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Do you have reservations about making that app you use for tracking available so that others can be spared the trouble of having to find one?
In response to
One Year of Pomodoros
Unfortunately, the app is in extremely alpha stages, running locally, and I doubt I'll prioritize it over other projects.
In response to
One Year of Pomodoros
How do you not get fatigued with recording things?
What are your recommendations for amount of structure before you incorporate pomodoros? Is there any structural/organizational stuff you should have set up before you do them?
How do you not get fatigued with recording things?
I'm actually a bit surprised that I was able to maintain my recording for over a year. Some reasons why I think I was successful in hindsight:
- Since I made the tracking app myself, I was excited to use it for the first little bit.
- I intentionally made my tracking app such that I could see my daily, weekly, and category totals, all at once for a given week, which is important for me since my primarily unit of productivity measurement/planning is the week.
- I came to realize that tracking all of the categories was key to the whole thing working. By tracking e.g. miscellaneous stuff (which seems pretty pointless at times), you're given a constant reminder that you are "covering all your bases."
- After tracking pomodoros for several months, not tracking pomodoros made it feel like I wasn't being productive.
- Once I passed a critical threshold, I was motivated by the thought of having an entire year's worth of data.
What are your recommendations for amount of structure before you incorporate pomodoros? Is there any structural/organizational stuff you should have set up before you do them?
You need basically zero structure to start using pomodoros; just a task and some time to work on it. (I say this especially because I'm really bad for wanting my system to be "perfect" before I use it.) I treaded the pomodoro waters for several months before delving in to tracking everything. My organization system, in short, is having a +/-5 year plan, a current year plan, and current quarter plan, and current month plan, and then specific tasks/projects for the current week (which I roughly estimate in pomodoros, or at least aim to hit a certain total for the week).
In response to
One Year of Pomodoros
Reports of productivity techniques working past the honeymoon period are very valuable. Thank you for posting this.
In response to
One Year of Pomodoros
I've been meaning to check this out. Thanks for the reminder.
In response to
One Year of Pomodoros
Real artists ship.
Possibly the best part about the web app. Despite the fact that the app looks more useful than any of the pomodoro apps I've seen before.
I recently read the sequences at a fairly rapid pace using the ebooks versions available on my ipad and there were certainly a few common things I found intensely irritating. I definitely found some of the sequences interesting enough to read again more closely. Which of the sequences are included in the ebook?
Basically all of them, with some modifications (e.g. a significantly reduced QM sequence), and with some reorganizing to improve flow.
Will the ebook be offered for free?
In response to
Open thread for December 9 - 16, 2013
I've noticed something: the MIRI blog RSS feed doesn't update as a new article appears on the blog, but rather at certain times (two or three times a month?) it updates with the articles that have been published since the last update.
Does anyone know why this happens?
Hmm, not sure why that's happening. I'll look into it.
In response to
Kurzban et al. on opportunity cost models of mental fatigue and resource-based models of willpower
This is exciting and interesting stuff. A good one-sentence summary from the paper:
In sum, many experiences, particularly the more or less unpleasant sensations discussed here (e.g., effort, boredom, fatigue), can be profitably thought of as resulting from (1) monitoring mechanisms that tally opportunity costs, which (2) cause an aversive state that corresponds in magnitude to the cost computed, which (3) enters into decision-making, acting as a kind of "vote," influencing the decision ultimately taken.
I'm trying to get my head around ways I could use this to sustain better and longer levels of focus, reduce boredom, etc. Two questions come to mind, that as far as I can tell have not been investigated in detail yet, and to which I don't have answers:
What, exactly, are the sorts of things my brain decides are more important than what I'm currently doing? Is it things like "I'm not signaling the right things to the people around me", "need food", etc.?
What are good ways to "reset" my internal monitoring mechanisms and thus return to a non-aversive state? I presume the answer is some kind of reward or positive feedback?
Basically, is it possible to trick this internal cost-benefit analysis into being focused for long periods of time?
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Cool!
By the way, are there any plans to eventually publish some of these MIRI-related ebooks in print form? Paper books tend to convey greater credibility than ebook-only.
FYI, Smarter Than Us is now available in print form. :-)