Group rationality diary, 6/25/12

cata

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of June 25th. (Based on the rate of participation in prior threads, I thought it might be a good idea to start posting every other week instead of every week. Only so much new stuff happens in a week.) 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!

(Previously: 5/14/12, 5/21/12, 5/28/12, 6/4/12, 6/11/12)

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

Thanks to everyone who contributes!

(Previously: 5/14/12, 5/21/12, 5/28/12, 6/4/12, 6/11/12)

Using Rescue Time to track what I spend time on, I found that days where I stuck to the Pomodoro timer fanatically resulted in more time spent on work (broadly defined as my job, or work on one of my projects), approximately 1 1/2 hours more. Interestingly, the days where I cheated on the Pomodoro app and worked through the break times as well felt more productive but I stopped working (or stopped focusing on work) much earlier. So this is surprising: when I feel like I can power through, I probably should not.

I have also just begun Paleo dieting again, as well as an exercise routine (I started to reply to the Minimum Viable Exercise thread and consciously turned the "LessWrong comment time!" feeling into an exercise plan (that I saved instead of posting to the thread).

This is interesting. Today was my first day of pomodoro usage (I use Rescue Time since a while). Afternoon I just decided to switch it off because I found it to kill my flow... That been said the reason why I started with pomodoro today was because I was procrastinating and used the time to try several pomodoro timers. My problem is getting started and hoped that setting myself to just do 1 pomodoro would make it easier to get going (which it didn't help...).

But once I am going I can work easily more than an hour without distractions (this I know from Rescue Time) and maybe pomodoro won't be a good solution for me. Stil it was just a first day, will try again, maybe also experiment with longer work units...