by Patrick Brinich-Langlois and Ozzie Gooen

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Communities once kept our ancestors from being torn apart by mountain lions and tyrannosaurus rexes. Dinosaur violence has declined greatly since the Cretaceous, but the world has become more complex and interconnected. Communities remain essential.

Effective altruists have a lot to offer one another. But we're geographically dispersed, so it's hard to know whom to ask for help. Skillshare.im is built to fix this.

Skillshare.im is a place for effective altruists to share their skills, items, and couches with one another.

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Offer skills or things that you're willing to share. Request items that other people have offered. Here are a few things people have offered on the site:

• access to academic papers
• advice on fundraising, careers, nutrition, productivity, startups, investments, etc.
• French translation (two people!)
• math tutoring
• lodging in Switzerland, the Bay Area, London, Melbourne, and Oxford

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As of this writing, we already have 59 offers from 55 people. With your help, we can make it 60 offers from 56 people!

Why use Skillshare.im, instead of getting the things you need the normal way? Certain things, like career advice or study buddies, can be hard to get. Even if you can find someone who has what you're looking for, you might enjoy the opportunity to relationships with other altruists. Plus, by participating in Skillshare.im, you show that the community of do-gooders is welcoming and supportive, qualities that may draw in new people.

You can be notified of new offers and requests by Twitter or RSS. As with all .impact software, the source code is available on GitHub. We use a publicly accessible Trello board to track bugs and features.

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We'd love to hear what you think about the site. Is it awesome, or a horrifically inefficient use of our resources? What could be improved? Send us an e-mail or leave a comment.

The Monkey Cage: "The Not Quite As Depressing Psychological Theory That Explains Washington":

In a landmark article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber propose an “argumentative” theory of human reason which both directly acknowledges the problems of motivated reasoning and suggests that motivated reasoning in the right social contexts can be incredibly valuable and powerful.

Mercier and Sperber have a straightforward account of why human beings reason. They reason to win arguments by convincing others that they are right. This means that human beings suffer from “confirmation bias.” They are far, far better at finding justifications for why they are right than they are at thinking carefully about reasons why they might be wrong. [...]

However, where Mercier and Sperber depart from the skeptics is in pointing to the social value of reasoning. People are terrible judges of the flaws and weaknesses of their own arguments. However, they are much, much better at identifying weaknesses in the arguments of others. Furthermore, confirmation bias gives them good reason not only to try to confirm their own arguments, but also to try to demolish the arguments of people who disagree with them. This in turn means that groups — under the right conditions — are likely to be able to reach better judgments than any individual within the group. Real, substantial argument allows a kind of cognitive division of labor, in which different arguments get tested against each other.

[...]

When a group has to solve a problem, it is much more efficient if each individual looks mostly for arguments supporting a given solution. They can then present these arguments to the group, to be tested by the other members. This method will work as long as people can be swayed by good arguments, and the results reviewed . . . show that this is generally the case.

.impact is a new network of volunteers coordinating effective altruist projects.

There are many project ideas that could be really useful for the effective altruist community. There are people with the skills and free time to make things happen but who lack guidance or support. .impact aims to provide infrastructure to get people and useful projects together. We hope to help volunteers learn useful skills, meet great people, and create something substantial.  

We're soon launching Skillshare.im, a place to share skills and services for free.  We've collaborated on several Trello boards to organize projects, research topics, and useful resources.  We’ve brainstormed and started outlining projects like a vegetarian advocacy study, an EA wiki, and argument mapping software.  We’ve had several weekly group hangouts and discussions with a variety of individuals.  Most of our general discussion holds place in our Facebook group, which now has 114 members and seems to be growing organically at a rate of 5 per week.

 

Our Purpose and Values

We’re guided first and foremost by a desire to do the most good. This is our purpose. But it’s difficult to do this without having some additional values. The following are heuristics we think will best guide future volunteering in order to optimize our purpose. These are will be changed as we gain experience.

We value action.  "Help people" is a good rule, and it’s often a more useful one than "understand how to help people optimally." There appears to be a lot of low-hanging fruit—we can achieve a lot by simply motivating people to do something.

We value effectiveness. We encourage and promote projects according to our expectations of their impact and probability of success. We vet and brainstorm ideas before putting them into action. We use lean methodology to get things out quickly and then decide whether to expand, pivot, or end a project.

We value openness and transparency. Our meetings and projects are documented; published work is open source or creative commons. We’ll release information on the success of applications, and we’ll publish lessons we’ve learned on our wiki and blog.

We value decentralization. We believe that volunteers will do best with little outside authority. We will try to limit individual ideologies in favor of collective opinions. Important decisions will be decided through voting whenever possible. 

 

Get Involved

Interested in working on a project? Already working away on something, but want more support? Interested in learning a particular skill, like computer programming or research? We need you!

If you would like to meet the existing community or would like help finding a project we’d be happy to talk to you. You can also join our Facebook group or look through our Trello board of projects.

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(Also cross-posted on our website.)

Previously: "Test Your Forecasting Ability, Contribute to the Science of Human Judgment" (May 2012), "Get Paid to Train Your Rationality" (August 2011)

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Think you have what it takes to make good predictions?  Since 2011, the Good Judgment Project (GJP) has been making predictions on issues of international relations and foreign affairs, recently winning the IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) prediction contest.  Predictions from the GJP have been startlingly accurate, outperforming prediction markets, and exceeding even optimistic expectations.  It's run by Phillip Tetlock, the famous predictor of "foxes and hedgehogs" fame.

