Boring Advice Repository

When in need of a conversation topic, ask a question about the other person's life. Anything about their life. (If I can't think of something else, I ask about weekend plans.) Listen for what part of their answer they're most interested in. Ask followup questions about that thing. Repeat as necessary.

People like to talk about themselves. This cuts awkward silences down to nothing and makes people like you. I've also learned all sorts of fascinating things about my acquaintances.

Try to live close to where you work. Failing that, try to work close to where you live. Commuting takes a lot of time and you don't get paid for it.

A major mental change that allowed me to own less things was someone mentioning "treat craigslist as free storage." The idea being that if you ever really need X you can get it fairly easily. But this extends to retail goods as well. I now keep in mind that everything that costs<(.1)(paycheck) is already mine and I only go pick it up if I really, actually, need it.

Start your post or comment with a summary when posting anything over 3-5 paragraphs.

If, realistically, you aren't going to do a thing, proceed immediately to figuring out the best way to not do it.

If you are looking for employment, tell everyone you know. I have gotten 100% of my jobs from friends saying "hey, did you hear about this one".

Spend more money/time on optimizing boring things you use a lot:
Shoes
socks/underwear
Mattress
Tailored clothes
Hygiene products that work well for you
Kitchen accessories (part of the reason you don't cook healthy meals for yourself might be because your kitchen work flow sucks)
Ergonomic setup at computer

If you are trying to do X, surround yourself with people who are also doing X. Takes much less willpower to keep doing it.

If you feel sad when you shouldn't feel sad consult a medical professional or therapist, they can help.

[Wish I'd realised that a few years ago.]

Learn to cook at least a handful of simple, cheap, fast meals. This will have more effect on your resolutions to "eat healthy" than temporary spurts of mega-motivation.

(also recognizing that spurts of motivation are temporary in general, do not rely on them for lasting change)

If a complete stranger or an acquaintance can do something useful for you, ask. (Politely. At a convenient time. With an appropriate amount of honest flattery.) If they say no, don't press them.

Failure case: make someone else feel important. Success case: get a favor, maybe make a connection.

Never post a web link that requires readers to click on it to find out if they want to click on it.

Obtain a smartphone. It will make your life better. (If you don't have one because you feel like they're overhyped, remember that reversed stupidity is not intelligence.) Here is a list of things I use my smartphone to do, in no particular order:

• Record things I want my future selves to do in RTM on the go
• Record sleep data using Sleep Cycle
• Take notes on conversations using either voice memos or Evernote
• Record various kinds of things in Workflowy, e.g. exercise data
• Respond more quickly to emails (people I know have debated the value of doing this, but I get really annoyed when other people take a long time to respond to my emails and don't want to do that)
• Receive calendar alerts, alarms, and Boomerangs from my past selves that remind me to do things
• Look things up, e.g. on Wikipedia, on the go (e.g. when I am waiting in line for something)
• Read academic papers on the go
• Search my email for important information on the go, e.g. the location of some event or an ID number of some kind
• Look up directions on the go, e.g. to the location of some event
• Look up places on Yelp on the go
• Look up prices and reviews of an item I'm considering buying IRL on Amazon

There is a possibility of wasting large amounts of time playing games which I curtailed early on by refusing to download games except during breaks from school.

Don't smoke.

The 80/20 rule is especially true for cleaning. Better to get it 80% clean twice as often than 99% clean half as often.

Stop doing stupid shit seems relevant.

To summarize: if you're good at something and it doesn't seem like it's taken serious effort to get to where you are, there's probably some low-hanging fruit that you haven't picked, because you haven't looked for it. Put a serious effect into improving and fixing your small, frequent mistakes.

Don't beat yourself up.

Always negotiate on salary, i.e. ask for more than their initial offer. Patrick McKenzie explains why.

Take melatonin a half hour before your desired bedtime. Set an alarm on your phone so that you remember to take it at the exact same time every 24 hours. This gets you to bed at roughly the same time every night and establishes a steady 24 hour cycle, but requires almost no willpower expenditure since you are already awake and it's just a matter of taking a quick pill. Worked for me.

Watch your internal monologue for two patterns: Hero stories where you are in the process of solving problems, and victim stories where you are incapable of solving problems. Attempt to reinterpret victimization stories into as-yet-unresolved heroic stories.

Tips on giving a speech or presentation:

• Practice your presentation several times out loud (if possible).
• The first thing you should talk about after introducing yourself and your topic is why the audience should even care about your topic (and don't assume it's obvious).
• If using a hand-held microphone, hold the microphone near your mouth, not in front of your chest.
• If you're using a computer for slides or a demo, set it up ahead of time if possible.

