Group rationality diary, 10/15/12

cata

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of October 15th. 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!

Previous diary; archive of prior diaries.

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of October 15th. 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

Thanks to everyone who contributes!

Previous diary; archive of prior diaries.

To improve my study habits, I'm trying two pretty straight forward strategies:

1) Noticing when I'm wasting time on the internet and not having fun, but rather just trying to waste time, and immediately switching to something productive. 2) When doing an assignment that doesn't involve using a computer, going to the library with whatever I'm doing and leaving my computer behind (the library is 2-3 minutes away from my dorm).

I've only just started using 1, and I've only used 2 once, but both sound like they should work and seem like they have so far. With 1, I often end up switching from bored internet browsing to reading one of my open tabs, which is more enjoyable and almost sort of productive, so even that is an improvement I think. When I used 2, I was surprisingly productive and surpassed my expectations. For unrelated reasons I had to return to my dorm, and various distractions made the time in the library about 3x more productive than the time away from it.