From the Monkey Cage article:

How does the Good Judgment Project achieve such strikingly accurate results? The Project uses modern social-science methods ranging from harnessing the wisdom of crowds to prediction markets to putting together teams of forecasters. The GJP research team attributes its success to a blend of getting the right people (i.e., the “right” individual forecasters) on the bus, offering basic tutorials on inferential traps to avoid and best practices to embrace, concentrating the most talented forecasters into super teams, and constantly fine-tuning the aggregation algorithms it uses to combine individual forecasts into a collective prediction on each forecasting question. The Project’s best forecasters are typically talented and highly motivated amateurs, rather than subject matter experts.

 

But the good news is that you now have a chance to get involved with GJP Season 3 if you think you're a great predictor:

If you enjoy world politics and appreciate a good challenge, consider joining the Good Judgment Project, which has openings right now for Season 3 forecasters. The Project will give you the opportunity to receive training, to get regular feedback on your forecasting accuracy, and to test your forecasting skills against those of some of the most accurate forecasters around. Interested? To find out more and to register, go to www.goodjudgmentproject.com.

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Also cross-posted on my blog.

There seems to be many important questions that need research, from the mundane (say, which of four slogans for 80,000 Hours people like best) to the interesting (say, how to convince people to donate more than they otherwise would).  Unfortunately, it's difficult to collect data in a quick, reliable, and affordable way.  We generally lack access to easily survey-able populations and a lot of research has high barriers to entry for completing (such as needing to enroll in graduate school).

However, since the 2005 creation of Amazon's Mechanical Turk, some of this has changed.  Mechanical Turk is a website where anyone can create tasks for people to complete at a certain wage.  These tasks can be anything, from identifying pictures to transcribing interviews to social science research.

Best of all, this is quick and cheap -- for example, you could offer $0.25 to complete a short survey, put $75 in a pot, and get 300 responses within a day or two, and this should be quicker and cheaper than any other option available to you for collecting data.

But could Mechanical Turk actually be useable for answering important questions?  Could running studies on Mechanical Turk be a competitive use of altruistic funds?

 

What Questions Would We Be Interested in Asking?

There are a variety of questions we might be interested in that would be appropriate to ask via Mechanical Turk.  I don't believe you could make a longitudinal study, so testing the effects of vegetarian ads on diets in a useful way wouldn't be able to happen.  But less conclusive diet studies could be run in this area.

Additionally, we could test to see how people respond to various marketing materials in EA space.  We could explore how people think about charity and see what would make them more likely to donate and how changes in the marketing affect a willingness to donate.  We could find out which arguments are more compelling.  We could even test various memes against each other and see what people think of them.

 

Is Mechanical Turk a Reliable Source of Data?

It would only be good to use MTurk if the data you could get is useful.  But is it?

 

Diversity of the Sample

The first question we might ask is whether MTurk produces a sample that is sufficiently diverse and representative of the United States.  Unfortunately, this isn't always the case for MTurk.  In "Problems With Mechanical Turk Study Samples", Dan Kahan noted that female populations can be overrepresented (as high as 62%), African Americans are underrepresented (5% in MTurk compared to 12% in the US), and conservatives are very underrepresented (53% liberal / 25% conservative in MTurk vs. 20% liberal and 40% conservative in real life).

MTurkers are more likely to vote and vote Obama.  More concerning, Kahan also found respondents lie about their prior exposure to measures and even whether their US citizens.  Additionally, repeated exposure to standard survey questions can bias responses.

But is this really a problem?  First, MTurk samples are still more diverse and representative than college student samples or other surveys conducted over the internet.  Second, many important questions are about items that we wouldn't expect to be influenced by demographics.  So it's quite possible that MTurk might be the best of all possible sources by enough to make it worth it.

 

Wage Sensitivity

Do you have to pay more for higher quality data?  Possibly not.  Buhrmester, Kwang, and Gosling and another analysis both found that even changes between 2 cents and 50 cents didn't affect the quality of data received on psychological studies, but it does buy more participants and at a higher rate of participation (get more participants faster).

 

Is Mechanical Turk a Competitive Use of Altruistic Funds?

It depends on the question being asked, how reliable the findings are, and how they'd be put into use.

Even though I don't think MTurk could be used for veg flyers very well, it's the best example I can think of right now: imagine that the current flyer converts 1% of people who read it to consider vegetarianism, but a different flyer might convert 1.05% of people.  This means that every donation to veg ads now has approximately a 1.05x multiplier attached to it, because we can use the better flyer.  If the MTurk study/studies to find this cost $1K, we would break even on this after distributing 100K flyers at 20 cents a flyer.  I don't know how many flyers are given out a year, so that may or may not be impressive, but the numbers are made up anyway.

The bottom line is that studies may have strong compounding effects, which will almost always beat out the relatively linear increase in impact from a donation to something like AMF.  But chances might be small that MTurk will produce something useful.  Likewise, it's possible that there are yet better settings for running these tests (like split testing current materials as they are being distributed, doing longer range and more reliable tracking of impact, etc.).  But MTurk could be an interesting way to supplement existing research in a quick and cheap manner.

I think it's worth thinking about further, even if I wouldn't act on it yet.

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(Also cross-posted on my blog.)

Why do people give to charity?

