Original post:  http://bearlamp.com.au/productivity-list-notch-system/

This is a write up of my current to do list system.  My system and the method of this write up is based on Mark Forster's to do lists.  If you are familiar with The Final Version Perfected you will be able to recognise elements from that system. 

It's not perfect, but it has been working for a few weeks now.  I have difficulty often with tasks of variable "size" and variable "time" (these are both a measure of "getting it done").  I started with the FVP and modified as I felt like it.  This is my Notch system.

I am confident, and I have not yet written about it - as far as I can tell, telling someone your final system is a bit like giving to someone in the pre-industrial revolution, "a working 2010 car" and expecting them to use that to build their own.  If they are a very very good engineer they will work out how to take it apart and how to put it back together so that they can build their own and get driving.  Of course systems are not that complicated, and maybe it's not so hard to give someone a to-do list system and hope they can make use of it.  I also don't credit myself for using a working car in contrast to being in the pre-industrial revolution era.

I believe the trick that underpins systems, the one that doesn't get mentioned often enough when we talk about systems that do or don't work for us, is the underlying meta-system of trying things and iterating on the results.

Having said all that about cars and underlying iterative systems...  This is where I am today.

To start, make a list of all the tasks that you want to do today in any order that they come to mind.  If you are confident that things cannot be done today, they don't belong on the list.  i.e. tasks requiring a specific geographic location that you are not intending on visiting today.  Consider things that might be due, things that are large are acceptable.  

--I make assumptions that significantly small tasks of under 5 minutes don't belong on the list, and regular activities don't need reminding (i.e. dinner with friends).

Example list:
Dogs
Space
write
Sanding
Emails
Battery blocks

Next to each task, write how long you predict it will take.  These will be wrong, that's okay - one of the things we are training is predictive power over future tasks, another is acceptance of the total time you do or do not have in your day.

Example list:
Dogs - 1.5hr
Space - 20mins
write - 1hr
Sanding - 3hrs
Emails - 5hrs
Battery blocks - 3hrs

An important thing that time-estimates can reveal is whether you were planning to surprise yourself by completing more than 24 hours of "expected work" in an 8 hour work day.  With that in mind it might be worthwhile planning what you wont to do today.  Hold onto this thought for now.  (my example list has 13hrs and 50 mins on it)

Look down the list and decide either what you will do first, or what you will do last (or both) and number them accordingly.  

Example list:
Dogs - 1.5hr
Space - 20mins
2. write - 1hr
6. Sanding - 3hrs
1. Emails - 5hrs
Battery blocks - 3hrs

Example list:
4. Dogs - 1.5hr
1. Space - 20mins
3. write - 1hr
5. Sanding - 3hrs
2. Emails - 5hrs
4. Battery blocks - 3hrs

If you find that two tasks are equal, number them the same number.  It doesn't really matter.  Do either of them first!  You can decide later when you get to that number.  If they are equally important then doing either of them is winning at deciding what to do.

After the list is numbered, do the first thing.  If you don't want to do that, you can reconsider the numbers, or just do the next thing instead.

After some period of time you might find yourself bored of whatever task you are on, or for whatever reason doing something else.  (I will sometimes do a bit of email while taking a moment from other tasks).  Don't worry!  This system has you covered.  Any time you feel like it - look to your list and put a notch next to tasks that you have done.

Example list:
4. Dogs - 1.5hr 
1. Space - 20mins - |
3. write - 1hr - ||
5. Sanding - 3hrs
2. Emails - 5hrs - ||
4. Battery blocks - 3hrs

I did the number 1 and I finished so I crossed it out, but I didn't finish 2.  What I did was do one "notch" of work on 2, and then do a notch on 3, then go back to 2 for another "notch", and go ahead and do another notch on 3.  

I use notches because sometimes I don't finish a task but I put a volume of effort into it.  In either time or in depth of work required.  Sometimes a notch will be a really hard 10 minute stretch, or a really easy two hour streak.  The notch time is the time it takes you to come back to the list and consider doing the other tasks.

This seems to be effective for tasks that will need a break, you still get some credit for a notch but you don't get to cross it out yet.  A notch is up to you.  but really it's just a way to keep track of how much of the thing you hacked away.  Some tasks take 5 notches, some take 1.  If it's the end of the day and a task is incomplete but has 4 notches done - you get to feel like you did complete 4 notches even though other tasks were completed in 1 notch.  This task is clearly bigger and harder to complete.

I like that this listing permits larger tasks to be on the same list as "one notch" sized tasks.  In the sense that you can still track the productivity and progress even without completing the tasks.

Where this system fails:

• On days like today, where I don't feel like writing out the list (most of my day is ugh, getting out of bed was hard).  Happens about once a month for me.  But also a workaround seems to be to write a list the night before, or look at yesterdays list for clues about where to begin.  Still - failure mode happens.
  
• On days with other fixed appointments - sometimes it's hard to decide what to do in the limited time frame, but that's where estimates come in, as well as thinking backwards for time management, as described in that post.
• For really really big tasks.  I have a task that is likely to take at least 20 hours over two days and it requires me to be in a set place and work on nothing else during that time.  That task has not made it onto this list system and probably never would.  In the mean time, lots of small tasks are getting done.
  

Meta: this took 2 hours to write.  Today has been a day full of suck and I don't know why but at least I wrote this out.

Original post:  http://bearlamp.com.au/low-hanging-productivity/

Tl;dr - Simple changes to workspaces like a big screen can make a big difference.

This week I spent a few days away from my usual desk.  I have been house sitting.  I didn't think too much of it; I tend to carry with me a portable lifestyle.  My laptop, some power blocks for my phone, and various supplies that make for easy "office"-ing around the place.  I usually don't carry a charger with me because when I know I will be gone a while I will take it with me.  

I have always liked a portable office.  The ability to stop, and continue later at ease was always important to me.  However recently I moved into a new place and set up a desk.  I figured I would tryX where X is workspaces (a post for the future).  I never set up a workspace for the reason of it not being portable.  The interesting thing that has surprised me this week is that I miss my big screen (which was a gift - I might have never bought myself a big screen).  

For whatever reason, the ability to view more space at once makes me more productive.  Combined with Linux's natural tendencies to have several desktop environments with simple switching.  My laptop screen is about 19in.  Which is plenty.  The new screen is about 1.5x that.  I never thought it would be useful, it took me years to do it.  If it broke today, I would be willing to spend up to $900 to get it back (which is more than six times the price of a new screen).  Right now I wonder how productive I might be with a 3rd screen... Or a 4th.  (or a 3D virtual reality work environment with screenspace limited by my eyeballs not my screen resolution...)

