Group Rationality Diary, December 1-15

therufs

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for December 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: November 16-30

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for December 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: November 16-30

A few different things:

I have had a fairly solid Anki habit for the past three months or so.

I have ankified a few self-improvement concepts (Lukeprog's posts on procrastination, some of Kaj Sotala's stuff on habits, random other tidbits), and I believe the constant exposure to those ideas has started having an effect, in that I seem to have started doing a lot of the advice in there (not all though). I may report on it later on.

But more dramatically effective, I recently started using HabitRPG, and have used it to get a few new daily habits:

Always get up before the alarm (previously I'd loaf around in bed for up to half an hour)
Always go to bed before midnight
Update my Gratitude Journal every day (I had been doing that semi-regularly for a few weeks before though)
Do some exercise every morning

It's also a good motivator for just getting things done in general. My choice of habits have been somewhat influenced by KajSotala's article on The Power of Habit, and by talking to some LWers who read that book and talked about Keystone Habits around exercise and sleeping. Also, I was influenced by Lukeprog's talking about success spirals to start by focusing on somewhat easier-to-achieve things (and also, Swimmer's discussion of goals versus systems.

Always get up before the alarm

How do you manage a habit of this? How do you manage to do it intentionally at all? It seems to me that the entire purpose of a morning alarm clock is to counteract the fact that we pretty much can't control when we wake up.

I loathe alarms, but I still need one for working days, or I would be two hours late every day.

0Viliam_Bur13y

How exactly do you put this in HabitRPG? Do you use HabitRPG from your bed, or can you somehow enter your daily task the next day? I imagine you could make a daily goal of "I went to bed before midnight yesterday", but that feels a bit inellegant.

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Group Rationality Diary, December 1-15

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Group Rationality Diary, December 1-15

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