It seems strange to even ask. Most people would point to the fact that they’re altruistic and want to make a difference. Others are concerned with inequality and justice. Another group points to the concept of “paying it forward” or repaying a debt to society. Other explanations cite various religious or social reasons.

Not too many people cite the fact that giving makes them happier. Even if people agree this is true, I don’t often hear it as people’s main reason. Instead, it’s more like a beneficial side effect. In fact, it seems pretty odd to me to hear someone boldly proclaim that they give only because it makes them happier, even if it might be true.

 

But if it’s true that giving does make people happier, should we be promoting that publicly and loudly?  Luke's article "Optimal Philanthropy for Human Beings" suggests that we should tell people to enjoy the happiness that giving brings.  Perhaps it might make a great opportunity to tap into groups who wouldn’t consider giving otherwise or have misconceptions that giving would make them miserable?

However, I’m a bit worried about how it might affect people’s incentives.  In this essay, I follow the evidence provided in the Harvard Business School working paper "Feeling Good About Giving: The Benefits (and Costs) of Self-Interested Charitable Behavior" by Lalin Anik, Lara B. Aknin, Michael I. Norton, and Elizabeth W. Dunn. Overall, in light of potential incentive effects, I think caution and further investigation is warranted when promoting the happiness side of giving.

 

Giving and Happiness

Giving What We Can has published its own review of research on happiness and giving and find a pretty strong connection. And it’s true -- lots of evidence confirms the connection and even indicates that it’s a causal relationship rather than a misleading correlation. In fact, it goes in both directions -- giving makes people happier and happier people are more likely to give[1].

Neurological studies of people found that people experienced pleasure when they saw money go to charity, even when it wasn’t their own, but experienced even more pleasure when they gave to charity directly[2], a conclusion that has been backed up with revealed preference tests in the lab[3, 4].

This connection has also been backed up in numerous experimental studies. Asking people to commit random acts of kindness can significantly increase self-reported levels of happiness compared to a control group[5]. Further research found that the amount people spent on gifts for others and donations to charity correlates with their self-reported happiness, while the amount they spent on bills, expenses, and gifts for themselves did not[6]. Additionally, people given money and randomly assigned to spend money on others were happier than those randomly assigned to spend the same amount of money on themselves[7].

 

Altering Incentives

People generally believe that spending on themselves will make them much happier than spending on others[6], which, given that this isn’t the case, means there is plenty of room for changing people’s minds. However, any social scientist or avid reader of Freakonomics knows that altering incentives can create unintended effects. So is there a potential harm in getting people to do more giving via advertising self-interested motive?

The classic example is that of the childcare center that had problems with parents who were late to pick up their children. They reasoned that if they charged fines, parents would stop being late, because they would have an economic incentive not to. They found instead, however, that introducing a fine actually created even more tardiness[8], presumably because what once was seen as rude and bad faith now could be made up for with a small economic cost. More surprisingly, the amount of lateness did not return to pre-fine levels even after the owners stopped the policy[9].

Other studies have found similar effects. A study of 3-5 year old nursery students who all initially seemed intrinsically interested in various activities were randomly put into three groups. One group made a pre-arranged deal to do a one of the activities in which they seemed interested in exchange for a reward, another group was surprised with a reward after doing the activity in question, and the third group was not rewarded at all. Those who were given an award upfront ended up significantly less intrinsically interested in the task than the other groups after the study was finished[10]. A similar study found that students who were interested in solving puzzles stopped solving those puzzles after a period ended where they were paid to solve puzzles[11].

 

In general, money and reminders of money tend to make people less pro-social[12]. This has also been found to some degree specifically in the world of charity. In a randomized field experiment, donors were encouraged to donate to disaster relief in the US and were randomly either enticed with an offer of donation matching or not. The study found that while people donated more often with the promise of donation matching, their contributions after the donation matching dropped below the control group, ending with a negative net effect overall[13].

Another study found that when gifts were sent out to donors, larger gifts resulted in a larger response rate of returned donations, but yielded a smaller average donation[14], though I suppose this could just be because more people who usually would give nothing were giving a small amount, bringing the average down. More importantly, this study found no net decrease in future donations after gifts were no longer sent out; instead, donations returned to their normal levels[14].

And certainly it’s worth noting some times when appeals to self-interest are successful. I couldn’t find any studies where this was the case. However, there is one anecdotal example: as Nick Cooney points out in "Self-Interest Can Make the World a Better Place -- For Animals, At Least", reduction in people eating factory farmed meat is coming almost entirely from people motivated not by concern for animal cruelty, but concern for their own health. Could advocating self-interested donations be the same as advocating health-motivated vegetarianism?

 

Opportunities for Further Investigation

It’s not very good to just let things be unclear if they don’t have to be, and I think we can resolve this issue with more scientific study. For example, one could randomly select one group to receive information about giving and happiness, another group to receive other standard arguments for giving, and a control group to receive no arguments or information about giving at all, and track their donation habits in a longitudinal study. This study would have it’s complications for sure, but could help see if information about giving and happiness backfires or not.

Or perhaps one could perform a field experiment. You could set up a booth asking people to donate to your cause and randomly include information about giving and happiness or not in your pitch and see how this affects immediate and long-term contributions. Doing this would have added advantages of being much quicker to run and not leading to people donating only because they think they’re being observed.

