I attended the July week-long camp, AMA.

Some of my post-camp impressions:

• Not all the skills I learned were new, but instructors were good at showing me how to apply them more broadly (i.e. I already usually priced small expenditures against the cost of chocolate lava cake at a restaurant as my $/food pleasure utility benchmark, but I didn't have pins for other things of value to me, like my time
• Some of the useful things I learned were software (Remember the Milk and Freemind, especially). I didn't know much about these tools before, and it was really helpful to have instructors go over specific ways they used them, work through upcoming projects with me, answer follow-up questions months later, and do specific tie-ins to things we learned in other units
• The best thing about the minicamp was its coherency. Over the first few days, the skills felt a bit piecemeal, but by the end of the week, I had learned how to make a lot of the discrete skills and tricks reinforce each other,

Specific things that improved as the result of attending minicamp:

• I do a fair amount of freelance writing, and I think I've gotten about 1.5x-2x faster at turning out writing.
• I spend a lot less time/mental energy/stress trying to keep track of tasks, and it's easy for me to set up tripwires for commitments in the far future (I've already got a reminder set to schedule a Ramond Llull party this summer, setting quick tasks to email an article I like to a friend so I don't have to keep muttering it to myself til I'm by my email).
• I'm more likely to use precommitments to reduce analysis paralysis (I'll try getting to the mall to run this errand, but if it takes more than 10 minutes to get to the highway, I'll give up and won't feel bad; I don't know when I want to get a cookie because I want a cookie or because I want a treat, so I'll go to random.org and take a 1/3 chance instead of worrying about whether I ought to)
• I'm studying martial arts.