This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for September 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.
Next diary: September 16-30
Previous diary: August 16-31
Adventures In HamLand:
If you remember when I said I'd start using Google Now for all my reminders.... Well, I tired of its passiveness and resistance to rescheduling, so I resorted to GTasks. I still use Google now for the location-based reminders. The nice thing about GTasks is it doesn't generate any upcoming repeats of a task until I've clicked the last one off. Too many task managers made me choose between accumulating a slew of undone tasks or losing track of whether a task is completed at all.
I've been skipping days in the control end of my melatonin self-trial. That slants my results. Recording is easier to forget when I eliminate the 'take melatonin' alarm.
I tried to turbo-charge the skill of goal factoring. This went on for a few episodes, until I realized I instead practiced the habit of 'Set a timer, write down a few vague ideas, get swept down a minor train of thought, remember timer and panic, blank out, panic some more...' So I broke it down into steps to practice individually, and then I'll practice transitioning smoothly between steps. Summarized steps: Notice a need to goal-factor, Assign exercise to the proper (timeless) self, prepare mentally and do a first pass of sub-goals, revise list, brainstorm other ways to fill those sub-goals & revise ad infinitum. The eventual goal is to confidently and consistently generate a strong list of purposes and alternatives in the first two minutes of sitting down and thinking about a problem for 5 minutes.