Get some decent winter clothes if you live in a climate where this is necessary. I can't tell you how many people I know at my college that have been going here for four years, complain about the weather, and don't own anything more than a sweatshirt to keep them warm. If it's windy, a raincoat can go over a fleece-style under layer and makes a huge difference. If it rains or snows, get some boots and maybe some wool socks. A hat and some gloves work wonders, too. Glove liners work nicely as light-weight gloves that can keep your hands warm when either driving or walking places but will get wet quickly if you put your hands in snow. There's no reason to be uncomfortably cold.

Be helpful. I have built a significant network of useful people, and in many cases the relationship started from from me offering to do small favors - as small as helping put away chairs after a lecture - and striking up a conversation.

Addendum: while on occasion I use this technique consciously, there is some concern about seeming transparent (still don't let this stop you, especially with unique opportunities at stake). Best reward yourself for being a helpful guy/gal, make it part of your self image. As your status grows it will be quite natural to offer help to important people (I once got the nerve to offer help to a very rich mayor of a major US city, as I had something to offer. Nothing came of it, but still).

Google it.

Some previously posted boring advice about maintaining an exercise routine:

I was successful in keeping a strict (but light) exercise routine for a year. Here are the main things I think helped me form the habit:

• Not worrying about quantifying, or optimizing. I would immediately get into the rabbit hole of analysis, when I knew that any exercise was much better than procrastinating until I found the perfect method. Once the habit is formed, then you can optimize it.
• Reduce physical inconveniences to actually exercising. The thought of going to a gym immediately turns me off, so I knew it had to be at home. That meant obtaining equipment. To keep it simple, this consisted of a yoga mat and a resistance band.
• Doing it right after waking up. I think this was vital to habit formation, as my mind wasn't very active, and it was easy to fall into routine. Only very rarely did I find myself considering not exercising.
• Doing it every other day - not too often to get burnt out, and not too infrequently to form the habit. In order to keep a consistent sleep schedule and not have to wake up very early, I alternated morning routines - exercise days and shower days. My workouts weren't intense enough to necessitate a shower immediately after. Also, I worked it in with my intermittent fasting routine on non-exercise days.
• Tracking it. Noting days that I exercised did give me a couple of achievement hedons. The effect diminished, but not before the habit was formed.

In addition to optimizing boring things you use frequently you should optimize boring things you do frequently. You usually need to set a side a time to do this, rather than hope you remember to do it when doing a boring thing. On a related note beware reoccurring commitments. Remember, for less than a dollar a day you can waste 300 dollars a year.

If you have ovaries/uterus, a non-zero interest in having kids with your own gametes, and you're at least 25 or so: Get a fertility consultation.

They do an ultrasound and a blood test to estimate your ovarian reserve. Until you either try to conceive or get other measurements, you don't know if you have normal fertility for your age, or if your fertility is already declining without knowing it.

This is important information to know, in order to make later informed decisions (such as when and whether to freeze your eggs, when to start looking for a child-raising partner, when you need to decide by before it's too late, etc.)

(I wrote more about this here: https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/Egg-freezing-catherios-info-for-friends--AbyB0V0bRUZsCM~QbeEzkNuMAg-tI98uI9kmLOlLRRuO80Zh )

Never take gossip at face value.

When you eventually hear the other person's side, don't take that at face value either.

Requisite meta: Pay attention to boring things that people who have accomplished goals you want to accomplish do more.

Learn how to remember people's names.

Of course you're horrible with names. That's because you haven't learned how to learn them. You evolved to know something like 100 names at a time, so your software needs an upgrade if you want to do more than that. Use the mnemonic technique called "linking" or "chaining". This video is cheesy, but it's exactly how I do it.

Calculate the VOI on giving this a try. If you go to conferences very often, or have lots of students, or live in a large city or something, it's probably really useful to you to be able to remember names. Especially given that you can google any name you manage to remember. And consider the psychological effects! A person's name is her favorite word, and knowing it is the password to her attention.

By the way, I'd be very interested to hear from any face blind people who have experimented with this.

ETA: This is also a fantastic party trick I use all the time.

Whenever you need something for which just buying the popular version on amazon won't work, seek out the enthusiast forum for whatever it is you're trying to buy. They usually have a sticky that will flat out tell you what is considered a great cost/performance item by experts.

Disclaimer: you should not do this if you are the sort of person to fall down the rabbit hole of new enthusiasms.

A few random tips:

Reminded by the conversation about phone alarm clocks - if you have trouble getting up in the morning, schedule two alarms, one thirty minutes prior to when you want to get up, and the second when you actually want to get up. Set an energy drink or large cup of coffee next to your phone/alarm. When the first alarm goes off, drink the coffee/energy drink, and go back to sleep.

Invest in an automatic soap dispenser for dish soap. http://www.amazon.com/simplehuman-Sensor-Sanitizer-Brushed-13-Ounce/dp/B003JTCAHK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1362766673&sr=8-1&keywords=simplehuman+soap+dispenser is what I use; it's refillable, adjustable, and accepts just about anything. (I previously used one of those dispensers with proprietary refills; they were expensive, dispensed too much soap, and when I drilled a hole in the top to refill it, it refused to dispense soap, although that may have been some kind of error on my part.) Makes a small but noticeable difference in the pleasantness of doing dishes.

