My parents were visiting this past weekend, so I broke up all my cleaning tasks over a week and assigned them to specific days in RTM. This got the job done, but one thing I notices is that cleaning took vastly less time than I imagined when I was dreading it. (Example: scrubbing my bathroom floor took about 10-12 min counting grabbing supplies and I had imagined about 20-30 min).
So I learned: (a) I do have time to clean and put it at as recurring every other month task in RTM to assign these tasks over a week (b) Ugh fields screw with my time estimates, leading me to procrastinate or strike goals entirely, since when will I ever find the time?
Two possible countermoves to (b):
I think I favor 2, since I'll have an easier time psyching myself up for "Five minutes of data gathering! My model of the world is getting more accurate" than experiencing something I don't want to do twice, once as visualization, once as reality. I'll try to find another task to test this way this week. Something I expect will take a while, but that I also notice I don't like.
This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of August 20th. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:
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!
Last week's diary; archive of prior diaries.