What about if your workday problems aren't "I have too many incoming emails and routine tasks to handle, I need to organize and prioritize things somehow" but "I need to design a robust technical system out of nothing and it needs to match our problem and be good enough not to get us into the trouble down the road and I'm having lots of trouble fitting the entire problem and the requirements from the existing system in my head" or "I need to figure out enough about a new technical field in a month that I can incorporate ideas from it into my paper and have it pass peer review and I have no idea what's going on with it"?
I've found it difficult to apply GTD style systems to the sort of problems where most of the initial difficulty is understanding the problem to begin with.
I took part in a recent discussion in the current Open Thread about how instrumental rationality is under-emphasized on this website. I've heard other people say similar things, and I am inclined to agree. Someone suggested that there should be a "Instrumental Rationality Books" thread, similar to the "best textbooks on every subject" thread. I thought this sounded like a good idea.
The title is "resources" because in addition to books, you can post self-help websites, online videos, whatever.
The decorum for this thread will be as follows:
I think depending on how this thread goes, in a few days I might make a meta post on this subject in an attempt to inspire discussion on how the LessWrong community can work together to attempt to reach some sort of a consensus on what the best instrumental rationality methods and resources might be. lukeprog has already done great work in his The Science of Winning at Life sequence, but his reviews are uber-conservative and only mention resources with lots of scientific and academic backing. I think this leaves out a lot of really good stuff, and I think that we should be able to draw distinctions between stuff that isn't necessarily drawing on science but is reasonable, rational, and helps a lot of people, and The Secret.
But I thought we should get the ball rolling a little before we have that conversation. In the meantime, if you have a meta comment, you can just go ahead and post it as a reply to the top-level post.