Invest in good tools, and keep them in good repair; if it's a one-off task, get it used, but get it good. Exceptions - tools which are more work to maintain than they save you (I'm looking at you, paintbrushes); tools which are expected to be destroyed by the work done with them (as the roto-rooter guy put it, in his line of business, all gloves are disposable); and tools you intend to misuse (flathead screwdrivers in my house are disposable tools that get destroyed frequently). If a job seems ridiculously hard - if it takes you two hours to drill a hole in a 2x4 - you're not using the right tools. Get the right tools, or borrow them. (On that note, it should be obvious, but treat borrowed tools with respect and return them promptly.)

Sometimes the right way to do things is the wrong way. I eventually gave up on the concrete saw while cutting out a new basement window and just started smashing things with a sledgehammer. It was easier to repair the excess damage with some new concrete than to do the job right to begin with.

If you have no idea what you're doing, hire somebody who is willing to work with you for a few hours. I'm 10x better at carpentry since I hired a carpenter. (And one of the important things I learned was one I never would have learned on my own - namely, that sometimes the correct solution is to just hammer things in until they fit.)

On a continuation of the previous two, everything really is a nail at some point. Be prepared to use the tools you have. It's not a bias to put the resources at your disposal to their fullest use; it's only a bias to fail to consider acquiring new resources when the situation demands it.

Don't spent $100 to save yourself $10. This should be obvious, but the number of times I've done something like spend an hour trying to save a $.10 plumbing part rather than just destroying it and replacing it...

When getting rid of things, don't consider how you feel about getting rid of it, consider how you feel about not having it anymore. If you don't expect to regret it, don't think so hard about it.

When cleaning house, prioritize getting rid of those things without practical utility first. Even duplicate tools serve a purpose.

If you're one of those people who buys things they intend to resell, first resell what you have. Otherwise you're not being a shrewd businessperson, you're just shopping.

Keep basic maintenance items on hand. Expand your definition of basic. If your kitchen drain falls apart after your hardware store closes, are you going to be able to cook dinner?

Buy a couple sealed 5 gallon jugs of water and store them. Even the least-disaster-prone city can still have broken water mains.

On a preparedness note, if you live anywhere prone to blizzards, keep a stock of medical supplies. Keep more gauze than you think you'd ever need; wound dressings need to be changed frequently. Keep a bottle of iodine on hand as well; a useful all-purpose disinfectant with a decent shelf life (5-10 years).

Invest in a good set of locking pliers/vise grip pliers. These are some of the most useful tools you can keep in your home, and a lot of people don't even know they exist.

Map things:

• Sanity check when you're using a maps-enabled device to get around. It might not be showing you the correct thing. Also, it might be showing you the correct thing, but you might be reading it wrong. (Well maybe not you, but definitely me.)
• If you've moved to a new area, avoid using map services to get around and work on your own internal brain-map. You don't want to live somewhere for a year and be helpless without your phone.

As per Yvain: Use amazon prime

As per me: Also use slickdeals, sign up for alerts for things you need but don't need right now. You can then safely forget about it until an email alerts you there is an excellent deal on one. I use this for things I need to buy intermittently such as supplements.

Don't forget to check retailmenot for coupon codes when buying online.

In addition to making lists for "work," make one for things you want to watch, read, and/or play. You'll feel more productive and motivated even when taking a break from work.

I used to forget to brush my teeth a lot, or even when I'd remember I'd shrug it off out of some sort of extreme level of laziness. Here's how I fixed it: I put my toothbrush in my shower. I brush my teeth in the shower. Saves time, makes it easier to remember, and it's less boring since I'm multitasking.

Wash your hands before every meal.

Identify emotionally draining people in your circles and spend less time with them. Alternative: Identify and fix major sources of emotionally draining interactions in people you like to spend time with.

Get a credit card with no annual fee (preferably one with 1% cash back). Pay absolutely everything with card (only rent/mortgage, loan payments, and utilities should be paid in a different way, and that's only because they don't accept credit card). Pay it off in full once every month (the same date every month, and only once a month) before the due date so you never give the credit card company anything more than the actual cost of what you bought.

This makes it incredibly easy to track your finances. Rent/mortgage and loan payments are fixed. If you make a steady monthly wage you know exactly how much money you are getting every month and exactly how much you have left for all non-loan expenditures. That number should be at least $100 more than you pay to the credit card to pay off your past month of living every month.

When you bank more than usual in a month you feel awesome. When you have to pay more than you made in a month you realize immediately and can take quick steps to curtail it.

This also gives you real-world data as to what living costs, helping you to avoid the planning fallacy.