 

References

[1]: Anik, Lalin, Lara B. Aknin, Michael I. Norton, Elizabeth W. Dunn. 2009. “Feeling Good about Giving: The Benefits (and Costs) of Self-Interested Charitable Behavior”. Harvard Business School Working Paper 10-012.

[2]: Harbaugh, William T. 2007. "Neural Responses to Taxation and Voluntary Giving Reveal Motives for Charitable Donations." Science 316: 1622-1625.

[3]: Andreoni, James, William T. Harbaugh, and Lise Vesterlund. 2007. "Altruism in Experiments". New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics.

[4]: Mayr, Ulrich, William T. Harbaugh , and Dharol Tankersley. 2008. "Neuroeconomics of Charitable Giving and Philanthropy". In Glimcher, Paul W., Ernest Fehr, Colin Camerer, and Russel Alan Poldrack (eds.) 2009. Neuroeconomics: Decision Making and the Brain. Academic Press: London.

[5]: Lyubomirsky, Sonja, Kennon M. Sheldon, and David Schkade. 2005. "Pursuing Happiness: The Architecture of Sustainable Change." Review of General Psychology 9 (2): 111–131.

[6]: Akin, Lara B., et. al. 2010. "Pro-social Spending And Well-Being: Cross-Cultural Evidence for a Psychological Universal." National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper #16415.

[7]: Dunn, Elizabeth W., Lara B. Aknin, and Michael I. Norton. 2008. “Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness.” Science 319: 1687-1688.

[8]: Gneezy, Uri and Aldo Rustichini. 2000a. “A fine is a price.” Journal of Legal Studies 29: 1-18.

[9]: Gneezy, Uri and Aldo Rustichini. 2000b. “Pay enough or don't pay at all.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 115: 791-810.

[10]: Lepper, Mark R., David Greene, and Richard E. Nisbett. 1973. “Undermining Children's Intrinsic Interest with Extrinsic Reward: A Test of the ‘Overjustification’ Hypothesis.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 28(1): 129-137.

[11]: Deci, Edward L. 1971. “Effects of Externally Mediated Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 18(1): 105-115.

[12]: Vohs, Kathleen D., Nicole L. Mead, and Miranda R. Goode. 2006. “The Psychological Consequences of Money”. Science 17 (314): 1154-1156.

[13]: Meier, Stephan. 2007. “Do Subsidies Increase Charitable Giving in the Long Run? Matching Donations in a Field Experiment”. Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Working Paper #06-18.

[14]: Falk, Armin. 2005. “Gift Exchange in the Field”. University of Bonn.

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(This essay is also cross-posted on the Giving What We Can blog and my blog.)

I like to think that I get a lot of stuff done.  Other people have noticed this and asked me how I'm so productive.  This essay is where I try and "share my secrets", so to speak.

The real secret is that, in the past, I wasn't nearly as productive.  I struggled with procrastination, had issues completing assignments on time, and always felt like I never had enough time to do things.  But, starting in January and continuing for the past eight months, I have slowly implemented several systems and habits in my life that, taken together, have made me productive.  Productivity is not a talent I have -- I've learned to be productive over the past several months and I have habits in place where I basically cannot fail to be productive.

Hopefully these systems will work for you.  I've seen some people adopt them to some success, but I've never seen anyone do it exactly the way I do.  And perhaps it would even be bad to do it exactly the way I do, because everyone is just a little bit different.  I'm being aware of other-optimizing and letting you just know what's worked for me.  I make no claims that these systems will work for you.  Your mileage may vary.

So what are the systems?  To get you to be productive, we'll need to get you to organize, to prioritize, then to do and review.  Have those four things down and you'll have everything you need to be productive.

 

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Organize

The first step to being productive is to be organized and remember things without memorizing them.  If we get these systems down, you won't forget your ideas, when and where events are, what tasks you need to complete, what papers you have, and what emails you have.

 

The Most Important Rule: Write Things Down

If you only take away one system from one category, I want it to be this one.  Whole essays can be written about these systems and this one is no different -- write things down.  Whenever you have a cool idea, an event invitation, a task, etc., write it down.  Always.  Constantly.  No excuses.

I've found in my life that stress has come in surprising part from trying to keep everything in my head.  When I write down everything I think is worth remembering, whether it be a concrete thing I need to do or just a cool yet unimportant idea I want to follow up on sometime later, I write it down.  That gets it out of my head, and I no longer feel the need to remember things (as long as I remember to look them up later), and I feel much better.

I've also found in my life that I constantly think I'll remember something and it's not worth writing down.  More than half the time, I've been wrong and forgotten the thing.  This has meant I've forgotten cool ideas and even forgotten events or to complete key items.  Always write things down, no matter how convinced you are that you'll remember them.

How do you do this?  I suggest getting something that will always be with you that you can write things down on.  For the vast majority of my readers, this can be a phone where you text yourself messages.  For a long time, I would use my smartphone to email myself notes, because I knew I'd always check my email later and then could record the note to a text document.  Later on, I moved to keeping track of ideas on Evernote and then later moved on to keeping track of ideas on Workflowy.  Workflowy costs $5 a month to use it to full potential (worth it, in my opinion), but there are free alternatives (that aren't as good, in my opinion).

However, don't shy away from the good old pen and paper if it gets the job done.  I got this notepad for $6 and it's been great.