I feel like (along with other habits) I am probably working at 120% of what I was working before.  A fair chunk of which I owe to the extra screenspace.

Questions for today:

1. What part do you remember adding to your workspace to help you be more productive.
2. What's the coolest most awesome or productive workspace that you have seen in action?  How hard would that be to get for yourself?
3. How can you make your current workspace a tiny bit more productive in anticipation for things you have to do tomorrow?

Meta:  This took 45mins to write.

Procrastination checklist

This list is a revision of this checklist: http://lesswrong.com/lw/hgd/10step_antiprocrastination_checklist/

1. What is the task? Make sure you're going to focus on one thing at a time.  Write it down (helps some people).  (If you need - start with the big picture, one sentence of "what is this for")

Can you do it now? (If yes then do it)

2. How long will you work until you take a break?  Prepare to set a timer and commit to focusing.

Can you do it now? (If yes then do it)

3. What are the parts to this task?  Break things down until they are in *can do it now* steps, if you have a small number of steps that can now be done; stop writing more steps and start doing them.

Can you do it right now?  (If yes then do it)

4. What's an achievable goal for this sitting? Set a reasonable expectation for yourself.  (until it's done, 1000 words, complete research on X part)

Can you do it now? (If yes then do it)

5. How can you make it easier to do the task?

• Is the environment right?  Desk clear, well lit area...

• Do you have something to drink? Get yourself some tea, coffee, or water.

• Are distractions closed? Shut the door, quit Tweetdeck, close the Facebook and Gmail tabs, and set skype to "Do not disturb."

• What music will you listen to inspire yourself to be productive? Put on a good instrumental playlist! (video game soundtracks are good)

• Do you have the right books open?  The right tools in reach?

• Is your chair comfortable?

• Can you make it harder to do the distracting or <not this> thing?

• (step 3 is going to help to make it easier)

Can you do it now? (If yes then do it)

6. Why are you doing this task?  Trace the value back until you increase the desire to do it.

Can you do it now? (If yes then do it)

7. Will gamifying help you? What are some ways to gamify the task?  Try to have fun with it!

Can you do it now? (If yes then do it)

8. What are some rewards you can offer yourself for completing sections of the task? Smiling, throwing your arms up in the air and proclaiming victory, or M&M's all count, a trip to the beach, a nice milkshake...

Can you do it now? (If yes then do it)

9. are you sure you want to do it?  Deciding either to; not do it now; or not do it at all; are also fine.  It’s up to you to make that decision, keeping in mind what “not doing it” means in it’s entirety.

In first-person form:

1. What is the task? Make sure I’m going to focus on one thing at a time.  Write it down (helps some people).  (If I need - start with the big picture, one sentence of "what is this for")

Can I do it now? (If yes then do it)

2. How long will I work until you take a break?  Prepare to set a timer and commit to focusing.

Can I do it now? (If yes then do it)

3. What are the parts to this task?  I want to break things down until they are in *can do it now* steps, if I have a small number of steps that can now be done; I will stop writing more steps in the process and start doing them.

Can I do it right now?  (If yes then do it)

4. What's an achievable goal for this sitting? Set a reasonable expectation for myself.  (until it's done, 1000 words, complete research on X part)

Can I do it now? (If yes then do it)

5. How can I make it easier to do the task?

• Is the environment right?  Desk clear, well lit area...

• Do I have something to drink? Get yourself some tea, coffee, or water.

• Are my distractions closed? Shut the door, quit Tweetdeck, close the Facebook and Gmail tabs, set skype to "Do not disturb."

• What music will I listen to, to inspire myself to be productive? Put on a good instrumental playlist!

• Do I have the right books open?  The right tools in reach?

• Is my chair comfortable?

• Can I make it harder to do the distracting or <not this> thing?

• (step 3 is going to help to make it easier)

Can I do it now? (If yes then do it)

6. Why am I doing this task?  Trace the value and feeling back until I increase the desire to do it.

Can I do it now? (If yes then do it)

7. Will gamifying help me? What are some ways to gamify the task?

Can I do it now? (If yes then do it)

8. What are some rewards I can offer myself for completing sections of the task? Smiling, throwing my arms up in the air and proclaiming victory, M&M's all count, a trip to the beach, a nice milkshake...

Can I do it now? (If yes then do it)

9. am I sure I want to do it?  Deciding either to - not do it now; or not do it at all; are also fine.  It’s up to me to make that decision, keeping in mind what “not doing it” means in terms of the task at hand.

Meta: This took about 2 hours to put together; between writing, rewriting, reordering, editing feedback and publishing.

I couldn't decide whether 2nd person or 1st person was better so I wrote both.  Please let me know which you prefer.

Any adjustments or suggestions are welcome.

My table of contents is where you will find the other things I have written.

feedback on if this works or helps is also welcome.

In June 2013, I didn’t do any exercise beyond biking the 15 minutes to work and back. Now, I have a robust habit of hitting the gym every day, doing cardio and strength training. Here are the techniques I used to do get from not having the habit to having it, some of them common wisdom and some of them my own ideas. Consider this post a case study/anecdata in what worked for me. Note: I wrote these ideas down around August 2013 but didn’t post them, so my memory was fresh at the time of writing.

1. Have a specific goal. Ideally this goal should be reasonably achievable and something you can see progress toward over medium timescales. I initially started exercising because I wanted more upper body strength to be better at climbing. My goal is “become able to do at least one pull up, or more if possible”.

Why it works: if you have a specific goal instead of a vague feeling that you ought to do something or that it’s what a virtuous person would do, it’s harder to make excuses. Skipping work with an excuse will let you continue to think of yourself as virtuous, but it won’t help with your goal. For this to work, your goal needs to be something you actually want, rather than a stand-in for “I want to be virtuous.” If you can’t think of a consequence of your intended habit that you actually want, the habit may not be worth your time.

2. Have a no-excuses minimum. This is probably the best technique I’ve discovered. Every day, with no excuses, I went to the gym and did fifty pull-downs on one of the machines. After that’s done, I can do as much or as little else as I want. Some days I would do equivalent amounts of three other exercises, some days I would do an extra five reps and that’s it.

