I made the mistake of awarding the temporary placeholder pin to a friend we had over. I explained the rules of the game, but the pin never circulated back. I carried her bag and hinted at it in a horridly passive-aggressive way ... It still left out the door with her. I insist this tradition is still better than elf-on-a-shelf, but it's obviously got its failure modes.

You should've changed it to a good nut bag on the spot. I'm not sure I'd call thievery a failure mode.

I had an idea for a new Holiday cached behavior for my roommate and I: the good nut pin.

The good nut pin is to be Christmas-themed and as tacky as possible. The object of the game is to give away the pin as soon as possible. It can only be given away in recognition of someone else being a 'good nut'; that is, as positive reinforcement for some good or worthwhile behavior we notice the other person doing. It is one of several ideas I came up with as I pondered the Meaning Of Christmas; Being Good starts to die out after the Naughty List proves fake, and Doing Good has potential for EA and positive externality-generating habits but is mostly about throwing money at feel-good charities.

I made the mistake of awarding the temporary placeholder pin to a friend we had over. I explained the rules of the game, but the pin never circulated back. I carried her bag and hinted at it in a horridly passive-aggressive way. I loudly pointed out my roommate's excellent contributions to the conversation. I flat out told her we were gonna need it back tonight or we wouldn't see it again until the next time she saw us.

It still left out the door with her. I insist this tradition is still better than elf-on-a-shelf, but it's obviously got its failure modes.

I finished Alex Vermeer's 8760 Guide, which I've been trudging on-and-off through for months. I now have a plan of sorts for the next half-year; this is quite a novelty for me. The plan is programming projects, job applications, emotional monitoring, and getting rid of unnecessary stuff.

I am implementing a motivation hack (thank you Nick Winter!) of deliberately telling people what I'm up to, even if it feels like motivation overkill, because I need some overkill. That is what I originally started doing posting to the group diaries for, but I got sidetracked.

• job applications: I'm compiling a list of local startups and walking up and asking them what they need help with, and if it's nothing I can currently help with then what skills I can install to make myself useful. I'm doing the "build up a portfolio, then apply" approach also, but that's slow-going. More importantly: the fact that thinking about talking to the kind of people I want to work with sends me into a terror-and-shame spiral is a reason to start trying to do it now instead of later. This is something that will happen every other day when I move down into Salt Lake, more weekly for now.
• Programming projects include: a text-adventure game, a personal ramblings website with JS/JQuery navigation, and aforementioned emotional monitoring. I'll be poking people for feedback about them. I got my dad to burn an Ubuntu disk, because Windows won't let me program anything interesting.
• Getting rid of unnecessary stuff mostly got done while I was writing my plan. I did a couple of yard sales and swap meets, next up is secondhand stores.
• Networking is also happening. Weekly lunch dates with co-workers, short after-shift reviews, and weekly goal setting. My temp job is not terribly important, but the habits are; I want to seek out people instead of avoiding them.

Low-hanging fruit: I increased my average intake of vegetables with minimal effort by acquiring microwaveable frozen vegetable bags, which have become my default "I want to eat something but don't want to spend effort preparing it" food. Each bag can be transferred directly from freezer to microwave and takes an average of five minutes therein, and then you cut open the bag and transfer to a serving dish (or, like me, just plop the open bag into a plastic tray and eat directly from it).

It's not perfect (for example, I cannot find green leafy vegetables in this packaging - then again, given the texture of frozen chopped spinach I probably wouldn't want to), but it's an improvement over most other foods that take similar amounts of preparation.

I am tracking happiness, using Beeminder + TagTime + a program I made to average numerical tagtime inputs over a day. I started trying to use actual tags, then got annoyed doing that and just did the happiness score. However, I notice that while I am using the tracker I am NOT so good at using my journal. My TIL evernotes and tagtime may soon obviate the need for a carry-around journal.

I am tracking happiness, using Beeminder + TagTime + a program I made to average numerical tagtime inputs over a day. I started trying to use actual tags, then got annoyed doing that and just did the happiness score. However, I notice that while I am using the tracker I am NOT so good at using my journal. My TIL evernotes and tagtime may soon obviate the need for a carry-around journal.

Productivity tricks that still seem to work for me after several months of use:

• Autofocous TODO lists on a paper notebook. There's a single notebook page with 20-30 TODO items, and that'll be the only TODO list I pick tasks from until all the items are done, abandoned or migrated to a new page.
• Pomodoro-style timeboxed work sessions listening to a noise track. Trying out this one linked on Cal Newport's blog now.

I also recently found out about Bullet Journal notation for notebooks and started using that alongside the autofocus. Basically you collect everything chronologically in a single notebook and build a table of contents and add special topic pages as needed. I'm using the monthly calendar pages idea from Bullet Journal to have a page where I have a single-line description of what I did on the day for each day of the month.

EDIT: The notes the noise track plays every 10 minutes started to grate after many repeats. Switched to this one

Adventures In HamLand:

• If you remember when I said I'd start using Google Now for all my reminders.... Well, I tired of its passiveness and resistance to rescheduling, so I resorted to GTasks. I still use Google now for the location-based reminders. The nice thing about GTasks is it doesn't generate any upcoming repeats of a task until I've clicked the last one off. Too many task managers made me choose between accumulating a slew of undone tasks or losing track of whether a task is completed at all.

• I've been skipping days in the control end of my melatonin self-trial. That slants my results. Recording is easier to forget when I eliminate the 'take melatonin' alarm.

• I tried to turbo-charge the skill of goal factoring. This went on for a few episodes, until I realized I instead practiced the habit of 'Set a timer, write down a few vague ideas, get swept down a minor train of thought, remember timer and panic, blank out, panic some more...' So I broke it down into steps to practice individually, and then I'll practice transitioning smoothly between steps. Summarized steps: Notice a need to goal-factor, Assign exercise to the proper (timeless) self, prepare mentally and do a first pass of sub-goals, revise list, brainstorm other ways to fill those sub-goals & revise ad infinitum. The eventual goal is to confidently and consistently generate a strong list of purposes and alternatives in the first two minutes of sitting down and thinking about a problem for 5 minutes.

Programming. Writing essays. Learning an instrument.

Yet another week in Hamland:

• starting a melatonin self-trial. Not double-blinded, and only two weeks long (1 week melatonin, 1 week control). The primary aim is less to get significant results on it and more to get into the general swing of recording stuff well enough to do maths on. It was great when I started collecting anecdotes, but more is possible.
• I am probably not asexual, despite frequent attempts to self-identify as such, and have the beginnings of a plan to better explore my boundaries. WOoooOOooh.
• I am now not using HabitRPG. It will take a while yet to iron out the kinks in Google Now, but I think it's working well so far. I want to remember to celebrate when I get things done, since I don't get arbitrary points for it anymore. I possibly need to install a System-1 visualization of being better off for looking at the list of things to do so I at least know exactly what I'm ignoring.