Whenever you make an investment, try to begin capturing value from it as soon as possible after spending the money/time for it. Converse: if for some reason you cannot begin exploiting an investment until a certain date, delay purchasing it until that date.

(I learned this from playing the board game Agricola, where a common error mode is to use the "Expand House" action early on, but then delay the "Family Growth" action. The former action is an expensive prerequisite of the latter, which is the one that actually benefits your position. The smart move is to do Family Growth ASAP after Expand House.)

If you're trying to learn a foreign language, get a channel in that language and leave it on in the background, occasionally sitting down to watch for a few mins, for example while eating breakfast. Do this for a year. Improvement doesn't always have to take effort.

Building off of an earlier comment. Setting alarm(s) for anything you need to at/by a specific time increases the chance you will actually do them, while decreasing the amount of time you spend worrying about doing them. Corollary, this can make your watch/alarm clock/smartphone a single point of failure for a huge chunk of you life, so take good care of it and/or have a back up.

ETA: "worrying about"

I just posted this on my Facebook wall and realized it might belong in this thread:

If you think you spend too much time on Facebook but don't know what to do about it, try this: set the password to a long string of characters (say, 50 letters or numbers) which you need to manually copy every time, and log off when you finish your session. The daunting prospect of having to manually enter this information will discourage you from logging in unless you really desire it. I went from checking Facebook a dozen times per day to just one or two times. (Tip courtesy of Piers Steel, The Procrastination Equation.)

Meta: Perhaps we should all pre-commit to rewarding people who say boring but true things, in general upvotes and/or social cache goes to people who say interesting things regardless of truth.

If what you are doing is not working, do something else.

If you spend a lot of time frustratedly explaining to people why you don't do some common social activity, consider giving in and just doing it.

There have been a few discussions on Less Wrong about how to explain to people why you don't drink. I eventually got so frustrated at having to verbally offset the mistrust I received through not drinking, I just went ahead and started drinking. It obviously depends on your social situation, but for me this amounts to maybe four glasses of wine a month, which is a ridiculously good trade-off.

Upvote comments that you think are useful on LW in general, not just comments you found personally useful. (A note to myself as I read this thread).

Give people permission to bug you.

If you commit to doing or following up on something for somebody, tell them to bug you if you don't get back to them about it. You'll feel less stressed about remembering or being obligated to do it because you've shifted at least some of the responsibility to them and given yourself external pressure, which is ultimately more efficient than relying on your own willpower anyway.

Conversely, give yourself permission to bug people, though without judgment. You know how you feel when you have email in your inbox that you know you really ought to get to, but don't? Somebody is feeling that way about your email right now. How helpful would it be if they electronically tapped you on the shoulder as a reminder? More helpful than getting more and more resentful because they've forgotten/don't care/don't consider you valuable enough to bother replying.

I was moved to post this by the fact that numerous LW participants apparently find the preparation and consumption of food to be such a huge imposition that they're willing to try rather radical interventions just to avoid cooking and eating. Assuming that such steps don't appeal, may I suggest some more mundane ones.

Write a weekly meal planner. This eliminates the extra cognitive load of having to think about "what am I going to make for lunch/dinner" on a rolling ad hoc basis. It also makes it more likely that your grocery shopping purchases will actually match your consumption needs.

To the extent possible, parcel the ingredients out by meal in your refrigerator as you stock it. This saves preparation time later.

I can't guarantee it will work for everyone, but I think a typical individual can save themselves both time and stress concentrating meal selection and the early stages of food preparation all at one time per week, rather than repeating the process on a daily basis.

Avoid weird people.

(Negation of #1 geek social fallacy.)

Of course this advice works only with some definitions of "weird", and I don't want to make it too long, but I feel it is very useful. The point is not to avoid anyone who is off-center in any Gauss curve, but to avoid specifically people who impose a huge cost on you and on people who associate with you, usually because of their serious lack of some social skill. Certainly, nobody is perfect, but don't commit the fallacy of grey.

Floss.

If you're picking out a CPU or graphics card for a custom-built personal computer, ignore basically every number the manufacturer provides to quantify its performance, and go look at some benchmarks. Not because the numbers the manufacturers provide are inaccurate, but because there are so many factors that go into how good hardware is besides the those numbers, that you will never get as accurate an estimate from them as with direct measurement of the performance.

Also, make sure they are compatible with your motherboard.

When starting a business, know your costs. The amount you need to earn (today / this week / this month) to break even is a number you should have essentially memorized. Beware ignoring so-called minor costs or failing to allocate costs to revenue sources.

AKA know your "nut".

If there's a goal you're working on that looks like it's going to take a lot of time and effort to achieve, spend a good chunk of time thinking about much faster ways to accomplish the goal before taking the slow route. Quick fixes and shortcuts aren't always bad.

Try to think critically about everything, not just the things you and the people you know of habitually think critically about.

