Using my boyfriend as a combination Pomodoro, task log, and accountability device is still proving to be quite useful. It helps that he's extremely willing and happy to be used that way :D

I've started consulting the I Ching in the morning. (Today was "difficulty at the beginning," with a side of "abundance," if I remember correctly.)

Reasons why:

1. I've been trying to read at least the foundational works of Chinese culture (I read the Analects and Dao de Jing a while back, and am reading through the Romance of the Three Kingdoms now), and this is one of them. But simply reading through the structure seems less instructive than actually engaging with the book as intended. (Compare reading the Hail Mary once, versus actually procuring a rosary and going through the motions.)

2. A while back, someone made a "rationalist horoscope," with the premise that there were a bunch of generally useful things you could remind someone of, and systematically reminding people of those things (and scoring the horoscopes based on helpfulness) is a useful thing to spend attention on. (As I recall, they didn't have that large of a stable of advice, and so fairly quickly had to resort to repeating themselves.)

3. A similar venture is Ben Franklin's virtues, which I've attempted to track at least once but didn't find particularly helpful. The I Ching operates on a slightly different level--instead of operating on modes of behavior / reactions, it operates on perceptions of situations.

4. I've kept a diary for at least a year now, but have rarely managed to work a solid reflection component into it and will often go weeks without entering anything. By consulting the I Ching, I'm provided with a constantly changing perspective to apply to my day, and then at the end of the day can record what that made me notice and how I reacted.

I will also note that up until recently I was primarily familiar with the numerological component of this particular form of divination (consult the RNG for wisdom!) but not the philosophical component. That is, the best advice is designed with its particular listener in mind, but there is value in a library of advice (that one learns how and when to apply by trying it through continually changing circumstances). Indeed, one might see this sort of divination, at its heart, as randomized trials applied to life!

(Incidentally, I immediately thought of three parts of my life where the situation was as described by the lot I cast, and a fourth on the drive to work. I also would not have applied one of the pieces of advice in the baseline history, but on considering why not it seemed like the reason was insufficient relative to the potential benefit.)

Things I've been up to:

Keeping a composition notebook as a lab notebook for life. The very first entry is "Keeping a Research Journal", where I'm recording metadata about this attempt and my self-confidence in doing important science subtasks before and after.

Most recently, I did some random-sampling with tagtime to help me locate convenient straps to bootstrap trigger-actions with. At each ping, I wrote down my current actions, what in my internal experience or environment triggered me to be doing that, and maybe a few things I thought I 'ought' to be working on instead. It was a more frequent sampling rate than I've ever done before (~10min between pings), and the most significant conclusion to pop out was that getting interrupted by random pings all the time really, really stressed me out. This highly skewed my samples towards anxious internet browsing.

Now I've got:

• Think about opening social media -> open mood survey
• Feel prideful -> reinforce the moment with msg to bf or tumblr
• Feel bored -> put on some music (feeling 'bored' is the often the first sign that I'm about to go into overload)
• Feel confused about next actions -> Take a walk outside
• Notice it's after 10 am -> make tortilla toast (simple enough to make while starving, in case I forgot to eat)

I'm deliberately not adding things until I've got a firm handle on the composition and effects of my baseline habits. My history with self-improvement is a long sad tale of accidentally tearing apart vital building blocks to fuel the production of shiny paperweights.

Using a (stochastic) time tagger has not worked for me. Apparently I'm not compulsively checking my phone enough. I miss lots of pings.

At first I thought I could just build enough habit. Didn't work.

Then I thought just enough data would solve it. Until I noticed that there are times where I don't reliably track as realiably as in other times (e.g. at home when the phone is out of earshot).

Then I thought I could salvage pings by smartly analysing them - evaluating tags relativ to the hour they come it thus compensating high-miss times. Until I realized that they correlate with the type of tag.

Then I gave up.

The last use of the ping right now is to remind me of writing this post.