One thing that makes Less Wrong awesome for me is that it's helped me seriously reduce my politics habit. I have a lot of posts on the xkcd forums, and politics (and economics) is a major recurring theme of those posts. Once I started thinking strategically about my involvement in politics, I found the following question useful: what is the optimal level of effort to put into politics (i.e. where marginal benefit equals marginal cost)?

The result, of course, is that I should put almost zero effort into politics. I still focus heavily on economics, human psychology, and systems design because those are professionally relevant for me, but I try to avoid discussions that are essentially debates on identities, not math or facts.

I've noticed a number of benefits from this- I have more available time, I have happier hobbies (when I do get into political discussions these days, I will notice the physiological residue of anger, which I generally try to avoid), I don't waste money on political donations.