Don't ignore obvious, commonsense explanations in an effort to be interesting. Keep in mind that the world is a complicated place and there's lots you don't know. Apparently hedgehogs (people who make confident, frequently wrong predictions based on simple models) are more likely to get media attention (and, based on my observations, internet attention as well). So, as a corollary, if you're thinking something outrageous, that idea likely found its way to you because it's outrageous, not because it's accurate.

Don't wait until things are horrible before making them awesome.

Don't get worked up about jumping through administrative hoops such as filling forms, filing tax returns, sending applications. Especially don't go on a moral plane and say things like, 'I shouldn't have to do these things' or 'This is degrading'. It is much more easier to just do the work which cannot be reasonably argued with. Further, if you don't, you can stand to lose a lot. And not for interesting reasons. Think of it as one-boxing on Newcomb (though without the million dollars).

Although this may not be for everyone, I'd recommend listening to audiobooks. The main advantage is that you can easily listen to them while walking or taking public transport, while cooking, while exercising, etc., which I personally find makes these activities a lot less boring.

I've also found that my personal rate of reading is faster with audiobooks (using RockBox with an mp3 player to speed up playback to 3-3.5x) than with normal reading, at something like ~450 words/min or ~1.3 pages/min. Most of the speed increase comes from me being really slow at reading normally due to getting distracted, focusing too much on thinking through one part, or just forgetting to read quickly, but still.

If you're good at something, do that thing.

(Obvious caveats apply.)

I used to have a lot of trouble getting up in the morning, and would frequently arrive to work or lecture at the last possible minute. The one change I made that had the largest impact, beyond strength of coffee or wake-up time, was to switch from showering after breakfast, near the end of my morning routine, to showering first thing when I get out of bed.

I now get out of bed, throw on my flip-flops, grab my stuff to shower, throw a pita in the toaster oven for 10 minutes to make a start on breakfast, fix coffee using the electric kettle, and shower. After showering, I put my contact lenses in. Then I fix up my breakfast sandwich (tomato, cucumber, slice of cheese in pita), toast it some more, and dress myself. Then I eat the food and drink the coffee while enjoying some morning web-browsing. Lastly, I brush my teeth, floss, rinse, pack my stuff, and get the hell out the door to work.

Showering is a blocking activity; when it came last, any slightest procrastination or oversleep got penalized in the last part of the morning routine: walking to work. Sometimes I wouldn't even get breakfast in; the whole thing became a self-destructive death-spiral of failing at basic responsibility and self-organization. By moving the blocking activities to be first in the routine, I now penalize the frivolous web-browsing when I need to penalize, and feel more refreshed earlier.

As a result, despite having no explicit requirement or incentive to be at work at any particular time (graduate student), and not even having a morning class this semester (afternoon lecture and tutorial only), I now regularly arrive to work around 9AM. This has made "racking up the hours" a lot easier, and raised my total productivity by a small but substantial amount that compounds each day.

TL;DR: Shower first in your morning routine.

After you get a haircut you like, ask your stylist to describe what ey did/what the style is, ideally in the vocabulary of the trade. For instance, my current style includes a face frame, long layers, and some other style words.

Write it down, stick the note in your wallet, forget about it until the next haircut. You get the benefit of repeating instructions as they would be described from one hairstylist to another and are less likely to fall victim to terrible cuts or the poor memory of your regular stylist.

As someone who is less productive with a bad haircut (I have to pin unruly lengths out of my eyes, etc), this has saved me time and confusion.

Start saving extra money while you are young.

In certain classes of cases*, the best way to find out answers to your questions is to ask them (rather than doing your own investigation).

Not sure if that's borderline punchy.

*For example, when trying to locate something while driving/walking around, when inquiring about poorly documented local activities, when your solution of some problem/research question may have one of many possible flaws (and thus you would need to look up each possible flaw to investigate it, while an expert may be able to spot the flaw immediately), when your quick google search fails to yield clear results, etcetera. Also see this comment.

[The starred things were edited in to improve specificity in response to comments.]

Before heading to the gym for a workout, plan out your workout in detail (what exercises, in what order, how many sets, how many reps) and preferably carry a piece of paper with the workout written on it. This leads you to getting more done in less time. But more importantly, this prevents decision fatigue from draining your willpower; and you need willpower in large quantities to finish your workout.

Bring your coat - but don't wear it. Being cold burns calories and improves circulation.

On that note, does anybody have any boring advice for cold-weather exercise? I can jog in 110 degree, 100% humidity weather, no problem. I grew up in the swampy parts of Texas. Heat and humidity are no problem for me. But jogging in cold weather - < 60 Fahrenheit - is killer; my throat feels like I'm swallowing jagged chunks of ice.

If you are feeling just a little sick, do not go to work. Apply for sick leave and stay home. Not only will you recover more quickly by getting more rest, you also protect your colleagues from getting infected.

.

