The problem I've had with using physical notebooks is that I never close the loop of actually reviewing them and converting the information into a more useable format (anki, connecting related information, etc).

What I've settled on for the last few years is just emailing myself notes throughout the day from my phone. I empty my inbox each day so every note is moved into its appropriate location (calendar for events, files by topic for general thoughts, or to do lists for tasks).

The "sexy" factor is something I've noticed though. I'm regularly tempted to move back to physical notebooks because it somehow feels more legitimate. It also can feel rude sometimes to take out my phone and make a note if I'm talking to someone. All in all though I've found the benefits of converting the information into a digital format as quickly as possible to outweigh other factors.

Whenever I have free time (which is unfortunately becoming more and more rare) I have tremendous difficulty in deciding what to do with it.

This seems to be the result of a few problems:

1) I have too many goals, and so I don't know how to properly prioritize them, making it difficult to choose a next task. 2) Once I try to prioritize goals I end up going down a black hole of trying to figure out what my values really are, what I should actually be doing with my life, what I actually care about, if moral philosophy has implications on my goals, etc etc etc until I've either wasted all of my free time or ended up with an entirely new set of goals.

My stupid question is, does anyone else relate to this? How do you manage to not get caught in "analysis paralysis"? Do I have the entirely incorrect approach to life by trying to base my moment to moment actions on an overall value system?

Is there usually a LW meetup at UMBC?

Have there been any rationalists on Jeopardy or similar game shows? It seems like there are a lot of high-IQ, well-educated, high-agency people in the rationality community who could make a good amount of money from such competitions fairly easily, which they could then use at least partially for effective altruism or similar high-utility causes.

This idea of 'attempted telekenesis' is a good label for most peoples reactions to frustrating events I think. One type of frustration seems to occur when the result of an action is not as expected and yet we try to repeat the action but with more anger and expect things to change but predictably they don't.

I've had great success over the last decade or so by really reminding myself in times of frustration that it's my actions causing the events, and that if I want events to change, I need to alter my actions accordingly.

• I read really, really fast. Like, I've finished some of the largest books in print(Atlas Shrugged and A Memory of Light come to mind here) in a single day before.
• The longer my reading list is, the less likely I am to add to it, or at least the less likely I am to take my additions seriously(when I have two items it's "I should read that!" When I have 200, it's "Eh, sounds interesting, might get to it someday").
• My to-read list is about 10 Chrome bookmarks(none short), 20 Amazon wishlist items, plus most of the width of a bookshelf that I've bought and not read, so I'm not sure how well I actually do despite the above.

If the problem is only in adding new cards why did you abandon old decks? Reviewing them doesn't need you to add new cards.

How many cards do you have in your deck and for how long do you use it?

I disrecommend this practice for text and equations. It will save you a small amount of time up front, but may cost you more overall. First, your ability to search is compromised depending on how much is a graphic. I search fairly frequently, especially when I want to update a card. That's the second disadvantage: you can't update a card so easily now. There's a third disadvantage: Typing up a paragraph from a book (in your own words) has additional learning benefits.

A fourth disadvantage is that different sources may have different notation. I've struggled to keep consistent notation for a number of my decks. You don't have much of a choice in the notation if you just take screenshots. It is a good idea to have multiple notations in your decks, but my suggestion would be to have consistent notation for the main cards and have extra cards about the less common notations.

In my experience, deciding what to add takes much more time than adding it. I make this as easy as possible by noting what I think is important when reading, reviewing, etc. I have lists of text files of things to add along with where to find more information. I have a Beeminder goal to add 3 cards daily that I don't mark as easy right off the bat, and I generally think about what would be most useful to myself and take them from my text files. (What I add tends to be technical, e.g., I am relearning combustion theory at the moment. 3 a day is reasonable for this, but the rate should depend on the subject and how much time you can invest.)

Graphical things are okay to take from books. However, I will frequently make my own graphic for the learning benefits and because I want to tweak/improve what I see.

I figured I would throw this out even though it seems exceedingly obvious in retrospect, but took me a while to figure out:

If you use Anki (or other SRS software) you can save a lot of time adding new cards by using screen shots. Not whole screen shots but selecting only important paragraphs/pictures/equations from an ebook or website. On a Mac this is command-control-shift-4 and then drag the part of the screen you want to copy to the clip board. Just paste it into Anki.

This saves me so much time when making cards out of books/papers that I almost exclusively read on my computer now.