Starting to go running in the early morning, right after I wake up. Idea was to get running done before it gets all hot and sunny. It seems to take some time after waking up for my willpower to kick in though.

Also, sticking to a regular running schedule, though I might get better at this by just acknowledging that early-morning running is a non-starter and trying to acclimatize to running in the heat.

A few colleagues told me how they taught their kids to sign and how it reduced frustration, so I looked it up, my notes are here. A lot of the papers claiming benefits from sign language seem to be from the same few people, and when I looked for the opinions of others, I got:

Claims that signing with infants benefits language development are examined. Fourteen infants aged 19 to 23 months were tested on their comprehension and production of novel labels in a word learning task. Infants participated in two conditions. In the Sign + Word condition, infants learned both a signed and vocal label for a novel toy, whereas in the Word Only condition, infants were taught only a vocal label for the novel toy. Results showed that when children participated first in the Sign + Word condition, their comprehension and production abilities were lower than when trained first in the Word Only condition. Previous exposure to sign language was not related to infants’ performance on the word learning task, although there was a marginal effect of previous language ability on performance. Contrary to previous findings (e.g., Goodwyn, Acredolo, & Brown, 2000), the sign and word combination did not facilitate children’s learning of spoken labels.

... so it may have some small benefit, but nothing huge.

We tried teaching ours a few simple signs, the only ones that stuck were those for eating and drinking. Now he's speaking a bit, so there's not much point any more.

Registered.

I've recently been thinking about making a home gym. Would a barbell, bench, exercise mats, Starting Strength book, and rowing machine be appropriate for a 'good enough' setup? Or is this the type of stuff you can only do in a real gym?

What is your opinion on jumping rope? It has several advantages in terms of laziness, and makes me completely exhausted in just a few minutes.

I like this post, since it is pretty useful content, and, based on my limited knowledge, seems reasonable. However, there are many nearby recommendations in this space that would probably not be as reasonable, and many people would be unable to judge. I think it would be good to have some community norm around "recommendation" posts like this that filters for reasonable advice. I'm not entirely sure what the best thing to do is, but one idea would be to ask such posts to make concrete predictions, and have people follow up with their reports later of whether the predictions held.

For instance, in this case, RomeoStevens can probably make fairly concrete predictions of what sort of strength and other gains people will have conditioned on doing these lifts twice a week for a month (or two months perhaps). I think making those predictions explicitly would be useful, both for vetting the method and for calibrating against possible oversights (for instance, I've found that women are quite different from men when it comes to strength training, so perhaps this advice works really well for people sharing RomeoStevens' gender but not for the opposite gender, or maybe it works really well for both genders).

For this post, I would guess the prediction is steady progress for at least 6 weeks (for males) before the given linear increase rule necessitates a reset. I suspect females need to progress more slowly to get ideal long-term gains, but I'm not sure.

Long post--my apologies.

Background:

I have been trying for a while now to follow the paleo (or caveman) diet. I think the argument for the diet seems legitimate enough (or, I should say, I am not smart enough in those areas to disprove their argument). Additionally, there seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence in favor of the diet, especially from people with auto-immune diseases, which I have. So for those two reasons, I have been trying to make it a permanent lifestyle change; what ends up happening is that I struggle through one week and rebound into massive cheating.

The Problem:

The problem that I have run in to—which I think is fairly common—is the diet is extremely difficult to maintain if you work a lot or don’t want to devote the majority of your free time to cooking. It takes a LOT of time to cook all your food from scratch. The paleo diet is: no grains, no dairy, no legumes, no sugar, nothing artificially made or with artificial ingredients, no potatoes, no peanuts, and very low added salt.

You are mostly supposed to eat meat, fish, poultry, eggs, and vegetables, with occasional nuts, fruits, and starchy vegetables like yams. These foods spoil easily, and require a decent amount of time to prepare, especially when you compare them with the typical American diet. So the problems I have run into are (1) it is a difficult lifestyle to maintain due to the time it takes to cook everything (2) the foods perish easily and I am stuck going to the supermarket 2+ times a week.

My Solution:

Change1: Optimize my cooking regimen by standardizing it. I now eat the exact same thing for breakfast and the exact same thing for lunch and dinner every day. At some point I expect this to get boring, but so far the results have been good.

This has the result of: -Food preparation time is shortened. I am no longer trying out new foods or recipes, which is a time waster.
-I purposely eat the same thing for lunch and dinner, thus I only have to cook one meal instead of two. -I cook said lunch and dinner for the next day while I am eating my dinner. -I purposely selected foods which do not require much attention to make, thus I can eat my dinner while I cook the next days food. I have been eating frozen organic stir fry vegetables and chicken cooked in coconut oil. I supplement it with a salad which takes about 1 minute to make if you buy your veggies cut up.

Change 2: After asking a clerk, I found out that all grocery stores (or at least the ones in Hawaii) get a resupply of foods on Tuesdays. So if you buy your foods on Sunday, like I was doing previously, you are getting vegetables and meat which are 5 days older than if you buy foods on Tuesdays. I have started grocery shopping on Tuesdays, which I expect to limit my grocery shopping trips to one time per week.

Change 3: Since food preparation is a time suck, I wash all the fruits and vegetables immediately upon returning from the store. I have not timed it, but it does appear that washing all the produce in one batch is faster than washing it in 7-21 separate batches. I also started packaging snacks in baggies directly after washing them, so I don’t have to spend time each night making snacks for work.

At this point (day 3 of strict diet) no health changes have occurred. Advocates say the health changes take 2-4 weeks to be noticeable.

I have recently been trying to mediate my motivation and emotional states using film and television.

I've been watching hardly any TV at all over the past 18 months. I have other things to do, most of what's available isn't very appealing, and anything that does appeal would involve a significant future investment of my time. I do wonder if I'm missing a trick, though.

Fairly recently I noticed that when I do watch television, it has a significant impact on my motivation to do things. If I watch something filled with fit athletic bodies doing fit athletic things, I feel considerably more motivated to go outside and get some exercise. If I watch something filled with smart people doing smart things, I feel more motivated to sit down and study. At the moment, exercise and study are my two biggest akrasia-blocked activities, so significant gains in this regard would be extremely useful.

There are, unfortunately, no television shows to my knowledge about chronicling one's motivation and leisure activities in a quantifiably tractable manner, so I'm not really motivated to do that. Any assessments I make will be purely anecdotal in nature.

The Giver trilogy is age appropriate and well-written dystopian children's novel. I remember very distinctly that this was my first exposure to what seemed like a plausible future world. (I read this in 4th grade so it might be too easy. )

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy would also be good; I read this in 6th grade and it was book that sparked my interest in sci-fi.