I haven't always enjoyed 100% dark chocolate. For a long time I ate chocolate with 85% concentration of cocoa, and then gradually moved upwards. I haven't met many people who like pure chocolate, though, and there doesn't seem to be a big market for it, judging from the difficulty of finding it. So my experience may be atypical.
I like it! But when I eat it, I want much less of it than I would eat of 80-90% in a sitting. (not necessarily a drawback)
More people, by several orders of magnitude, like unsweetened black tea than unsweetened chocolate. And probably another order of magnitude for coffee.
Does this mean that you should ask people about tea rather than chocolate? There are a lot more of them. And maybe it's easier with tea. If it's easier with tea, maybe you should do tea first. But if it's easier, maybe the masses of people who do it did it without planning or introspection, while the hard task may be a better source of information.
I've asked more people about tea than about chocolate. But I haven't asked anyone about coffee, because I don't drink it, and I think that's worth trying.
What is the outcome of asking people about tea? Do they say useful things? specific to tea, or things that might generalize to chocolate?
With tea, a few people like unsweetened black tea and have always experienced it as having flavor (though there's still the usual acquired-taste aspect of bitter/tannic things). Others, like me, find that without sugar it's just fragrant water that doesn't get experienced as having taste, but they like it that way. I haven't found anyone who's actively learned to enjoy sugarless black tea in the way I would like to.
I enjoy sugarless black tea. I didn't use to. I got into through green tea (which I admittedly still prefer in the general). I think drinking a lot of green tea and getting pretty into it (trying lots of different loose leaf types, learning about ideal steeping temperatures and times) got me used to the basic form of tea, after which it's a lot easier to get into black tea.
Seems a similar concept to HabitRPG
Yes, it is similar, and it grew out from my experience with that website. However, I found HabitRPG problematic for a number of reasons. First, the rules are such that I "died" even if I failed to complete a small proportion of dailies. Second, I had little freedom to assign different value points to different tasks. Finally, my system allows me to manipulate the data in all sorts of ways, and create progress graphs that are more informative and motivating than those in HabitRPG.
Are you on a gluten-free and/or starch-free diet?
No, I just try to avoid foods that are carb-dense or nutrient-light. I'm a vegetarian.
Now I'm more curious. Potatoes are vitamin and mineral cornucopias, and peanuts are protein powerhouses. Why avoid those two?
Peanuts are not 'protein powerhouses' unless you are trying to measure protein/volume instead of protein/calorie. They give 7g protein per 164 calories. Compare that to tofu which provides 20g protein per 176 calories or salmon which provides about 20g for 183 calories.
Potatoes are not nutrient-dense relative to the food I eat. 100 Calories of e.g. spinach contain many times the minerals and vitamins contained in 100 grams of potatoes.
Peanuts are not very bad per se, but the opportunity costs of eating them are too high for me, since they substitute other, better nuts from my "nuts" budget (e.g. walnuts, almonds and hazelnuts).