It's not obvious that attention is being diverted to obscuring information.

It makes it harder for me to build a mental image of the situation that he's describing. If it's harder than I will put less attention on the situation.

Here it's a subtle choice. But it points to a pattern. A common general piece of advice on telling stories which draw listeners attention is to provide a lot of adjectives to make it more easy for the audience to picture what you are describing.

The kind that most people don't put to practice when they hear it. Instead of describing the principle abstractly, I pointed to an example.

It takes effort to provide listeners with details. It's still one of the pure white hat strategies to getting peoples attention when you speak.

As far as the information being relevant, when I give someone recommendation about testosterone, the gender of the person I'm interacting with matters.

I have a good idea that more testosterone in males will help with given attention. I'm less certain, that trying to increase testosterone is a good strategy for females.

One problem I have with this proposal is that Discussion isn't for low-quality content (this seems to be a common misconception), it's for a different type of content. Making Discussion into the land of less popular posts seems like it eliminates potential utility.

There is a distinct absence of Eliezer Yudkowsky/Michael Vassar slashfic on the internet. Let's keep it that way.

Thanks so much for letting me know that you liked this and, more importantly, what worked for you and what didn't. Also thanks for the two month waiting period to make sure that it works long-term.

~

Too much introspection for every day: I incorporated bits of this into the weekly review.

I'm interested in what this looks like. Could you elaborate?

I understand that even books written in Finnish not infrequently have titles and are available for purchase.

Title and link to buy?

I had my first book published. It's a textbook for upper elementary school, and I'm reasonably confident it is the only such textbook in the world that includes

• an explanation of the planning fallacy

• a description of confirmation bias and survivor bias

• a sub-section titled "What do you think you know and why do you think you know it?".

This article was so good, I wanted to put it to a test. At the start of October I began to try the advice given in the article. Now, after two months of practice, I wanted to give thanks. This practice has increased my productivity substantially; for example I am now almost two months ahead of schedule on a major work project. This is quite unprecedented experience for me.

I didn't follow your every advice and I had to abandon some ideas that obviosly were not working for me. Following are my experiences: I hope that somebody gets some little benefit from them.

The most helpful bits of the article:

• Write things down. This really was the most important rule. I now have a notepad with a pencil next to it in every room of my apartment. Whenever a thought hits me, I write it down.

• Two minute rule. This was also something I needed to hear. I used to have a bad habit of procrastinating over the smallest things. The "Two Minute Rule" was a useful heuristic to get rid of that.

• To-Do-lists. I was already using my calendar a lot, but using to-do-lists more actively was a major change.

• Action-Waiting-Reference. Very useful. I now have a habit of not leaving anything on a desk unless I'm going to do something to it within two days. Rest of the things go into "Waiting" folder or "Reference" shelf.

• Weekly review. This seemed like a small thing, but it was something that had been missing from my previous attempts at increasing productivity.

Things I tried, but didn't really work for me:

• Workflowy. The possibility of creating hierarchical lists is fantastic, but without notifications and alerts a to-do-list isn't as helpful to me. I use Gtasks for Android instead.

• Eisenhower Matrix. Too many of the tasks seemed to be "Kinda Important and Semi-Urgent", i.e. I had trouble sorting them under Eisenhower matrix.

• Always Inbox Zero. Don't really see the point. It seems like too much trouble for too little benefit. This might be due to the fact that I don't get that much email, at least compared to some people.

• Daily reviews. Too much introspection for every day: I incorporated bits of this into the weekly review.

This article made a significant change in my life. Thank you for posting it.

I took the survey.

This is, incidentally, my first comment on LessWrong. I've lurked for years, and pretty much thought I'll probably stay as a lurker for good. For some reason taking the survey made me want to break my silence.So that's a bonus, I guess.