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Vaniver comments on Group Rationality Diary, July 1-15 - Less Wrong Discussion

1 Post author: therufs 01 July 2014 03:46PM

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Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 01 July 2014 04:40:16PM *  3 points [-]

I'd like to coin some terminology: anti-lists.

Having a well-constructed list helps you get things done. Every action on the list has an immediate successor, so you don't have to think about the next actionable step required to complete your overall goal. If the goal is "clean my home" or "pack for my trip abroad", this is very useful. If the goal is "enjoyably waste time", it can cause some problems.

An annoying number of time-wasting activities are very good at giving you the next actionable step in wasting your time. In some cases this is deliberate, such as websites that provide you with lists of related articles once you've finished reading them. In some cases it's presumably accidental but still very effective. Heavily cross-referenced websites such as Wikipedia, TVTropes or Less Wrong can create a tab explosion, and once you've finished reading this tab, the obvious successor to that action is reading the next tab. Once you've watched an episode of a TV series, there is generally an obvious successor to that episode, and if you have immediate and easy access to that successor, watching it becomes a strong candidate for your next action.

I have recently started thinking in terms of "anti-listing" activities that are conducive to this sort of behaviour. To anti-list an activity is to take action to disrupt the line of succession. In the case of the series of Robot Chicken I just downloaded, this is literally a case of removing the list of files from my immediate environment. This seems like a fairly robust way of thinking about my activity management.

Comment author: Vaniver 12 July 2014 09:07:36PM 0 points [-]

The concept of a "not-to-do list" seems useful here; instead of things that you want to do to check off, they're habits or actions that you do not want to do. "Do not watch the next episode of a TV series without getting up and moving around" could prevent you from launching an unintentional marathon, by giving you an opportunity to change what you're doing with every episode.