This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of May 28th. 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!
I'm splitting up my daily writing practice and daily journal into entirely separate things. I've tried creating a habit of doing daily freewrites every day, which I usually used to examine how my day went, and failed miserably each time. (Though it was useful for as long as I could keep it up.) Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity, so I'm trying it differently now.
My daily examination is now an Excel spreadsheet, in which I mostly answer simple yes-no prompts. Things like "Did you eat 3 meals, take your vitamins, feed the dogs, do something social, change your mind, try something new, stay up late the night before..." The time that needs to be devoted to writing about my day has always been prohibitive in making it a real habit, so I'm just tracking easy things and leaving the comments area for when I'm feeling particularly introspective. When I'm not, it's not a big hassle to open the doc and write a row of Y's / N's / ?'s right before bed. I'll probably be fiddling with the questions for a while until I'm happy, so the early days aren't going to have answers to all the questions.
I do still want to write every day. Writing is a well-ingrained ugh field for me. It's one I need to get over, both for the sake of school and for the sake of releasing the fanfiction plot bunnies that run around pooping all over the landscape of my mind. I changed my goal of X minutes per day to 300 words on weekdays and 500 on weekends. I'm giving myself a release valve each week for the price of a dollar, gifted to a coworker or random stranger. I've also got a $10 commitment contract for a month, something I was too convinced of failure to try before. I don't care about quality so much yet, I just want to get in the habit of sitting down and filling a blank page start to finish.
And now I've posted here about it, which means I might also face getting downvotes and stern looks of disapproval for failing! D-8
Edit: Oh, also increasing the amount of socializing I do every week. The local meetup had a recent presentation on smart networking, and one little gem was the maxim 'Never eat alone'. I've had substantially more fun since I've started trying to follow this advice. I've had a few surprising conversations come from asking if another person can hang out, even if we never got to making plans.
I have found two things effective for this:
The first is writing out story notes / the passages in question longhand on a pad of paper I keep near my bed as I'm falling asleep. (You can also write out general notes and reminders to get them out of your head.)
The second is being willing to just write the sections of the story that are interesting / currently in my head, without worrying about connecting them to other things or making it a full s... (read more)