Why it works: this one has a host of benefits.

* It provides a sense of freedom: once I’m done with my minimum, I have a lot of choice about what and how much to do. That way it feels less like something I’m being forced into.

* If I’m feeling especially tired or feel like I deserve a day off, instead of skipping a day and breaking the habit I tell myself I’ll just do the minimum instead. Often once I get there I end up doing more than the minimum anyway, because the real thing I wanted to skip was the inconvenience of biking to the gym.

3. If you raise the minimum, do it slowly. I have sometimes raised the bar on what’s the minimum amount of exercise I have to do, but never to as much or more than I was already doing routinely. If you start suddenly forcing yourself to do more than you were already doing, the change will be much harder and less likely to stick than gradually ratcheting up your commitment.

3. Don’t fall into a guilt trap. Avoid associating guilt with doing the minimum, or even with missing a day.

Why it works: feeling guilty will make thinking of the habit unpleasant, and you’ll downplay how much you care about it to avoid the cognitive dissonance. Especially, if you only do the minimum, tell yourself “I did everything I committed to do.” Then when you do more than the minimum, feel good about it! You went above and beyond. This way, doing what you committed to will sometimes include positive reinforcement, but never negative reinforcement.

4. Use Timeless Decision Theory and consistency pressure. Credit for this one goes to this post by user zvi. When I contemplate skipping a day at the gym, I remember that I’ll be facing the same choice under nearly the same conditions many times in the future. If I skip my workout today, what reason do I have to believe that I won’t skip it tomorrow?

Why it works: Even when the benefits of one day’s worth of exercise don’t seem like enough motivation, I know my entire habit that I’ve worked to cultivate is at stake. I know that the more days I go to the gym the more I will see myself as a person who goes to the gym, and the more it will become my default action.

5. Evaluate your excuses. If I have what I think is a reasonable excuse, I consider how often I’ll skip the gym if I let myself skip it whenever I have that good of an excuse. If letting the excuse hold would make me use it often, I ignore it.

Why it works: I based this technique on this LW post

6. Tell people about it. The first thing I did when I made my resolution to start hitting the gym was telling a friend whose opinion I cared about. I also made a comment on LW saying I would make a post about my attempt at forming a habit, whether it succeeded or failed. (I wrote the post and forgot to post it for over a year, but so it goes.)

Why it works: Telling people about your commitment invests your reputation in it. If you risk being embarrassed if you fail, you have an extra motivation to succeed.

I expect these techniques can be generalized to work for many desirable habits: eating healthy, spending time on social interaction; writing, coding, or working on a long-term project; being outside getting fresh air, etc.

Briefly: I'm looking for a person (or group) with whom I can mutually discuss self improvement and personal goals (and nothing else) on a regular basis.

Also, note, this post is an example of asking a personally important question on LW. The following idea is not meant as a general mindhack, but just as something I want to try out myself.

We are unconsciously motivated by those around us. The Milgram experiment and the Asch conformity experiment are the two best examples of social influence that come to my mind, though I'm sure there are plenty more (if you haven't heard of them, I really suggest spending a minute).

I've tended to see this drive to conform to the expectations of others as a weakness of the human mind, and yes, it can be destructive. However, as long as its there, I should exploit it. Specifically, I want to exploit it to fight akrasia.

Utilizing positive social influence is a pretty common tactic for fighting drug addictions (like in AA), but I haven't really heard of it being used to fight unproductivity. Sharing your personal work/improvement goals with someone in the same position as yourself, along with reflecting on previous attempts, could potentially be powerful. Humans simply feel more responsible for the things they tell other people about, and less responsible for the things they bottle up and don't tell anyone (like all of my productivity strategies).

The setup that I envision would be something like this:

• On a chat room, or some system like skype.¹
• Meet weekly at a very specific time for a set amount of time.
• Your partner has a list of the productivity goals you set during the previous session. They ask you about your performance, forcing you to explain either your success or your failure.
• Your partner tries to articulate what went wrong or what went right from your explanation (giving you a second perspective).
• Once both parties have shared and evaluated, you set your new goals in light of your new experience (and with your partner's input, hopefully being more effective).
• The partnership continues as long as it is useful for all parties.

I've tried doing something similar to this with my friends, but it just didn't work. We already knew each other too well, and there wasn't that air of dispassionate professionality. We were friends, but not partners (in this sense of the word).

If something close to what I describe already exists, or at least serves the same purpose, I would love to hear about it (I already tried the LW study hall, but it wasn't really the structure or atmosphere I was going for). Otherwise, I'd be thrilled to find someone here to try doing this with. You can PM me if you don't want to post here.

1. After explaining this whole idea to someone IRL, they remarked that there would be little social influence because we would only be meeting online in a pseudo-anonymous way. However, I don't find this to be the case personally when I talk with people online, so a virtual environment would be no detriment (hopefully this isn't just unique to me).

Edit (29/3/2015): Just for the record, I wanted to say that I was able to make the connection I wanted, via a PM. Thanks LW!

• Meta:(Epiphany Addiction, Reversing Advice, Excellence Porn)
• @Learning: 
• Success People: (Mastery),(ChoosingTopics: Osci,PG)
• Thinking: (Ikigai, Stoicism, Rationality)
• HabitChange: (!ShootDog)
• Productivity.Principles/Energy/Relaxation:(FullEngagement, ArtOfLearning)
• Productivity.Systems/Hacks: (Autofocus, GTD/ZTD, EatFrog),(Scott Young)
• Depression/Anxiety: 
• Social: 
• Meditation 

Full List: https://workflowy.com/s/zUTEaY0ZcJ

I'd like feedback on: 

• What other categories/links would you include (I'm sure there's lots of interesting stuff I'm missing.)? What do you think of the categorization ("Thinking" is a pretty large category.)? 
• Whether you think I should make cross-posts about sub-topics here. The main benefit of making more cross posts is that the discussion/comments would be more focused on those topics. In particular, I think that looking at SuccessfulPeople.Startups, SuccessfulPeople.Science, and the Meditation document are the most original parts of this post. 
  • SuccessfulPeople.Startups contains a categorization of some of Paul Graham's essays (e.g. Having ideas, fund-raising, executing, etc). 
  • The SuccessfulPeople.Science link contains a separate categorization of advice specifically for scientists (e.g. Picking ideas, the importance of being persistent, the importance of reading widely, etc). 
  • The meditation document lists a few high quality meditation resources that I've found (and I've read ~10 books on meditation. Most of it is crap. Some of the stuff I list is orders of magnitude better than the median meditation book I've read.). 
• Whatever seems salient to you. 

