Well, we're still waiting on that proof of the Riemann Hypothesis.

Seriously however, how about introducing him to the Collatz Conjecture? Something to mull over when the vanilla work is finished. And given his interests, he'll no doubt think of multiple ways of attacking the problem. I saw chess, computers and videogames listed as interests, so he perhaps he could try writing a chess engine from scratch. Design the algorithms in class and code them at home.

These suggestions might be a little advanced for eight years old, but I expect the boredom problem will get worse over time.

I've just started playing with it now so these are just initial thoughts:

1) Command Line History would be really nice: Messing up a command (new-prd $var1 (fn ....) and having to retype from scratch is a pain. Although if you get a nice GUI it won't matter;

2) (Never mind; I can't reproduce it now) (After I did (change-time (days -1)); (data ..) nothing was returned from (entered) _ ;

3) Allowing data to be entered via a source file might be nice, but I suppose a script would work ok too. Perhaps I should write a Perl script to convert CSV into Familiar data?

I schedule my tasks on a week basis (using an app I developed) instead of every day, but the process is similar. It seems to be working quite well for at least six months now. I got better results after I increased my estimates of how long my tasks take. (Occasionally my app will schedule ughhy tasks first thing on a Monday morning. If people are interested, I'll report back whether I manage to successfully avoid postponing them :)

What I still need to work on is returning to planning after an upheaval like sickness or holidays. I'd be interested to hear how your process copes with that. At the very least, you have five/seven more opportunities to return to planning as opposed to losing a whole week. One thing I didn't read was how you determine what tasks you'll do in a particular day?

I think deadlines are a sufficient condition for procrastination but not a necessary one. And even starting a project earlier is no guarantee of avoiding a last minute crunch. (When I was studying I'd start projects on time, get the "hard parts" done, but still end up finishing them off at the last minute. Whether that's a function of anchoring or just plain vanilla Planning Fallacy, I'm not sure).

Without a deadline, can you still procrastinate? Of course, but the consequences of not starting are less immediate, but still potentially severe. If you don't finish writing an essay by the deadline, you fail a course. If you don't submit an application, nothing happens now, but restrict your options later. If you never exercise, you're more likely to get sick as you age.

So having decided to start, how do you maintain momentum? From a comment above, breaking down a single project into sub tasks with their own deadlines is a great start. But there's still a trap here - the comforting thought that some sub tasks will take less time than others, and you've got heaps of time to the actual deadline to catch up. Quantifying what you'll achieve (e.g. I will write the introduction and conclusion by the end of the week) provides a concrete goal and also harder to lie to yourself about how much time you have.

Segment time into arbitrarily “eras”

Trivial nitpick: Missing word between arbitrarily and "eras". I couldn't quite work out from context whether it should be 'large', 'small', or 'sized'. Naturally, it doesn't affect the argument, being arbitrary.

My understanding is that the planning fallacy is just not taking the outside view, for whatever it is. Depending on your past experiences, you may or may not have fallen prey to it.

Note: Firstorderpredicate's response isn't as condescending as it sounds, it's a Methods of Rationality quote.

Is this similar to Things ?

It's the summer before my freshman year of college, and my only obligation is that my parents are paying me to clean our filthy house. So I have tons of free time that I am trying to put to the best use possible. Here's a list of what I am doing:

• My goal in life is to be a video game developer, so my main priority is learning how to make video games. I'm not really sure which of several possible projects I'll end up spending most of my summer on, but right now I'm learning how to use Unity 3D.

• I've been reading stuff in the broad category of "human nature". For example, on my bedside table right now, I have Self-Made Man, The Luck Factor, The Happiness Hypothesis, Queen Bees & Wannabes, and The Moral Animal. I started this project in order to hopefully reach an a-ha moment that would allow me to realize what I'm doing wrong and therefore cure my shitty social skills, but I think I've already reached this moment very early into the summer, so now the whole project seems slightly less useful and I might forgo it in order to spend more time learning gamedev. :\

• Doing Starting Strength.

• Learning how to lucid dream.

• I wanted to spend a lot of time getting better at meditation with the goal of eventually reaching jhana, but I've lapsed really hard in my practice lately and I'm having a lot of trouble getting back into it. So I don't know what I'm going to do about this one.

I'm tracking how many pomodoros I've done of learning video game devlopment and reading about human nature here. My initial goal was to do five hundred in a fifty-two day period, but unfortunately it's looking like this might have been overly ambitious.

you're uh, assigning just a tad too much power to the well above average biochemist.

More seriously, I think Harry's path here is much more magic than bio focused. He's seen memories removed and copied. If he can figure out how to remove ALL the memories from a body, and if he knows the obliviate charm, and if dead cells work for poly juice (which they should since hair is dead) then he has a decent path using only minor variants to known magic.

As mentioned here, here, and here, I've been working on a new iOS (and eventually Android) game based on Dual N-Back, called Double Dynamo (also on Facebook ).

I just got the background music working last week, which was trickier than it sounds — I needed to play multiple tracks back to back without a gap while syncing the gameplay to the beat of the music. I'm halfway through writing a technical post on my blog on how I got it working, so watch this space....

The other part of the project is figuring out a marketing strategy, which is for me at least as challenging as the design and implementation aspects. My background is firmly on the technical side.

I've talked about why I'm doing this project in previous comments, but briefly, I consider it a stepping stone to larger things, a way to build a reputation as an indie developer, and also something to add to my portfolio that I can point to and say "I did that". Which is something I can't really do right now even after 7+ years in games. Also, I've already learned far more about game development than I would have working in a larger studio.