 

Keep Track of Events: The Calendar

Of course, some of the things you want to write down will be particular things that need to be recorded in particularly useful places.  One of these things is events, or places you need to be at a particular time and place.  For this, you can use any calendar, but I like Google Calendar the best.  Whenever you get invited to an event, record it on your calendar.  (We'll include reviewing your calendar regularly in a bit, so you won't forget what's there.)

A common mistake I see people make is to rely on Facebook events to keep track of their events.  Perhaps this works for some people, but not all events are done through Facebook or can be done through Facebook, so you end up keeping track of events in multiple places, which causes confusion and missed events.  Wherever you record events, record all your events in one place.

 

Keep Track of Tasks: The To-Do List

The next thing you'll want to keep track of is tasks.  For this, you need a to-do list.  I spent a lot of my life just using a TextEdit document, but I recommend you use a dedicated app instead.  I personally use Workflowy here too, but others work great.  In the past I've used Trello to great success.  I've seen others succeed with Asana or even just a text document on the computer.

A common mistake I see people make here is using their email as their to-do list.  This might make some sense, but often emails contain information unnecessary to your tasks which slows you down, and sometimes emails contain multiple action points.  Worse, emails contain no easy way to prioritize tasks (which is really important and will be discussed in a bit).

Bottom line: Keep all your tasks in one crisp, clear place.  Don't spread out your to-do lists across multiple applications and don't put it in with a bunch of other stuff.

 

Action, Waiting, Reference: Stay Organized with Zones

Once you have your ideas written down, your events on your calendar, and your tasks on your to-do list, it's time to organize the materials you'll have to deal with.  Lots of physical papers and computer documents come at you throughout your day and it's time to organize them.

The trick here?  Get a surface area you can keep clear and divide it into three zones: action, waiting, and reference.

 

The action zone is for things that need to be done.  Have a form you need to fill out?  Something you need to read?  Even more outlandish things like a necklace you need to repair or something?  Keep everything needed for a task together in folders or with paperclips as necessary, put it in the action zone, and record the task on your to-do list.

The waiting zone is for things that eventually need to be done, but which cannot be done yet because you're waiting on something.  Perhaps you need feedback from someone, a package still needs to arrive, or the task only can be done on a certain day.  For this, keep everything grouped together in the waiting zone, and record on your to-do list what the task is and what you're waiting for.  (We'll revisit implementing zones in the to-do list in a little bit.)  Move things to action and update your to-do list when what you're waiting for arrives.

The reference zone is for things you might need to look at and need to be kept around, but are not associated with any task.  For examples, things I have had in my reference zone are passwords, details about tasks from people, items that are relevant but not necessary to the work that I'm doing, etc.

 

Always Inbox Zero: Apply the Folders to Your Email

Email is really messy for most people, but it doesn't have to be.  The solution here is to implement the zones in your email too.  I use Gmail, but nearly every email system includes folders these days.  Use that system to create three folders -- action, waiting, and reference -- in your email, then sort your email according to the folders and record on your to-do list.

There is no reason to have any email in your inbox.  You should be at "inbox zero" constantly.  Whenever an email comes in, process it and file it.  Got an email from Nancy that you need to reply to?  Put it in "Action" and put "Reply to Nancy's email" on your to-do list.  Got a long email from your boss that you don't even have time to read yet?  Put it in "Action" and put "Read boss's email" on your to-do list.  Then when you go back to read it, you can determine the next action item.

Emails also make sense to be put in waiting.  If it's important I get a reply from the email, I'll put it in waiting to remind myself to follow up later if necessary (more on that later).  I'll also put emails in waiting if I'm expecting a reply from someone else first, or if it's information for an action item I can't act on yet, or if I want to reply later on.

Lastly, reference is very important for emails that you need to keep around to read, but don't need to reply to.  Lots of notes that people send me get processed into my relevant Workflowy document and then kept in reference for as long as they're relevant.

 

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Prioritize

Now that you're all organized, it's time to get in a position to do the things you need to do.  But watch out, because unless you have time to complete your entire to-do list in one sitting, it's a poor use of time to just go from the top to the bottom.  Instead, we need to go from the most important to the least important.

 

Eisenhower Matrix: Do What's Important

How do you prioritize?  The best tactic I've seen here is called The Eisenhower Matrix.  It comes from Steven Covey's book First Things First but is credited to President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Here, you take your to-do list and organize everything into four quadrants: important and urgent, important and not urgent, unimportant and urgent, and unimportant and not urgent.  This is very easy to do on Workflowy, and still possible on something like Trello.

There's pretty universal agreement that you complete all the "important and urgent" tasks first and the "unimportant and not urgent" tasks last.  But the real trick is that after you complete the important and urgent tasks, you should move to complete the important and not urgent tasks.  Ignore the not important and urgent tasks until you've completed all important tasks and even be comfortable with skipping unimportant tasks if necessary.  Why?  Because they're not important.

If you get this matrix down, you'll soon get ahead on your tasks, because you'll be completing important tasks before they become urgent.

Also, note the inclusion of "waiting" here as one of the tabs in my to-do list.  This is where I put tasks I can't complete yet with a note of what I'm waiting on.  Something like talking to my Dad three days from now would be tagged as "#30aug :: Talk to Dad" (using Workflowy hashtags), but I'd also do things with unclear dates, like "Brian responds to email :: Forward response to Seth".  Beware that being able to manage unclear deadlines (where you don't know what day the task will be) is something that most to-do list apps struggle with.