TL;DR: There is probably some costly problem in your life right now that you are not even aware of. It is not that you are procrastinating on solving it. Rather, this problem has gradually blended into your environment, sinking beneath your conscious awareness to the degree that you fail to recognize it as a problem in the first place.

This post is partially an elaboration on Ugh fields, but there are some decisive differences I want to develop. Let me begin with an anecdote:

For about two years I've had a periodic pain in my right thigh. Gradually, it became worse. At one point I actually had a sort of spasm. Then the pain went away for a few weeks, then it came back, and so forth. All the while I rationalized it as something harmless: "It will probably just go away soon," I would think, or "It only inhibits my mobility sometimes." Occasionally I would consider seeking medical help, but I couldn't muster the energy, as though some activation threshold wasn't being reached. In fact, the very promise that I could get medical help whenever convenient served to further diminish any sense of urgency. Even if the pain was sometimes debilitating, I did not perceive it as a problem needing to be solved. Gradually, I came to view it as just an unfortunate and inevitable part of existence.

Last Monday, after hardly being able to walk due to crippling pain, I finally became aware that "Wow, this really sucks and I should fix it." That evening I finally visited a chiropractor, who proceeded to get medieval on my femur (imagine having a sprained ankle, then imagine a grown man jumping on top of it). Had I classified this as a problem-needing-to-be-solved a few months earlier, my treatment period would probably be days instead of weeks.

Simply, I think this situation is of a more general form:

You have some inefficiency or agitation in your life. This could be solved very easily, but because it is perceived as harmless, no such attempt is made. Over time your tolerance for it increases, even if the problem is worsening (Bonus points for attempts at rationalizing it). This may be due to something like the peak-end rule, as the problem doesn't cause any dramatic peaks that stick out in your memory, just a dull pain underlying your experience. Even if the problem substantially lowers utility, your satisficing lizard brain remains apathetic, until the last moment, when the damage passes a certain threshold and you're jolted into action.

While similar to procrastination and akrasia, this does not involve you going against your better judgement. Instead, you don't have a better judgement, due to the blinding effects of the problem.

Possible Solutions:

I didn't solve my problem in a clever way, but I've begun employing some "early warning" techniques to prevent future incidents. The key is to become aware of the worsening inefficiency before you're forced to resort to damage control.

• Do a daily/weekly/monthly reflection. Just for a few minutes, try writing out in plain text what you currently think of your life and how you're doing. This forces you to articulate your situation in a concrete way, bypassing the shadowy ambiguity of your thoughts. If you find yourself writing things about your life that you did not previously know, keep writing, as you could be uncovering something that you'd been flinching from acknowledging (e.g. "Obligation X isn't as rewarding as I thought it would be"). A more elaborate formulation of this practice can be found here.
• I kind of feel that "mindfulness" has become a mangled buzzword, but the exercises associated with it are quite powerful when applied correctly. I've found that following my breath does indeed induce a certain clarity of mind, where acknowledging problems and shortcomings becomes easier. Using your own thought process as an object of meditation is another excellent method.
• While the previous two examples have been personal activities, other people can also be a valuable resource due to their uncanny ability to be different from you, thus offering multiple perspectives. However, I doubt expensive talk-therapy is necessary; some of my most useful realizations have been from IRC chats.

Follow up to: Rationality Games Apps

In the spirit of: Games for rationalists

Obvious candidates are 

• Dragon Box
• HabitRPG
• Anki App

There are lots of low profile apps filed under learning in the app stores but most of this is crap and it takes lots of time to explore these. 

I also found some recommendation for learning with Android apps and will point my son to these. 

I'd like to hear what apps do you or yours children use. Which apps and esp. games do you recommend for future rationalists?

I have returned from a particularly fruitful Google search, with unexpected results.

My question was simple. I was pretty sure that talking to myself aloud makes me temporarily better at solving problems that need a lot of working memory. It is a thinking tool that I find to be of great value, and that I imagine would be of interest to anyone who'd like to optimize their problem solving. I just wanted to collect some evidence on that, make sure I'm not deluding myself, and possibly learn how to enhance the effect.

This might be just lousy Googling on my part, but the evidence is surprisingly unclear and disorganized. There are at least three seperate Wiki pages for it. They don't link to each other. Instead they present the distinct models of three seperate fields: autocommunication in communication studies, semiotics and other cultural studies, intrapersonal communication ("self-talk" redirects here) in anthropology and (older) psychology and private speech in developmental psychology. The first is useless for my purpose, the second mentions "may increase concentration and retention" with no source, the third confirms my suspicion that this behavior boosts memory, motivation and creativity, but it only talks about children.

Google Scholar yields lots of sports-related results for "self-talk" because it can apparently improve the performance of athletes and if there's something that obviously needs the optimization power of psychology departments, it is competitive sports. For "intrapersonal communication" it has papers indicating it helps in language acquisition and in dealing with social anxiety. Both are dwarfed by the results for "private speech", which again focus on children. There's very little on "autocommunication" and what is there has nothing to do with the functioning of individual minds.

So there's a bunch of converging pieces of evidence supporting the usefulness of this behavior, but they're from several seperate fields that don't seem to have noticed each other very much. How often do you find that?

Let me quickly list a few ways that I find it plausible to imagine talking to yourself could enhance rational thought.

• It taps the phonological loop, a distinct part of working memory that might otherwise sit idle in non-auditory tasks. More memory is always better, right?
• Auditory information is retained more easily, so making thoughts auditory helps remember them later.
• It lets you commit to thoughts, and build upon them, in a way that is more powerful (and slower) than unspoken thought while less powerful (but quicker) than action. (I don't have a good online source for this one, but Inside Jokes should convince you, and has lots of new cognitive science to boot.)
• System 1 does seem to understand language, especially if it does not use complex grammar - so this might be a useful way for results of System 2 reasoning to be propagated. Compare affirmations. Anecdotally, whenever I'm starting a complex task, I find stating my intent out loud makes a huge difference in how well the various submodules of my mind cooperate.
• It lets separate parts of your mind communicate in a fairly natural fashion, slows each of them down to the speed of your tongue and makes them not interrupt each other so much. (This is being used as a psychotherapy method.) In effect, your mouth becomes a kind of talking stick in their discussion.

