Group Rationality Diary, November 1-15

therufs

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for November 1-15.

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.

The poll earlier this month seems to be sufficiently in favor of maintaining the current schedule that extra votes are unlikely to change things much, but if you'd really like to register your opinion, you are welcome to do so here.

Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating.

Immediate past diary: October 16-31

Rationality diaries archive

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for November 1-15.

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 cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating.

Immediate past diary: October 16-31

Rationality diaries archive

After realizing I was forgetting obvious next actions to work on, I implemented an autofocus style TODO list four weeks ago. Still keeping it up. The core idea is to keep a fixed size live segment of the TODO list, and only work off that. I keep the list in a squared paper notebook, with the live segment being a column of around 30 items. When the live list starts getting full, it gets closed and the remaining items get either abandoned or transferred to the next live list.

The live list keeps the system focused and prevents the list from expanding uncontrollably into a despair-inducing blob. Keeping the whole thing on paper instead of a file makes the paging structure the natural way to arrange the list instead of something that needs to be explicitly maintained.

I keep separate pages for someday/maybe items, which are the sort of hopeless blob TODO list that just keeps growing, so that I can get ideas I come up with out of my head with no expectations of getting around to doing them in the immediate future. These can serve as ideas for stuff that can get broken down to more actionable pieces and promoted to the live list.