Timeboxing: Plan Your Day in Advance

The next prioritization thing to master is planning your day in advance.  You do this through making "time boxes" for things, or periods of time where you'll do something predefined.  For example, I'll set aside some time to work through my to-do list or to work on particular projects.  For bigger projects, I'll decide how much I want to work on them in any particular day or week and set them aside from my to-do list.  I'll then block out time for them on my calendar and end up with days like this.

Since I plan my days in advance using this timebox method, I just plan every minute of the calendar in advance and have a plan so I always know what to be doing and never miss a beat.  Of course, things come up and you'll have to change your plan for the day, but that's better than having no plan at all.

Two Minute Rule

It's important to be mindful of how much time it takes to record a task, put it in your to-do list, and prioritize it, however.  For most people, including me, it's about two minutes for any given task.  This gives rise to the "two minute rule": if doing somethign would take less than two minutes, just do it now.  Likewise, if it would take over two minutes, put it in your to-do list and do it at the best time.

 

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Do

Now that you have your to-do list set and timeboxes for when you're going to work and on what, it's time to actually do the work.

 

The Pomodoro Technique

The ideal timebox should be a length that is a multiple of thirty minutes so you can do the most powerful productivity thing there is: The Pomodoro Technique.  Beware that it doesn't work for some, but I do urge you to give it a fair shake and a few tries, because for those whom the Pomodoro works, the Pomodoro Technique works wonders.

Here's how you do it.  Set a timer for 25 minutes.  During those 25 minutes (a) work only on your task at hand; (b) do not do anything else, even for a second; (c) be completely focused; (d) be free from distractions; (e) and do not multi-task. There are some acceptable things to do during a Pomodoro, however: go to the bathroom, drink, listen to music.  But there are tons more things not to do during a Pomodoro: check Facebook, read your email, etc.  The list will go on.

After the timer expires, take a five minute break.  During these five minutes, do anything you'd like except the task on hand.  Even if you feel like the break is boring and you're itching to get back on task, don't.  You're only hurting yourself in the long-run.  This five minute break will restore your focus, keep you grounded, provide a way to think through your ideas in a different setting, and prevent you from needing longer breaks later in the day.

It should be noted, however, that the Pomodoro can be a bit difficult to get in the habit of, though.  To solve this, I've found it useful to work my way up to the full Pomodoro by spending a month getting used to "15 minutes of work, 5 minutes break", then another month doing "20 minutes of work, 5 minutes break", and then finally "25 minutes of work, 5 minutes break".

Different people have tried other multiples besides 25 and 5, but I'm still convinced that 25-5 is the ideal split.  Perhaps 27-3 could work better for advanced Pomodoro users, but I wouldn't push it further.  I've seen things like 90-30 or 30-10, and all of these seem to involve working just a little too long (losing focus) and then taking a lot more break than is necessary.  Of course, if it works for you, then it works.

Here's the 25-5 stopwatch I use and my 20-5 stopwatch.  I've also liked Tomato Timer.com, but any timer can work.

 

Be Comfortable with Breaks

The important lesson of working a lot is to be comfortable with taking a break.  The novice productive person will think it virtuous to work clear through a break and onward, thinking that he or she is making even better use of their time, defeating all those sissy workers who need breaks!  But really, this person is just setting up their own downfall, because they'll crash and burn.

Burnout is real and one of the most dangerous things you can do is train yourself to feel guilty about not working.  So you need to remember to take breaks.  The break in a Pomodoro is a good one, but I also recommend taking a larger break (like 30 minutes) after completing three or four Pomodoros.

One particularly good break I'd like to give a shout-out to is to take a nap.  Taking a nap at a fairly regular time has health benefits (see also here, here, and here) and doesn't harm your night sleep if you nap for 20 minutes and don't nap too late in the afternoon or evening.  In fact, I've actually found naps to be a time saver instead of time "wasted" for a break, because I can sleep less at night and still feel rested and be focused throughout the day.

 

Keep Your Energy Up

Another thing to prevent your chance of crashing and needing a long break to restore your energy is to keep your energy up.  I recommend drinking something that is somewhat sugary but not too sugary (I drink water-diluted lemonade in a 25%-75% mix) and remembering to exercise on a regular basis.  Also, eating healthy and sleeping right works wonders for keeping your attention on your work.

 

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Review

Of course, it's not enough to do if you're not going to learn from how you're doing and improve.  I suggest you review your life on multiple levels -- daily, weekly, monthly, and once every six months.

For the daily review, I keep track of whether I've succeeded at certain habits like exercising and eating right, and log the amount of time I've spent on various things so I can keep track of my time usage.  I also complete other relevant logs, and then spend a bit of time reflecting how things have gone for the day and think of ways to repeat successes and avoid mistakes.  I then check the plan for the next day and tweak it if necessary.  This process takes me about 15 to 20 minutes.

For the weekly review, I go through my action-waiting-reference zones wherever they exist (physical piles, email, and computer folders) and process them -- make sure everything there is still relevant and still belongs in the same place.  I'll remove whatever needs to be removed at this stage and remind myself what I'm working on.  I'll organize and clean anything that isn't organized at this stage and get everything together.  I'll then quickly re-read my strategic plan and plan out the week in accordance with my goals.  Recently, I've set amounts of time per week I want to be spending on certain projects, so it's now a matter of making a schedule that works.  This process usually takes me 45 minutes to an hour.