All told, if you're talking to yourself you should be more able to solve complex problems than somebody of your IQ who doesn't, although somebody of your IQ with a pen and a piece of paper should still outthink both of you.

Given all that, I'm surprised this doesn't appear to have been discussed on LessWrong. Honesty: Beyond Internal Truth comes close but goes past it. Again, this might be me failing to use a search engine, but I think this is worth more of our attention that it has gotten so far.

I'm now almost certain talking to myself is useful, and I already find hindsight bias trying to convince me I've always been so sure. But I wasn't - I was suspicious because talking to yourself is an early warning sign of schizophrenia, and is frequent in dementia. But in those cases, it might simply be an autoregulatory response to failing working memory, not a pathogenetic element. After all, its memory enhancing effect is what the developmental psychologists say the kids use it for. I do expect social stigma, which is why I avoid talking to myself when around uninvolved or unsympathetic people, but my solving of complex problems tends to happen away from those anyway so that hasn't been an issue really.

So, what do you think? Useful?

My sister (and about 2.5 million other people) are headed to college in the fall.

I gave her a copy of Cal Newport's How to Win at College as a graduation gift, but given that her life is about to change more than it has in any of the past 14 years, one book probably isn't enough.

What books do you think incoming/recently arrived college students should be reading? You can assign reading with any motivation you'd like, but I'm looking especially hard for books that meet the following criteria:

• An average to somewhat-above-average college student can read them without much struggle.
• They have some practical application in college life/job seeking/being a good adult (rather than just being a personal favorite book).
• They are easy to find and budget-friendly (free online/cheap on Amazon/probably in the college library).
• They are not Oh, The Places You'll Go, just to head you pranksters off at the pass.

This is a detailed description of my reading and learning workflow. You may find ideas to adopt, or maybe you can tell me what I could be doing differently!

Overview

I've been using Spaced Repetition on and Off for the past few years, and have built a solid Anki habit this last three months, to the point where now I wonder how I could read books without entering the important points into Anki.

I recommend getting a habit of using Spaced Repetition, it's a small habit that doesn't require too much willpower (it can feel like a game, if done right!), and is useful in the long term.

Daily routine: transit

I have a dozen or so Anki decks. Some I consider “valuable” (Algorithms, Driving Code, Git commands), some less so (Paris Metro, Hiragana and Katakana, Vim commands, …). I also carry around a book, notebook and four-color pen.

On any downtime (waiting for transit, waiting in line in a store, standing in crowded transit…), I’ll review my decks, starting with those with the most due cards.

On some days I may not finish all the decks, but that’s no big deal; with an hour and a half of transit per day, I’ll get to them eventually.

If I can sit for a bit of time, and don’t have too many outstanding cards, I’ll usually read a book (or work on stuff in my notebook if I have some stuff that needs brainstorming).

Reading books

If I’m reading fiction, I’m relaxing, I don’t need to try to remember anything :)

If I’m reading non-fiction, I’ll usually have an index card as a bookmark and place to take notes - things to look up, summaries and rephrasings, diagrams, page numbers of parts to come back to, and of course things to enter in Anki (though I’ll sometimes just directly enter them in my phone).

I’ll reread my notes when I finished the book or a big chapter, or when I come back to the book after a long time, and eventually enter them in Anki (usually with Anki's web interface, which is quicker than typing on a phone).

Reading online material

I have a bunch of Google Docs where I take notes on various topics (why Google Docs? I can search them, share them if needed, work with them from various places). If I’m reading something I want to remember, I’ll usually have a corresponding google doc open in another window (so I can see both at the same time - hunting through tabs breaks the flow). My notes will be a mix of

• URLs marked as “to read” or “read” (with maybe a summary of what it’s about)
• Verbatim quotes
• Rephrasings, insights, questions, brainstoriming
• “anki format” cards (pairs of question, then answer), for example, from my Haskell deck:

How do I declare that Integer is of class Eq, using IntegerEq?
instance Eq Integer where
  x == y                =  x `integerEq` y

(note that in this case it's three lines, when entering into Anki I'll have to put the first line as question and the two other ones as answer)

Building the anki cards in Google docs makes it easier to make related cards by copying and pasting the same question and changing little bits ("Question: ???, B and C", "Question: A, ??? and C", "Question: A, B and ???")

In the evening, when I don’t have the energy for something more difficult, I’ll occasionally copy batches of stuff from Google Docs into Anki. To do that first I copy everything into a plain text file (to strip all formatting, otherwise things look weird in Anki and it’s distracting), and then cut-paste the cards into Anki by alt-tabbing between the text file and the Anki web interface (this sounds cumbersome but can be done fairly quickly using pretty much only the keyboard).

What if I get behind?

No big deal, I’ll review the “important” decks first, and then eventually catch up on the rest (Some people recommend using one big deck for everything; I prefer having several small decks because it makes it easier to catch up with what matters if I “fall of the bandwagon”).

What I learned

• Make Stupid and easy cards; I aim for having answers that are a single word
• I delete or suspend cards that I suspect are a waste of time (because I don’t care about learning that; because it’s too difficult; because I suspect it’s wrong).
• Double-sided cards are useful for learning languages (I used to make both directions independently)
• If you're learning a foreign language with a weird alphabet, it's worth the extra effort of finding an imput system on your phone (or computer) that handles that alphabet.

What I’d like to improve

Batch-entering data is a bit complicated, I wish I could just select a bunch of text in google docs and say "just put all this in Anki". However, as a low-energy habit batch-copying stuff feels a bit like a game so I don't mind that much.

• I wish I could put some decks at “low throttle” and some at “high throttle” (say, I want to learn 20 driving code cards a day, but only 3 vim cards). Anki has a setting that says how many new cards you get, but it's global; so either I change that setting all the time (which can be done fairly quickly), or control the influx by leaving stuff in Google Docs.
• I wish I could control randomization: just select a bunch of cards and say "randomize these". There's some cards I want to see in a random order, and some where I'd rather see them in the original order.
• Anki is bad at handling synchronization, if I used Anki on my phone and want to use the web interface, I need to synchronize first, which takes a few minutes and may fail; otherwise there will be a conflict and I will have to pick which of the two datasets I keep. This is another reason why I prefer to use Google Docs for staging: waiting for synchronization breaks my flow.
• How do people use evernote or supermemo?

