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http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/nqz/open_thread_jul_04_jul_10_2016/dcyy
This comment has a great link to a pretty big list of concepts.
At the moments when you are happy with your life, the desire to escape from reality reduces dramatically. So I guess a high-level approach might be to optimize your life to be more happy, even if it seems like it would reduce your productivity, because you may get the side effect of procrastinating less.
This article was about the low-level approach, when your life already kinda sucks and you cannot fix it at the moment, only try to reduce the damage.
In your case, the obvious question seems to be: "Can you arrange things so you would tutor more, and do whatever is the other thing less? And perhaps hire some babysitter to help with the kid." Alternatively, could you somehow optimize your environment (or more precisely, your kid's environment) so that less of your attention is needed?
(My high-level approach is to change my frustrating job, and I am already doing some interviews. Also, some other frustrating things will go away in the future; unfortunately the changes take time that I can't speed up, so it's approximately two more months.)
At the moments when you are happy with your life, the desire to escape from reality reduces dramatically. So I guess a high-level approach might be to optimize your life to be more happy, even if it seems like it would reduce your productivity, because you may get the side effect of procrastinating less.
I think most of my own procrastination has always had more to do with the desire to escape, and feeling bad about low expectancy/value of the work at hand, rather than the procrastinating activity itself being highly entertaining.
Being productive can feel terrible because it is a constant reminder of not just what you want to achieve, but also of the fact that you have not achieved it, depressing stuff really.
Yes, this could be what's happening with me.
Same happens with certain physical activities, race day magic is so common.
I think your app does this well.
How is it after a week? Do you still use it?
I have not used it since testing it out. No change to how I feel about the app, I just haven't used any self tracking apps recently. I use Trello as a general to do app, which lacks regular occurrence task tracking. I will move meditation and gym tasks to Hastewurm and report back in 2 weeks. Both these tasks are things I wished I did more by about 50%.
My commitment to report back will probably result in increased likelihood of me sticking to this goal, but I could nonetheless try to be mindful of my bias, and provide some feedback on efficacy and or improvements.
In response to
Open thread, June 20 - June 26, 2016
I once had a system in which I was writing checkboxes on paper for tasks I wanted to do regularly.
Stuff like eating vitamins, or doing backups of my server.
It started with the typical daily/weekly/monthly todos, but it gradually evolved into something much less rigid, and calculated in a (increasingly complex) spreadsheet.
For a long time, I've been working out the balance between this system being forgiving...
(as in, allowing for soft recovery, rather then being hit by "do 12 hours of jogging" after a week of vacation)
and also giving you accountability over a longer period
(as in, avoiding the "I'll skip it this week, and instead definitely do it next week" effect).
I've also recently had the idea to publish some Android apps, and one of the first ideas was to code a cleaner, leaner and meaner version of my old spreadsheet.
As far as productivity apps go, this is very basic stuff, but I haven't actually found anything out there that could replace my system.
So lo and behold.
It's still kinda maybe not feature complete, but I already use it myself (and I've finally retired the spreadsheet :D):
If you like this sorta stuff, give it a try and let me know what you'd like to see improved.
(Also if you happen to really like it and be generous, there's a premium version which has the same functionality but makes me more happy)
I think your app is great! I am also the kind of person to get really excited about new productivity apps that have that one cool trick that makes it different from other apps, so I might not be a good gauge on how well your app would be received, but yea, I love it.
The only other self tracking app I have used is Beeminder. My only gripe about Beeminder is that everything is linear, if you do 10 units more you are 10 ahead, if you miss 10 units you are now 10 units behind. I have always wanted some sort of discounting for being ahead, and some sort of sped up recovery for being behind, and I think your app does this well.
In response to
June 2016 Media Thread
Podcasts Thread
Recently listened to Joe's Rogan's Podcast with Sam Harris as guest. He talks a little about his views on AI safety, nothing controversial, he takes it seriously.
One particular thing that stood out was that he didn't really seem to know about tDCS at all, which really surprised me as I would think this is totally up his alley. https://xkcd.com/1053/
In response to
Open Thread May 2 - May 8, 2016
I realize if I Pomodoro most things, instead of some thing, I feel more motivated to go through my to do list. Sorry if this is already obvious. I tend to do Pomodoros on repetitive, long-term, open-ended tasks like studying, practicing or working.
I'd refrained from doing any Poms on short-term goals, that are uncertain in time it takes, it may take longer than an hour but less than 8 hours, for example researching health insurance; I feel unmotivated to start it because I know it's going to take a long time but not too long, but I don't know how long, so I procrastinate. Putting on my list to do 2 poms of research on health insurance, then reassess if I need more poms, feels more motivating.
If I had to guess why I had a tendency to leave smallish tasks off my pom list, I would guess I was being arrogant in thinking I had the will power to just out right do these tasks with out resorting to poms.
Did you get a feel of the education/income/social status of the group you saw? I wonder if they try to recruit a certain type of person.
I know about scoring rules and probability assessments. Email me and we'll set up a time to talk.
Similar to Viliam in a sibling comment, I think that this is the sort of idea that would work in the ideal world but not the real world. To channel Hanson, "Consulting is not about advice," and thus a product that seeks to disrupt consulting by providing superior advice will simply fail. (Compare to MetaMed, which tried to disrupt medicine by providing superior diagnostics. Medicine is not about healing!)
To channel Hanson, "Consulting is not about advice," and thus a product that seeks to disrupt consulting by providing superior advice will simply fail.
This is something that I would be interested in reading, so I think I found the link in case anyone else is interested.
Side story, I once did a case study phone interview with a consulting firm, using a real world example of one of their clients, a major credit card company. They were tasked with finding ways to increase revenue. Without any background information I gave them a bunch of wacky out of the box and on the spot answers. I asked them what the real answer was.
The answer? Need more customers. That's 500k over the course of a month for 6 MBAs. But the client gets a 30 page PDF with words on it documenting their finds so shrug
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How is it after a week? Do you still use it?
Update:
Was I able to use the app successfully to increase my tasks by 50%? No. But I wont blame it on the app.
I found that manually clicking next day was something I did not like. The temptation to delay clicking it and catch up the next day is strong. If it were automatic I would have to live with the consequences of getting a bad score. Furthermore if you accidentally clicked next day before before updating other tasks, then too bad, you cant reverse. So for testing I made a few tasks and advanced it several days, but unless I reinstall the app, the date can not roll back for when I want to stop testing and use it for real.
There is no way to easily see your progress for the last few days. It would be nice to click on the task and see how you did recently or if I missed a few days to see when was the last time I did the task. Sure there is an export button but the data is hard to read if you just want to know quickly how you did recently.