You can get soluble fiber (for example, dextrin, which is long indigestible chains of glucose) from the store. So if you aren't eating enough fiber due to how inconvenient vegetables are, you can start with this. It will make you thirstier, less hungry, and more regular. It also seems to improve blood sugar levels. The popular brand for dextrin is Benefiber, however I have only tried WinCo's version, Qualifiber. I paid $5 for 38 servings of 3.5 grams, which are 1/3 a daily supply at full strength.

Note: Fiber intake should be increased gradually, and with plenty of water.

• http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietary_fiber
• http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dextrin

Budget some money each month towards substantially improving your life.

Look for the best, lowest hanging fruit (ie objects, classes and experiences that will have the most impact per dollar spent)

Ask others to recommend things - so you don't just think of the things you already know about.

Note: I've set up a page to collect these ideas here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/li4/low_hanging_fruit_for_buying_a_better_life/

Read literature with an old writing style, especially if you dislike said writing style. The more opaque and complicated, the better.

I find that I'm a very fidgety reader, unconsciously skipping words, or even whole sentences, skimming over words I don't actually know the meaning of, and failing to connect the context of words that I do know the meaning of with the rest of the narrative or lecture. This I do with both literature and more importantly, when reading science. I've decided to read At The Mountains of Madness and penalize myself for every time I lose track of the narrative, and reward myself for every time I recognize when one sentence adds or contributes to something implied by another sentence earlier on in the paragraph, and so on. Furthermore, I will do this for only literature, and not with learning new scientific concepts, or even old ones that I have already learned. The problem is with reading comprehension, not with understanding concepts, and exercising two skills at once prematurely may cause problems. I hope this will instill genuine patience, so that being careful and observant becomes a natural thing, rather than the uncomfortable thing I wrestle with.

As a pedestrian or cyclist, you're not all that easy to see from a car at night, worse if you don't wear white. High-visibility vests (that thing that construction workers wear, yellow or orange with reflective stripes) fix the problem and cost around $7-$8 from Amazon including shipping, or £3 in the UK.

Don't get arrested.

Don't get involved with crazy people.

Supplementing potassium has a large effect on mental performance for some people, it's cheap and easy enough to be quite worth trying. Personally I add a few grams of KCl (nusalt) to a drink.

If you have trouble getting into an exercise routine, try this. Join a gym, and go every single day and do the same exact thing every time. For a lot of people, doing something every day is a lot easier than coming up with a schedule that changes depending on the day, especially if one of the changes is 'do nothing on Sunday' (recipe for doing nothing on Monday too, and then forgetting about the whole thing).

What I do is this. I wake up to my alarm, and then I immediately go eat a light breakfast, and then head to the gym. Once at the gym I stretch for like 5 mins, run on the treadmill for 5-10 mins, do a couple sets of military press or something, and then go to the sauna. Hits all the major pieces. Flexibility, cardio, lymph movement, resistance training, sweating, etc. Once I finish at the sauna, I take a shower, put on fresh clothes, and then start my day. I essentially use the gym as my 'morning routine'. I'm not ready for anything until I put on fresh clothes after my (quick) workout.

If you routinely lose things behind the same piece of furniture either move it closer to the wall or block that space, or move it further from the wall to make retrieval easier.

Invest at least 10% of your after-tax income, each month, in a Vanguard index fund. Do not buy individual stocks, nor any actively managed index fund, nor any fund with an expense ratio over 0.5%. If you absolutely must pick stocks, and I admit that I am not blind to the attraction, use a fee-free broker such as Loyal3, and don't count this towards your 10% - use play money for active investing.

If you are looking at your latest paycheck and finding it hard to see where you're going to cut to be able to put 10% into investments, precommit now to starting this program after your next income increase; also, start with 1% instead. If you cannot free up even 1% of your income, you have a major problem, which you need to fix. (Incidentally, if you can do 20%, do that.)

If your employer has a 401K match, for the love of all that's holy, contribute enough to max out the match! That's free money, that is!

If you have several old 401Ks, roll them over into an IRA with Vanguard. It'll be easier to keep track of your money, you'll likely pay lower fees, and IRA money is more accessible than 401K money.

Maintain a savings account with at least three months' expenses in it; six is better; twelve is probably too much - at that point you're losing more in growth than you're gaining from being able to ride out a job loss. But people do differ in how they feel about risk; by all means make it twelve if you'd be happier that way.

If you have recurring credit-card debt (not paid off at the end of each period), pay that down before starting on investing. And for dog's sake do so right now, that stuff is poison. Consider Lending Club or other peer-to-peer lending services, it is fairly likely that you can get a better rate than your credit card gives you.

(By request)

Shower-drying optimization:

Leave the bathroom door open and the shower curtain partway pulled so humidity doesn't collect in the room. Have an oversized bath sheet in reach (you can get good ones at Costco). When you're done showering, towel-dry hair, then the rest of you, then comb your hair so it doesn't stick. Without humidity in the room, you don't keep sweating so you don't feel clammy. You can get dressed immediately if you're pressed for time. If you're like me and hate putting dry clothes on damp skin, find something you can do for ~15 minutes while you air-dry the rest of the way (making/eating breakfast is good for this, since you probably have to do it anyway).

