Group rationality diary, 1/9/13

cata

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of January 7th. 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! Happy New Year to folks; my resolution is to always post these on Monday evenings instead of letting them slip to Tuesday or Wednesday : >

Previous diary; archive of prior diaries.

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of January 7th. 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! Happy New Year to folks; my resolution is to always post these on Monday evenings instead of letting them slip to Tuesday or Wednesday : >

Previous diary; archive of prior diaries.

As is obvious from my record, I've stopped doing this, and figured I should do some sort of post-mortem.

The immediate reason I stopped when I did was traveling; it was too much of a hassle to do it while traveling, and then when I got back it was too much of a hassle to do the days when I was gone, and I made the mistake of not doing today until I had done yesterday, which led to not doing either.
The biggest reason I stopped was because I didn't have a good implementation / trigger. Doing it online was a mistake- yes, it was easy to make and publish the spreadsheet, but it also meant that I needed to be at a computer or on my phone. If I had been able to do it after I crawled into bed, I would have been much more likely to do it.
Another reason was that the list of virtues wasn't particularly compelling to me. Each of them was something I endorsed, but it wasn't clear that each one of them was something that I wanted to actively work on. For some of them, I was able to think of a way to improve along that virtue (like switching to one meal a day for temperance), but for many of them I couldn't (for order, the main new thing I could do is spend time adding new systems to arrange my things/time/etc., and tracking lapses wasn't particularly motivating in avoiding those lapses in the future).
Similarly, I prefer thinking in terms of systems to thinking in terms of goals (see Scott Adams on the subject).

Takeaway for me: I like the idea of daily reflection time, but if I want to record the results of my reflection I either need to schedule time for it on a computer (unlikely to work) or do it on a physical medium (likely to work, but then not as likely to get transcribed into electronic format). I like the idea of quarterly review and improvement for each virtue. I was surprised at my ability to think up ways to do various things better- I originally had thought "I've already developed X to the optimal level" for almost all of them but found that focused contemplation did come up with good ideas for several (but not all) of them. I think I got more from spending time inventing systems than spending time tracking myself, which suggests not spending the effort on tracking / not trying to spend the reflection time as tracking. I like the idea of having a dedicated aspect of myself to improve for every period of time, but I think that would be done better as ordering my list of 'lifestyle projects' and only working on one at a time (and switching to the next when I finish one) than as setting apart time to focus on things that I may or may not have a good plan of attack for.