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.

I am starting a project to take more deliberate control of my life:

At the macro level, I want to clarify my medium-to-long-term goals (of the "what do I want to accomplish in the next couple years?" variety).
At the micro level, I want to prioritize tasks and opportunities so that I can spend my time on the best ones.
At the pico level, I want to improve my memory for decisions and goals and reduce akrasia.

I have no idea how to proceed on the macro piece. Does anyone have any good ideas or know of any good resources for it?

The micro piece seems pretty straightforward; it's just a matter of doing it.

For the pico piece, when I try to improve in this regard, especially on the memory part, I tend to run into an infinite regress of "I need to do X" --> "I need to write down X so that I remember to do it" --> I need to remember to write down when I need to do something" ... Does anyone have any suggestions on how to prevent that?

The problems with defining long-term goals may be personality-specific. I mean the cure is probably different if your problem is that you often change your mood, or if your problem is that you think about things other people want from you instead of what makes you happy. So when you have problem clarifying your goals, go meta and ask why.

My problem was that my mood changes quickly, and my opinions sometimes move like a leaf in a strong wind; and I forget my conclusions made in the previous moods. And whatever I think may be strongly influenced by what happ... (read more)