(Fat free) yogurt is cheap, tasty, healthy, lasts a long time in the fridge, and requires no preparation and only one utensil.

In addition to budgeting time, budget mental energy. Cooking may take a bit of time, but it doesn't take much mental energy once you've done it a few times. If you have a bunch of chores to do, don't batch them up completely; batch them into chunks and use those chunks as mental breaks. Just because cleaning isn't fun, doesn't mean it is as mentally draining as learning mathematics. (Too punchy?)

Call your cable company to try to negotiate a better rate.

If you want to stop taking prescription meds and they're cheap enough, keep buying them and stockpile.

(Source: Burninate)

If you are having trouble finishing tasks on a task list, make a task schedule.

My kid has recently decided he's into meteorology. First, he just walked around with scribblings of "+5, -11" and hummed a weather forecast theme. This got boring for everybody else, so we explained to him that 'weather' happens in some places, and people watch it for explicit purposes of deciding some matters, not for sheer cuteness. (I don't think he believed me on that one.)

So now we make 'forecasts' - several for Ukraine (first the video, then the sound, for 25 cities or for north-south-center-west-east), Earth ('Australiaaa... thirty-six degrees... kangoroo can live'), and space in general (with fictional planets, although he ordered a Solar system, too). The upcoming one is going to be for mammoths (I'm thinking Eurasia + North America).

This lets us work on reading, writing, reciting (short messages; he doesn't like learning poetry by heart), painting and building things from cardboard, finding places on the globe. Although my husband groans about having to edit the end product (without delay).

Reduce routine shopping time by

• Make a list of items you shop all the time

• Shop at a fixed schedule e.g. every tuesday, every 4 weeks, every first tuesday of the week.

• Shop the items in a fixed order (possibly matched on you list). Note: Most stores change the order almost never and the order is part of the customer retention program, so you should be aware that this will bind you to the store.

• Choose a weekday and time where the supermarket is mostly empty (e.g. in the morning instead of on saturday or in the evening when it may be crowded)

• Do the shopping together with other persons to batch larger amounts and/or use transporation together (a car)

• Buy a larger fridge (possibly a large top loading one in the basement (the top loaders are much more engery efficient) to reduce the number of times you have to go shopping.

• Freeze some food not customarily frozen: bread/buns, butter, cut cold meat (it may affect the taste)

• Use a a grocery delivery service. But note that it may not save as much time as you think:

  • oportunity time costs for need to be there when the delivery arrives
  • limited availability of frozen goods
  • storing away the purchase also takes some time esp. on large purchases (you do not usually feel this time on small purchases as it gets merged into everyday tasks)

• You can still buy fresh fruits and vegetables etc. more often e.g. bi-weekly. You can use that time to do fun shopping with a mostly empty basket and unhurried.

Some more context for this can be found in the following scattered comments:

• use a a grocery delivery service

• repeatedly shopping for the same recipies

• use a weekly meal planner

Personal example:

We used to shop every five weeks with a pre-filled checklist for 6 persons. In total about 4-5 shopping carts full (I heard the german carts are relatively small compared to the US ones). It takes 3-4 hours total. Note that this includes >1h to store everything away (e.g. unpacking vegetables, fruits, unpacking boxes, reordering fridge). What remained were short weekly single-shop trips to buy milk, fruits, bread and a few other items.

I'd guess that compared to shopping every two days as my mother used to which took at at least 1h each time (whatever the amount purchased) this probably saves about an 1.5 hours each week.

And it is cool.

Make commitment contracts for anything important (works best for long term things). Commitment contracts (beeminder.com stickk.com) have basically solved 90% of motivational problems. The more important something is and the lower the initial expectancy of you actually doing it, the bigger contract you make. for example, if you really need to study for an exam, but you know that in this past you have always intended to study for exams but ended up doing nothing, then put a lot of money on yourself doing it. Be wary if there is ever something important that you do not want to make a commitment contract for, as if you actually expect to do it, then making the contract should pose no problem, as you will be unlikely to lose any money.

If you type a lot, buy a mechanical keyboard.

Don't use 'dimmable' LED lights.

META: There is a good reason to assume that an punchy-sounding piece of advice will be more useful than a boring-sounding piece of advice: all other things being equal, the listener is usually more likely to have already heard the latter than the former. (Of course, “more likely” != “sure”, and also people often do forget advice they've already heard, so it's not like boring advice is always useful; but the tone of this post appears to imply that punchyness and usefulness are not in fact positively correlated.)

Buying a good microphone and some decent voice recognition software and learning to speak so that the computer can understand you can potentially save you a lot of time if you do a fair amount of prose-style text input.

