I find that I don't have good habits for using, just like I don't have good habits for very many other things. I'm only likely to use a hack if I was reading about it earlier and then remembered to try it within a few days. I would probably try it with mild success, maybe using it every once in a while.

For me, forming habits (beeminder) is the most important hack I use.

Are you making fun of all us productivity porn connoisseurs? :)

Seriously though, we're pretty proud of the Beeminder blog: http://blog.beeminder.com

There's also good stuff at http://blog.idonethis.com though they actually post too frequently for my taste.

Ooh, and http://markforster.net and of course lifehacker.com has a gazillion interesting ideas.

(And, yes, self-parody that I am, I second your call for a comprehensive survey article on productivity techniques!)

I would be very grateful if someone wrote an article summarizing all of the different methods of getting organized and learning to do so, with links to all of those various productivity blogs.

Also, shoe size correlates with income (i.e. correlation is no proof of causality).

It may well be that it is an environment of cooperative learning that is conducive to both testing higher on IQ tests and cooperating on prisoner's dilemmata.

(The paper's "environment" robustness test only checked by factoring out private schools, which is a poor proxy.)

Azkaban is commentary on Muggle prisons. I really hope people got that.

Wow, this was harder than expected. It's almost like the education theory people don't talk to psychologists. There were some studies that claimed to measure conscientiousness, but it wasn't apparently related to Conscientiousness, so who knows? Maybe they were measuring zombie!conscientiousness?

I trolled the obvious sources for thirty minutes and came up with:

1. Kim, E., & Schniederjans, M. J. 2004. The role of personality characteristics in web-based distance education courses. Communications of the ACM 47(3):95–98.

2. Schniederjans, M. J. & Kim, E. 2005. Relationship of student undergraduate personality characteristics in a total web-based environment: an empirical study. Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education 3(2):205-221.

3. Bassili, J. N. 2006. Promotion and prevention orientations in the choice to attend lectures or watch them online. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 22:444-455.

Good luck, brother. I hope other people have better luck.

Spaced Repetition is very useful for studying efficiently.

I didn't know you were from Seattle! Definitely give me/us a message if you visit.

I am in general interested in seeing Caplan's work publicized on LW. I may do it myself at some point. If we come up with anything other than "what Caplan says makes sense for the most part" I'll be sure to at least make a discussion post.

I've started building a diode laser cavity (a box you shine a laser into which makes it have a more precise color), which means that I've been buying parts and spending lots of time in a machine shop. Most of what I'll be doing in the coming months will be using a mill to cut out various sized chunks of aluminum.

I've also been helping organize a conference.

Personal wise, I've been trying to pay attention to my mood and emotions more by keeping records.

I have difficulty recognizing emotions. I tend to categorize them as physical feelings, such as a certain tightness to the stomach, or between the ribs. I've come to associate these with commonly known emotions, since some of them correlate with thoughts making them easier to pinpoint, but sometimes I have specific feelings and I don't know if it is a known emotion or not.

It is pretty rare that I don't know what I'm feeling, but I have a record of the first time I felt intense jealousy/anger/stress, and I wrote about "hot skin, wide eyes, a burning feeling on my chest like a rash, and tightness between the shoulders" and my thoughts before I realized the name for what was happening.