More resources on Spaced Repetition

The article on the Wiki points to a few discussions here of Spaced Repetition (which are worth reading if you want to see how other people use it), including Gwern's excellent article.

How about you? Do you use Spaced Repetition? Have you tried, but give up? Do you have a workflow with some bits that differ from mine? Do you have any tips of things I could do better?

From the blog [Bakadesuyo](http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2013/10/productivity-ninja/):

>1) Know When You’re At Your Best

>And plan accordingly. To be a productivity ninja focus less on time management, and more on managing your energy.

>Charlie Munger, Vice-Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, used a system like this to make sure he was always growing.

>He identified the hours when he was at his best — and then routinely stole one of those peak hours for learning.

>>Charlie Munger hit upon one strategy when he was a young lawyer. He decided that whenever his legal work was not as intellectually stimulating as he’d like, “I would sell the best hour of the day to myself.” He would take otherwise billable time at the peak of his day and dedicate it to his own thinking and learning. “And only after improving my mind — only after I’d used my best hour improving myself — would I sell my time to my professional clients.”

There are four more entries, but posting them here would probably violate copyright. Anyone implement any of the suggestions listed?

Some people seem to be a bit too generous for their own good. I know a precious few people who are especially good at saying "no" when asked to take on new responsibilities that would put them over their limits. I love working with people like that because I can always trust them to tell me when it would be better for me to find someone else to do the thing. I expect this to be an extremely valuable skill it would probably be good for many of us to understand, learn, and be able to teach to people who really need it.

In Common sense as a prior, I used the example of prayer as a practice that is probably adaptive but the people who adopt it may not know why it is adaptive. I wrote:

Another striking example is bedtime prayer. In many Christian traditions I am aware of, it is common to pray before going to sleep. And in the tradition I was raised in, the main components of prayer were listing things you were grateful for, asking for forgiveness for all the mistakes you made that day and thinking about what you would do to avoid similar mistakes in the future, and asking God for things. Christians might say the point of this is that it is a duty to God, that repentance is a requirement for entry to heaven, or that asking God for things makes God more likely to intervene and create miracles. However, I think these activities are reasonable for different reasons: gratitude journals are great, reflecting on mistakes is a great way to learn and overcome weaknesses, and it is a good idea to get clear about what you really want out of life in the short-term and the long-term.

…I think it would be better still to introduce a different routine that serves similar functions—this is something I have done in my own life…

Someone recently wrote to me asking about my routine. I wrote this person an answer, so I thought I might as well share it with others. I have a number of structured routines like this that I find helpful and have considered sharing more widely, so this post will also serve as a test for whether I should share these routines. (These routines include: planning the day and tracking your time, planning and evaluating a project, doing a literature search, keeping a record of personal principles, reading and evaluating a paper, weekly review, and a few others that are less developed.)

Below, I offer and explanation of my routine, a template for following it, and give examples of what it looks like when I have used it. I have been doing this for about 6 weeks and I spend 5-15 minutes doing this per day. I was raised in a very religious family, and did something pretty similar for about the first 18 years of my life. I think it is good, but I don’t think the effect size/my tracking ability combo allows me to confidently distinguish between “it’s a placebo” and “it actually works” on the basis of my personal experience. I do it because it intuitively makes sense to me, it fits with some practices that I think are likely to be adaptive, it seems good so far, it seems good from a common sense perspective, some impressive people I know do similar things, and I’ve been told that psychological research on gratitude journals supports the idea. (Also, I don't mind benefits from "mere" placebos.)

One quick point of caution is that I would be careful about framing this as “atheist prayers” in your head. I framed it that way for a while and thought it would be a good idea to do it, but “atheist prayers” just sounds silly. On the other hand, “daily reflection” just sounds reasonable. I found framing it this way made me substantially more motivated to actually follow the process.

A detailed explanation of my process

1.       Getting started

a.       Download the document “Daily reflection.”

2.       Step by step

a.       At the end of the work day or before going to sleep, open up “Daily reflection.”

b.      Copy and paste the template for today’s entry.

c.       Fill in today’s date, e.g. 18 August 2013.

d.      Under “What went well today/what am I grateful for?”

                                                               i.      List things you feel good about doing recently or things you enjoyed today.

                                                             ii.      List general things you have noticed lately and appreciate, even if they are not recent.

                                                            iii.      (This is supposed to help you notice good things in life and seek out more of the good things.)

e.      Under “Where would I like to improve? What principles could I follow in the future in order to improve?”

                                                               i.      List any mistakes you think you made today.

                                                             ii.      Try to think about principles you could follow to avoid similar mistakes in the future.

                                                            iii.      If any of the principles seem useful or generally applicable, save them in another document, titled e.g. “My Principles.” I review my principles roughly monthly, and get reminders when I add new ones. I took this idea from Ray Dalio.

                                                           iv.      (This is supposed to help you learn from mistakes and identify, manage, and/or overcome personal weaknesses.)

b.      Under “What do I hope for in the future?”

                                                               i.      List upcoming challenges and opportunities that you hope go well.

                                                             ii.      List long-term priorities that you hope go well, especially ones you haven’t thought about lately or have been neglecting.

                                                          iii.      (This is supposed to help you keep track of what you really want out of life in the short-term and the long-term.)

3.       Other notes      

a.       If it is inconvenient to make notes in this document and I’m not going to open up the document, I will sometimes do my daily reflection in my head.

b.      I generally list 2-5 things under each category per day.

c.       I find this complements well with tracking your time. If you do track your time, you can look at how you spent your day and think about what was productive and what was unproductive. This helps with identifying items for the first and second steps.

Daily entries (template)

1.       Date:

a.       What went well today/what am I grateful for?

b.      Where would I like to improve? What principles could I follow in the future in order to improve?

c.       What do I hope for in the future?

2.       Date:

a.       What went well today/what am I grateful for?

b.      Where would I like to improve? What principles could I follow in the future in order to improve?

c.       What do I hope for in the future?

3.       Date:

a.       What went well today/what am I grateful for?

b.      Where would I like to improve? What principles could I follow in the future in order to improve?

c.       What do I hope for in the future?

Examples of daily entries (stripped of anything personal or embarrassing)

1.       9 August 2013

a.       What went well today/what am I grateful for?

                                                               i.      Got my post drafted

                                                             ii.      Great talk with [friend]

                                                            iii.      Enjoyed dinner

                                                           iv.      Talking to [other friend] was useful

b.      Where would I like to improve? What principles could I follow in the future in order to improve?