For the monthly review, I reflect on the habits I've been trying to build for the month and decide what habits I want to keep, what habits I want to add, and what habits I want to subtract.  I review how the month as a whole went and think about what I can do to repeat successes and avert future failures.  I then write up a reflection and publish it on my blog.  This process usually takes me two hours.

For the six month review, I return to my goals and think about how my life trajectory as a whole is going.  What are my life goals?  What am I doing to accomplish them?  Am I closer to my goals than I was six months ago?  Should I be working toward new goals?  What common mistakes did I make through the past six months that I want to avoid?  I then write a documentwith my personal mission and goals for the next six months and skim it every week to constantly remind myself of what I want to be doing.  This process usually takes me three hours.

 

Yes, there will be an unlucky day where you do all four reviews and spend like six and a half hours reviewing your life at different levels.  Perhaps this is a bit much for people, but I've found tremendous benefit from it.  I've found that spending this day reviewing my life has saved me from not just days, but even months, of wasted time that doesn't accomplish what I really want to do.  Reviewing is another way of saving you time.

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Additional Tips

Now I've given you all my main advice, but I have some additional tips if you want to keep reading.

Carefully form these habits over time.  This is a lot to do at once, so do it in stages.  Build the habit of writing things down first, and then slowly get the apps you like in place for ideas, events, and tasks.  After you have that down, spend the time necessary to get your email in order and implement the zones wherever possible.  Then begin to move into prioritizing your tasks with the Eisenhower Matrix.  After you have this down, begin planning your days in advance with timeboxes and start doing your reviews.  While you're building that habit, simultaneously start building up the Pomodoro habit, slowly approaching 25-5 over a few months.

Find a way to reliably stay on habit.  Don't make the common failure of sticking to something for a month or two and abandoning it.  Spend a lot of energy thinking through how you'll stay on habit and how you'll not be like all the other people who think they'll stay on habit then fail.  Make a bet with a friend, start up Beeminder, or create some other kind of commitment device.

Form the productivity mindset. I had a lot of trouble implementing this plan until I was able to think of myself as an important person who does important things and should personally value my time.  I had to really want to be productive before I could start being productive.  Success at this will follow from the right mindset.  It's time to start thinking of yourself as important.  If you can't fool yourself, maybe it's time to look at your goals and decide what goals would make you feel important and then do those goals instead.

Behold the power of routines. I find it a lot easier to exercise if I have a routine of "every other day, right after waking up" or "every other day, right before dinner".  Your routine can be built from here.  It's a lot easier to stick to timeboxes if they're regularly occurring.  Use a calendar and build yourself something nice.

Put everything in a particular place.  People lose a lot of time just hunting around for things.  Solve this by spending some time ahead of time organizing things in your life and getting them into particular places.  Then always make sure things return to their places.

Declutter your life.  You'll work better if you have less stuff to keep track of and less commitments to worry about.  Get rid of everything and delegate anything you can.

Make a productivity place. This works especially well in colleges where there is a large variety of places you could be working.  Find a place to work, set up your Pomodoros, and follow them to the letter.  Don't mess up.  Take your longer breaks somewhere else.  If you do mess up, find a new productivity place and start again.  I found this really helpful for my mindset, but others have found it silly.

Don't neglect friends and family.  This is a big one.  Remember, the goal of being more productive is to free time to do the things you want and be with the people you want.  It's not to spend 100 hour workweeks neglecting those who are important to you.  Make sure to take some time off to spend with friends and family.  Schedule it in your calendar if you have to.  This will matter most in the long-run for your life.

Productivity ≠ Busy and Busy ≠ Productivity.  If you do productivity right, you shouldn't feel busy all that often.  Being busy is a sign of having poor productivity and/or having taken on too many commitments, and is rarely ever a sign of doing things correctly.

 

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Conclusion

These tips are really a result of me experimenting for eight months.  I'd expect you to take a similar amount of time to go from zero to productive and end up with different systems that work for you and your environment.  But I think there are a lot of power in these systems and I'm interested to see what other people do and how other people run with them.  After all, they work for me.

 

Further reading:

* The Secret Weapon

* David Allen's Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

* Scott Young's The Little Book of Productivity

* Paul Christiano's Workflow

* 10 Step Anti-Procrostination Checklist

* Zenhabits

 

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(Also cross-posted on my blog.)

Fortunately, the odds of an extinction-sized asteroid hitting the earth this century are low, on the order of one in a million. Unfortunately, asteroids aren’t the only threats to humanity’s survival. Other potential threats stem from bio-engineered diseases, nuclear war, extreme climate change, and dangerous future technologies.

Given that there is some risk of humanity going extinct over the next couple of centuries, the next question is whether we can do anything about it. We will first explain what we can do about it, and then ask the deeper ethical question: how bad would human extinction be?

Read more at "Preventing Human Extinction" at the Effective Altruist blog.

An idea I had while talking to Xio Kikauka and Joey Savoie is to run a jobs board for people interested in effective altruism.  It seems like it actually would be relatively easy to have a script automatically monitor various job pages and synthesize them all into one area that looks nice.

Would this be useful to create? And if so, where should we get jobs from?

Some potential ideas:

 

• The Humane League (Jobs, Internships)
• Effective Animal Activism
• Giving What We Can
• 80,000 Hours
• GiveWell
• Innovations for Poverty Action (Jobs, Internships)
• Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

 

I'd be willing to make this happen if people were interested.

