I've had trouble keeping up with certain prescribed medications due to side effects and a sense that I may be comparing them to an atypical baseline (non-medicated) baseline.

Today, I finally got around to implementing a new schedule for medications & for handling the side effects. Since I procrastinated so long, I also now have a much better baseline helped by the acquisition of an Android application designed explicitly for people with my condition that makes it easy to log symptoms even without Internet access. I also started using a 2 button timer so that I am reminded to go back and log how I'm doing after the initial onset of symptoms.

I still have to do number crunching and see what this new (almost certainly more accurate) baseline says.

Briefly, I am going to take advantage of the following ideas:

• Cutting out all the obstacles I can think of
• Feeding your inner pigeon
• Habit RPG (and everything that entails)

I took the survey a few days ago and ran into trouble trying to answer the IQ test-related questions (IQ/SAT/ACT/etc.) because I would have to dig around for the answers to those questions and that required more effort than I wanted to spend on a survey.

The instructions for entering percents was also a bit confusing.

Other than that, the survey was well designed. I really appreciated how clear you were about where it was OK to stop and that it was fine to leave things blank.

1

Lock the door and video the process of locking & verifying. Bring the video with you on your trip.

Pro:

• Whenever you're in doubt, just watch the video.
• No need to even bug a friend.

Con:

• Assumes you have a digital camera handy and a way to view the recording on the trip.

7

Use SleepBot and just say the stuff aloud so it auto-records them. Then, go to sleep.

Pro:

• Instant/easy recording

Con:

• Have to dig through recordings the next day
• Requires having a smartphone plugged in & near the bed

Flash game: Socrates Jones: Pro Philosopher. The gameplay is similar to Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, but you instead debate famous philosophers in an attempt to understand morality.

It's pretty short and suffers from the "I know the correct answer here, but how did the author of the game intend me to indicate that" problem, but I found it fun and interesting nonetheless. It helps to keep the walkthrough at hand, so you can resort to it if you start getting frustrated. Even though the arguments were only addressed relatively briefly, I actually felt like I'd learned something. Liked the music, too.

Online Videos Thread

I've speculated on this in the past. I was reading a book and it mentioned that one of the things used to help autism spectrum people learn social skills is something called Social Stories (TM); read through the article and some of the linked materials or look at Google hits, and tell me that MLP doesn't sound a lot like how one might design a maximally-appealing 'Advanced Social Stories'...

"Don't Shoot the Dog" by Karen Pryor is about conditioning / elementary hedonics for humans and other mammals. This book is really really important and I should write more about it at some point.

I've speculated on this in the past. I was reading a book and it mentioned that one of the things used to help autism spectrum people learn social skills is something called Social Stories (TM); read through the article and some of the linked materials or look at Google hits, and tell me that MLP doesn't sound a lot like how one might design a maximally-appealing 'Advanced Social Stories'...

At work, one of our customers is known to be "unique"/"challenging". The customers normally talk to a person (let's call this the middle person) who used to work in the customers' field and translates their requests for software developers. The customer had gone through >3 e-mail rounds with the middle person and I as we tried to build an item to her liking.

After the last e-mail complaint, I printed out all of the e-mails related to the topic, all of the example cases she pointed at, and tried to figure out what state of mind would make her so frustrated and have so much trouble getting us to do what she wants as opposed to simply taking each e-mail at face value. I made one more tweak to the product, e-mailed the middle person, and held my breath.

This happened about 2 weeks ago.

My company hasn't received any more e-mails about the product so it seems to be a great success.

I post this anecdote here because the idea of approaching the problem like that was almost certainly taken from HPMoR. Quote is below:

Harry kept his expression blank, and realized one second too late that it might as well have been a signed confession. Professor Quirrell didn't care what your expression looked like, he cared which states of mind made it likely.

Caution: This probably only works if the person you're modeling is sane.

I haven't tried it, but dailies are set by default to be active every day of the week; you might be able to unselect all the days.

Is there any reason not to just delete the tasks that aren't working for you, though? It seems like if the task isn't something you actually want/need to do in the immediate future, it's more of a goal than a task.