If you're sad and lonely and hungry and cold and tired and sore and naked and sitting alone in a dark room doing nothing, then get up and put on clothes and eat food and talk to people.

Better than treating others as you would like to be treated is to treat them as they would like to be treated (insofar as doing so is within your means).

If you want to live longer, consider reading this post on high-impact ways to lead a healthier lifestyle by RomeoStevens.

You should frequently change your passwords, use strong passwords, and not use the same password for multiple services (only one point of failure where all your passwords get compromised rather than every such service being a point of failure). It's not easy to live up to this in practice, but there are approximations that are much easier:

• Using a password manager is better than using the same password for lots of services. Clipperz is a web service that does the encryption on your computer (so your passwords never get sent to the server), and can be installed locally. Alternatively, you can use a local application if you're not worried about ever needing your passwords when you don't have access to your computer. I currently try to get by with (a login password) + (passwords for particularly important online services like online banking) + (a password manager password).

• If you balk at the inconvenience of regularly memorizing randomly-generated passwords, it's better than nothing to come up with memorable phrases and take the first letter of each word to form your password. (Non-boring bonus advice: You can use phrases that remind you of something you want to do each time you log in to your computer, like looking at your todo list. [ETA: Never mind. I've now tried this twice and both times entering the password has become automatic far too quick, stopping almost immediately to serve as a useful reminder.])

As a man, don't get married unless she is very rich.

As a woman, get married if the law is on your side(which it generally is in most western countries) and if the man has enough financial resources.

Try using nonstandard razors.

I tried a traditional straight-edge - my experience is that it's too much bloody work just to keep the thing in working order. Also, a wet strop is a ruined strop, in an environment in which it's likely to get wet - not workable if you share bathroom space with other people who may not be as careful of your stuff as you are. Or animals who think it makes a nice chew/scratching toy.

However, you can find straight edge razors which accept single-edge razor blades (the cheap replaceable kind), and also safety razors in either the double-edge or the straight-edge variety.

Straight edge with replaceable blade advantages:

They don't get clogged.

Substantially cheaper to use.

Closer shave.

You don't need to trim a beard before you shave it off.

Disadvantages:

Until you figure them out, and probably even after you do, you'll cut the heck out of yourself.

Unwieldy for some applications (upper lip, I'm looking at you)

Unusable for some applications

You might get mistaken for a hipster or contrarian or both.

Safety razor with replaceable blade advantages:

Cheaper

Substantially harder to clog, and easily remedied - pull the blade out, rinse it off, put it back

Closer shave than the X-blade monstrosities

Substantially more stylish than plastic

Disadvantages:

Sharper, AKA "Safety" is relative - unlike the more conventional plastic things, I find shaving cream of some kind to be an actual necessity, and irritation seems more frequent.

For parents who have trouble making the kids go to bed on time, like I do myself:

These past two nights, I lured the kid into bed with "Aurora Borealis" made with three really garish coloured rhinestones and a small flash-light (and with a plate of water & a plate of water and vegetable oil, since I was curious about how the images would change). Put the rhinestones on the floor or into the plate (they float between water and oil, but if you press on them, they sink) and direct light onto them (swishing them around, holding the light closer or farther, nudging them - sometimes, in water/oil, they overlapped) so that there is a reflection on the ceiling. (You can just oil them, it gets a sharper gleam than non-treated 'stones.)

I am going to buy some identical ones and try coating one with colourless nail polish, one with oil, and try adding salt to the water (or glycerine... or chlorophyll solution in ethanol... or benzene...) to see if there will be some change in my "Aurora". Good thing the kid is five and I have some time to brush up on my optics:)

For meat-eaters, even a small plant in the kitchen can be a place to pour off juices from thawed meat. Plant gets nutrients, environment gets less eutrophication.

Advice for if you don't want to go bald.

Two boring items of cooking interest:

On cracking eggs: There's a thin membrane on the inside of an egg's shell. When you crack an egg, you're actually aiming to break that membrane. If you crack the shell but the membrane's still intact, the egg won't split cleanly and most likely you will get shell pieces in your food. Figuring this out reduced my shell-in-food mishaps by something like 80%.

On butter: Real butter (the kind that comes in sticks) is meant to be kept at room temperature when you're going to use it. It lasts a week or more that way in a butter dish. I somehow didn't realize this until I was past thirty. I used margarine all my life, because I thought it was normal for butter to be rock-solid and completely unspreadable, as it is when taken out of the fridge.

When placing multiple identical items in a fridge, or most other storage, always make room and place them in a row from front to back, so that you always reach for the freshest or open one from the same place.

How To Survive A Death March (as in 80 hour work week).

Read the Boring Advice Less Wrong thread periodically and do what it says.

Do not take excessively long, frequent and hot showers.

Don't get divorced.

Don't be evil.

Surreal Advice Repository