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(Also cross-posted on my blog.)

Follow up to Why I'm Skeptical About Unproven Causes (And You Should Be Too)

Previously, I wrote "Why I'm Skeptical About Unproven Causes (And You Should Be Too)" and a follow up essay "What Would It Take to Prove a Speculative Cause?".  Both of these sparked a lot of discussion on LessWrong, on the Effective Altruist blog, and my own blog, as well as many hours of in person conversation.

After all this extended conversation with people, I've changed my mind on a few things that I will elaborate here.  I hope in doing so I can (1) clarify my original position and (2) explain where I now stand in light of all the debate so people can engage with my current ideas as opposed to the ideas I no longer hold.  My opinions on things tend to change quickly, so I think updates like this will help.

 

My Argument, As It Currently Stands

If I were to communicate one main point of my essay, based on what I believe now, it would be when you're in a position of high uncertainty, the best response is to use a strategy of exploration rather than a strategy of exploitation.

What I mean by this is that given the high uncertainty of impact we see now, especially with regard to the far future, we're better off trying to find more information about impact and reduce our uncertainty (exploration) rather than pursuing whatever we think is best (exploitation).

The implications of this would mean that:

• We should develop more of an attitude that our case for impact is neither clear nor proven.

• We should apply more skepticism to our causes and more self-skepticism to our personal beliefs about impact.

• We should use the language of "information" and "exploration" more often than the language of "impact" and "exploitation".

• We should focus more on finding specific and concrete attempts to ensure we're making progress and figure out our impact (whether it be surveys, experiments, soliciting external review from relevant experts, etc.).

• We should focus more on transparency about what we're doing and thinking and why, when relevant and not exceedingly costly.

 

And to be clear, here are specific statements that address misconceptions about what I have argued:

• I do think it is wrong to ignore unproven causes completely and stop pursuing them.

• I don't think we should be donating everything to the Against Malaria Foundation instead of speculative causes.

• I don't think the Against Malaria Foundation has the highest impact of all current opportunities to donate.

• I do think we can say useful things about the far future.

• I don't think the correct way to think about high uncertainty and low evidence is to "suspend judgement".  Rather, I think we should make a judgement that we expect the estimate to be much lower than initially claimed in light of all the things I've said earlier about the history of past cost-effectiveness estimates.

 

And, lastly, if I were to make a second important point it would be it's difficult to find good opportunities to buy information.  It's easy to think that any donation to an organization will generate good information or that we'll automatically make progress just by working.  I think some element of random pursuit is important (see below), but all things considered I think we're doing too much random pursuit right now.

 

Specific Things I Changed My Mind About

Here are the specific places I changed my mind on:

 

I used to think donating to AMF, at least in part, was important for me.  Now I don't.

I underestimated the power of exploring and the existing opportunities, so I think that 100% of my donations should be going to trying to assess impact.  I've been persuaded that there is already quite a lot of money going toward AMF and we might not need more money as quickly as thought, so for the time being it's probably more appropriate to save and then donate to opportunities to buy information as they come up.

 

I now agree that there are relevant economies of scale in pursuing information that I hadn't taken into account.

What I mean by this is it might not be appropriate for individuals to work on purchasing information themselves.  Instead, this could end up splitting up the time of organizations unnecessarily as they provide information to a bunch of different people.  Also, many people don't have the time to do this themselves.

I think this has two implications:

• We should put more trust in larger scale organizations who are doing exploring, like GiveWell, and pool our resources.

• Individuals should work harder to put relevant information about information we gather online.

 

I was partially mistaken in thinking about how to "prove" speculative causes.

I think there was some value in my essay "What Would It Take to Prove a Speculative Cause?" because it talked concretely about strategies some organizations could take to get more information about their impact.

But the overall concept is mistaken -- there is no arbitrary threshold of evidence at which a speculative cause needs to cross and I was wasting my time by trying to come up with one.  Instead, I think it's appropriate to continue doing expected value calculations as long as we maintain a self-skeptical, pro-measurement mindset.

 

I had previously not fully taken into account the cost of acquiring further information.

The important question in value of information is not "what does this information get me in terms of changing my beliefs and actions?" but actually "how valuable is this information?", as in, do the benefits of gathering this information outweigh all the costs?  In some cases, I think the benefits of further proving a cause probably don't outweigh the costs.

For one possibly extreme example, while I don't know the rationale for doing a 23rd randomized controlled trial on anti-malaria bednets after performing the previous 22, it's likely that doing that RCT would have to be testing something more specific than the general effectiveness of bednets to justify the high cost of doing an RCT.

Likewise, there are costs on organizations to devoting resources to measuring themselves and being more transparent.  I don't think these costs are particularly high or defeat the idea of devoting more resources to this area, but I hadn't really taken them into account before. 

 

I'm slightly more in favor of acting randomly (trial and error).

I still think it's difficult to acquire good value of information and it's very easy to get caught "spinning our wheels" in research, especially when that research has no clear feedback loops.  One example, perhaps somewhat controversial, would be to point to the multi-century lack of progress on some problems in philosophy (think meta-ethics) as an example of what can happen to a field when there aren't good feedback loops to ground yourself.

However, I underestimated the amount of information that comes forward just doing ones normal activities.  The implication here is that it's more worthwhile than I initially thought to fund speculative causes just to have them continue to scale and operate.

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(This was also cross-posted on my blog.)