                                                               i.      Spending too much on dinners

                                                             ii.      Spending too much time criticizing people with dumb views

c.       What do I hope for in the future?

                                                               i.      Evaluate my projects well after they are done

                                                             ii.      Use my framework for evaluating topics to work on

2.       13 August 2013

a.       What went well today/what am I grateful for?

                                                               i.      Really enjoyed the weekly review

                                                             ii.      Glad I e-mailed a number of people to engage them on their perspectives

                                                            iii.      Glad I came up with the idea that 80K say what it is going to change and be held accountable for making the changes

b.      Where would I like to improve? What principles could I follow in the future in order to improve?

                                                               i.      I spent too much time checking the LW blog in response to my stuff

                                                             ii.      I’m not sure how useful it was for me to be involved with this prioritization institute stuff

                                                            iii.      I didn’t do a good job filling out my time tracker

                                                           iv.      Maybe [friend] is right that I didn’t do a good job as I think defending my common sense prior post

c.       What do I hope for in the future?

                                                               i.      Get my GCRI talk outline done

                                                             ii.      Get to the point where I can do 10 pull-ups

                                                            iii.      Review my common sense prior project

                                                           iv.      Share my productivity procedures with others

Article Prerequisite: Self-Improvement or Shiny Distraction: Why Less Wrong is anti-Instrumental Rationality

Introduction

The goal of this post is to explore the idea of rationality training, feedback and ideas are greatly appreciated.

Less Wrong’s stated mission is to help people become more rational, and it has made progress toward that goal. Members read and discuss useful ideas on the internet, get instant feedback because of the voting system, and schedule meetups with other members. Less Wrong also helps attract more people to rationality.

Less Wrong helps with sharing ideas, but it fails to help people put elements of epistemic and instrumental rationality into practice. This is a serious problem, but it would be hard to fix without altering the core functionality of Less Wrong.

Having separate websites for reading and discussing ideas and then actually using those ideas would improve the real world performance of the Less Wrong community while maintaining the idea discussion, “marketing”, and other benefits of the Less Wrong website.

How to create a useful website for self improvement

1. Knowledge Management

When reading blogs, people only see recent posts and those posts are not significantly revised. A wiki would allow for the creation of a large body of organized knowledge that is frequently revised. Each wiki post would have a description, benefits of the topic described, resources to learn the topic, user submitted resources to learn the topic, and reviews of each resource. Posts would be organized hierarchically and voted on for usefulness to help readers effectively improve what they are looking for. Users could share self-improvement plans to help others improve effectiveness in general or in a specific topic as quickly as possible.

2. Effective Learning

Resources to learn topics should be arranged or written for effective skill acquisition, and there may be different resource categories like exercises for deliberate practice or active recall questions for spaced repetition.

3. Quality Contributors

Contributors would, at the very least, need to be familiar with how to write articles that supported the skill acquisition process agreed upon by the entire community. Required writing and research skills would produce higher quality work. I am not sure if being a rationalist would improve the quality of articles.

Problems

1. Difficult requirements

The number of prerequisites necessary to contribute to and use the wiki would really lower the amount of people who will be able to benefit from the wiki. It's a trade off between effectiveness and popularity. What elements should be included to maximize the effectiveness of the website?

2. Interest

There has to be enough interest in the website, or else a different project should be started instead. How many people in the Less Wrong community, and the world at large, would be interested in self improvement and rationality? 

3. Increasing the effectiveness of non altruistic people

How much of the target audience wants to improve the world? If most do not, then the wiki would essentially be a net negative on the world. What should the criteria be to view and contribute to the wiki? Perhaps only Less Wrong members should be able to view and edit the wiki, and contributors must read a quick start guide and pass a quick test before being allowed to post.

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:

• One resource per comment
• Place your comment in the appropriate category
• Only post resources you've actually used. Write a short review of your resource and if possible, a short summary of the key points. Say whether or not you would recommend the resource. 
• Mention approximately how long it's been since you first used the resource and whether or not you have made external improvements in the subject area. On the other hand, keep in mind that there are a myriad of confounding factors that can be present when applying self-help resources to your life, and therefore it is perfectly acceptable to say "I would recommend this resource, but I have not improved" or "I do not recommend this resource, but I have improved". 

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. 

There have been a couple discussion posts on this, but let's make it general and collect our tips in one place. It's also a good way to encourage each other at getting better at this - looking for info more often and more efficiently.

So, if you want to find something out, where do you look, and how? Who do you ask?

So what the world needs is yet another task management program, right?

My idea is software which automatically implements productivity strategies, measures the effectiveness of those strategies, and analyses which strategies work best for you.  Hopefully, using the software would result in a sustained increase in your productivity over time.

By "productivity strategies" I mean things like: the recommendations in the the anti-procrastination algorithm, the pomodoro technique, exercising regularly, pre-commitment, experimenting with sleep patterns, gamifying your tasks and so forth.

In practical terms, what I'm envisioning is an extensible software framework.  The core program would be a simple task list manager: add tasks to be done in the future, check off items as done when completed and send notifications to the user.

This core framework would then be extended by plugins, which represented different productivity strategies.  For example, the pomodoro plugin might make your first task at 9am each morning to review your task list and choose the most important three tasks (MITs), your second task to set and begin a timer for 30 minutes and your third task to complete that top MIT you chose.  After 30 minutes, it would add a new task of taking a five minute relaxation break and send you a notification to let you know.  Five minutes later, it would notify you again to finish your relaxation break task, with a fresh task to re-start the timer and then back to your MITs for a further 30 minutes.

The software could independently activate and deactivate the plugins in order to collect sufficient data to suggest which strategies were most effective for you.  Over time, more plugins would be written as people made further suggestions.  Existing plugins could be potentially improved and automatically reviewed using A/B testing.

When deciding whether a strategy is "effective", I mean that a large number of tasks are completed, that the remaining number of tasks on the list is small and that the age of those tasks is not too great.  However, the criteria could be extended to ask for an indication of mood from the user, to allow for low stress optimisation, for example.  Perhaps stochastic self sampling would work well here.

If users were willing to opt into providing anonymous data, the software could automate a community review of the strategies: which strategies seem to be most commonly effective?  Affinity analysis could even be used to recommend plugins that were helpful to other people who responded to similar strategies as you.

What are your comments, and specifically criticisms, of this idea?  Would you try using software like this if it existed?  Would you like to assist in writing software like this?

Over the last 6 months I've started doing a lot of things differently. Some of these changes seem to have increased my work output a good bit and made me happier. I normally hesitate to share habits, but I'm pretty happy with these in particular, and even if they will work for only a few people I think they are worth sharing. Most of the habits I've adopted are fairly common, but I hope I can help people anyway by identifying the habits that have most helped me.

I'm curious to hear about alternatives that have worked for you. 

Workflowy: 

Workflowy lets you edit a single collapsible outline. I use it very extensively. It is much more convenient than the network of google docs it replaced, and I use it much more often. It is much like other outliners, but (1) has a slicker interface, (2) works offline, (3) lets you recurse on and share sublists.

Workflowy is free to try but costs $5 a month. This may seem expensive for what it does, but if you use (or could use!) outliners a lot this is not enough to matter. After some searching Workflowy seems like the best option. I'm sure I like Workflowy more than most people, but I really like it, so I think it's worth trying.

Here is a skeleton of my workflowy list, which hosts many of the other systems in this post.

Checklists:

I have a checklist of tasks to do each night before sleeping. In the past I would often forget one of these things; putting them in a checklist helps me do them more reliably and makes me more relaxed. 

Checklists for other occasions, particularly waking up and traveling, are also helpful, but are much less important to me. 

Todo lists:

I now maintain two todo lists: one with a list of tasks for each upcoming day, and one with a list of tasks for future events ("I'm in the UK," "it is Thursday," "I'm going grocery shopping"). Whenever I think of something I should do, I either put it under a future day and do it when that day arrives, or I put it with an associated event. Each night I check both lists and decide what to do tomorrow. 

Beeminder:

Beeminder is a service that holds you to commitments and tracks your progress. It has helped me a lot over the last months. I've experimented with a few different commitments, but two have been most useful: following a daily routine, and doing a minimum amount of work each day (on average). Beeminder has pretty low overhead.

Reflection:

I spend about 10% of my productive time reflecting on how things have been going and what I should do differently. I benefit from producing concrete possible changes each time I sit down to think. I realized how important this is for me recently; since I've started doing it more reliably, I have gotten a lot more out of reflection.

Pomodoro:

I do my work in uninterrupted blocks of 20 minutes, punctuated by 2-3 minute breaks. This is my bastardized, minimalist version of the pomodoro technique, which I arrived at by trial and error. I use Alinof timer, which was recommended to me by a friend. 

Calendar:

I now record commitments on my calendar reliably and check it each night. I failed to do this for 6 months after finishing my undergraduate degree, which I think was a serious mistake. I became much more reliable at checking my calendar after adopting a daily checklist.

Time Logging:

Whenever I start a new activity, I write down the current time and a description of what I just stopped doing. At the end of the day I spend a few minutes reading this log and estimating how much time I spent on each activity. This makes me more attentive to time during the day, helps me remember what I did throughout the day, and frees up attention. Sometimes I use the logs to try and notice trends. For example, I've been exercising on random days and measuring how this affects my time. I don't yet know if this helps at all.

Catch:

Catch is a note-taking app. It is very minimal, and lets you record a voice note by pressing a single button. It has substantially increased my affordance for taking notes during the day, which I use to remember todo items and help with time logging.

I have started the Tel Aviv Self-Improvement Meetup Group. It is not about rationality or LessWrong per se, but it is heavily influenced by rationality dojos and LW posts in the applied rationality, personal optimization and anti-akrasia cluster. As the description says, it is

A group of people helping each other apply rationality to our everyday lives, in order to improve our skills, make the best decisions, become productive and achieve our goals.

If you're interested and in the area, you're welcome to join. If you have any comments or suggestions, based perhaps on experience with similar groups, please share.

We investigated the ability of people to retrieve information about objects as they moved through rooms in a virtual space. People were probed with object names that were either associated with the person (i.e., carried) or dissociated from the person (i.e., just set down). Also, people either did or did not shift spatial regions (i.e., go to a new room). Information about objects was less accessible when the objects were dissociated from the person. Furthermore, information about an object was also less available when there was a spatial shift. However, the spatial shift had a larger effect on memory for the currently associated object. These data are interpreted as being more supportive of a situation model explanation, following on work using narratives and film. Simpler memory-based accounts that do not take into account the context in which a person is embedded cannot adequately account for the results.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/m6lq80675m22232h/ 

There's probably some deep implications to this I'm not qualified to plumb.  But next time I'm concentrating on something, and need to get up from the computer and walk around a bit, I'm going to try avoiding doorways.

Little over a week ago my work watched this video for a "self-improvement" seminar.
I hadn't seen this linked anywhere on LW yet, and thought it might be relevant, given lukeprogs' article on motivation.

The old thread (found here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/6dc/the_true_rejection_challenge/ ) was becoming very unwieldy and hard to check, so many people suggested we made a second one. I just realized that the only reason it didn't exist yet was bystander effect-like, so I desiced to just do this one.

From the original thread:

An exercise:

Name something that you do not do but should/wish you did/are told you ought, or that you do less than is normally recommended.  (For instance, "exercise" or "eat vegetables".)

Make an exhaustive list of your sufficient conditions for avoiding this thing.  (If you suspect that your list may be non-exhaustive, mention that in your comment.)

Precommit that: If someone comes up with a way to do the thing which doesn't have any of your listed problems, you will at least try it.  It counts if you come up with this response yourself upon making your list.

(Based on: Is That Your True Rejection?)

Edit to add: Kindly stick to the spirit of the exercise; if you have no advice in line with the exercise, this is not the place to offer it.  Do not drift into confrontational or abusive demands that people adjust their restrictions to suit your cached suggestion, and do not offer unsolicited other-optimizing.

So my personal life just got very interesting. In a net-positive way, certainly, but still, I am, as Calculon put it, "filled with a large number of powerful emotions!" -- some of which are anxious and/or panicky.

This is making it annoyingly difficult to focus at work. I am an absolutely textbook "Attention Deficit Oh-look-a-squirrel!" case at the best of times, and this seems to have made it much, much worse. I can handle small tasks, but anything where I'm going to have to spend an hour solving multiple problems before producing results, I can hardly make myself start.

Has anyone dealt with the problem of maintaining productive focus while emotionally overwhelmed/exhausted, and if so, do you have any pointers?