Group Rationality Diary, September 1-15

Last time I posted on one of these rationality journals it was about 9 months ago. I said I was going to go on a couple month long bike trip. I'd been having a lot of trouble setting and meeting goals, and after failing so many important goals ended up pretty depressed, so I decided to just not set goals anymore and just peddle my bike for a while.

My bike trip ended up being just three days, as I got bored rather quickly. It turns out that just biking all day was not as mentally stimulating as I had hoped it would be. The bike trip wasn't a complete waste; biking to the ocean has been a life goal of mine, and I finally pulled it off. Also, I got lots and lots of exercise, which helped with my depression. Finally, I slept in a ditch on the side of the road, something I have never done before. I no longer fear being homeless. If you have food in your stomach, a warm coat, a place where you can rest undisturbed, and a deep exhaustion that makes worrying about social conventions impossible, it turns out that the rest of life will take care of itself. Of course, I was biking through a rural area, so that made sleeping undisturbed a lot easier. The other big thing was the ocean. Oceans and libraries always settle the thoughts in my head.

After all that, I went home and got a job. They don't pay me much, but on the plus side expectations and stress are very low.

I went from generally depressed to generally happy all at once, when I got that low stress job I previously mentioned. It turns out that spending several months sending out tons of job applications, getting exactly 0 responses, and then having LOTS of free time to stew in your thoughts is not healthy. In the future, I will treat large blocks of free time as being a potential risk, and make sure to fill them up with productive activities.

I've had "find meaningful tasks to occupy my time" as a life goal since about age 7 or so, though back then I phrased it as "don't be apathetic". Basically, I want to be the sort of person who goes out and does things and has an interesting and meaningful life, but instead I do the easiest, laziest thing instead, which usually means browsing the internet. Up until now, my strategies have included (starting with my first strategy and ending in my last) praying to god to change me, swearing every night that I would totally be a different person, berating myself when I failed, using physical impediments to prevent myself from failing, reading lots of books about reason and psychology and keeping a journal in which I listed things like goals and reasons why goals were not being met, and using mind altering drugs to chemically force the emotions I wanted. All these plans failed, and as you can likely imagine by the time I was willing to use the mind altering chemicals I was pretty desperate and upset.

The thing that all these strategies have in common is that they are attempting to promote the positive emotion. I read some books on meditation, and one concept that stood out to me was this idea that happiness doesn't exist; there is simply the absence of negative emotions. Remove all negative emotions, and you will discover that you are happy. My new strategy is that I am going to practice removing negative emotions. When I detect negative thoughts, I will focus all my attention on the sensations I am experiencing present moment, starving the negative emotions of the brainpower they need. It's like that old question; "Quick, think of anything other than white elephants!". The way to prevent your mind from thinking unwanted thoughts is to focus your mind so intently on another, different thought that there is no space left for the first thought. Poof! White elephant gone.

My new plan for "find meaningful activities to spend my time on" is to meditate until I eliminate the negative emotions that are preventing my from enjoying myself. Once my mind is a place of peace, I will being to naturally enjoy certain activities again, and find them more compelling and interesting then just browsing the internet.

So far this plan seems to be working well, and I have even had some success in starting a meditation habit. I'll report back in a couple months.

...

One last thing; I've often thought that flossing would be a good idea, but was too lazy to bother. Then I learned that the water in my district was not fluoridated, and that mouthwash actually works, so I went and bought some mouthwash. Swishing funny-tasting liquids around my mouth is a lot more fun then dragging a string between my teeth and having it sometimes come back bloody, so I've successfully added "use mouthwash" as a habit. That's neat. And hopefully it'll save on dentist bills. I've had a cavity pretty much every time I visited the dentist for as long as I remember, so if I suddenly stop getting cavities I'll have clear proof that this works.

I have read this advice somewhere, that people like to focus on developing their strongest skills (because thinking about their strongest skills makes them feel good), but to be successful they have to focus on fixing their weakest skills (but they often avoid it because it feels bad).

Specifically applied to me, no matter how good I am at programming, if I spend all my time procrastinating online, I will never make a computer game. Therefore, to make a computer game, my #1 task is fixing my procrastination habits, not improving my programming skills. My skills are probably good enough as they are, and they will further improve by doing, and I can read some articles and books later if necessary. -- My brain is trying to focus my attention towards learning, because learning is pleasant; it gives me the feeling that I know more. I love learning. But I could learn infinitely without getting anything done. Also, if I don't do anything, maybe I am not fully understanding what I learned, or maybe I keep forgetting it soon. -- The important part is noticing that my brain recommends me to focus on learning, but the winning move is to focus on stopping procrastination. Because it's the procrastination, not the lack of learning, that really stops me now.

This week I started a diet, to reduce my weight and become more healthy. There was a really convenient solution available. There is a company that makes the food and brings it to me home every day. They claim the food contains all the necessary nutrients and not much calories. The important part is that you have to eat regularly, 5 times a day, with 2-3-hour intervals between meals. I have subscribed for two months to test it, one week is already over. I am pleasantly surprised that the food usually tastes great, and that despite eating less than usually, I never actually felt hungry. (To declare a success, I must wait those two months and measure how much my weight has actually changed.) The only downside is the cost of the food, but my idea is that after those two months, I will continue eating the same way, but preparing the meals myself. To overcome another trivial inconvenience, I keep the plastic boxes from the food, so it will be easy to estimate the portion size. Also the boxes have good shape and size so that many of them can fit in the freezer.

As another weakness, I have noticed that I don't reflect on my actions regularly. I don't make enough plans to change myself. May seem contradictory to this comment, but this comment reflects only my latest weeks. I was aware of having internet procrastination problems for years, and I didn't fix that even one year after the CFAR Rationality Minicamp! (I had a plan, the plan didn't work well, I was kinda aware of that, but I did nothing about it.) It was actually the one-year-later questionnaire that woke me up to realize that I haven't fulfilled my 10 goals I stated after the minicamp (actually, I forgot nearly half of them), and that I have lost momentum. Now, one month after that realization, I have reduced my web procrastination to 25%, and it actually wasn't that hard. Why haven't I done that sooner? What other potentially useful and easy improvements am I ignoring? Then I realized I didn't make plan for any regular reflection on my goals, so naturally I wasn't reflecting much. Okay, it is late evening now, I will do that tomorrow.

I have successfully developed a habit of making reports every day about what I did. Just a few yes-or-no categories. And I kept doing this for more than a year (which is more than anything I tried before). This didn't improve me automatically in every measured dimension (as I kinda naively expected), but at least I have the data, so I can look and see what is okay and what is wrong. -- For example, it tells me that today was completely wrong; the only good thing was not eating anything with sugar. I could have exercised for 5 minutes. I could have walked outside for 20 minutes. I could have posted an already prepared article on my blog, as I originally planned to. But I didn't do anything of this, and just spent my whole day online. (Which is an improvement from spending most of my week online.) Well, it won't happen tomorrow, hopefully. This kind of logging draws my attention to what I am doing, and what I am not doing. (Like, my previous days this week were more productive.)

I guess I should write an article on my blog about what changed (and what didn't) during my one year after the Rationality Minicamp. The good thing: I already have the necessary data; I just have to process it.

I discovered that deciding exactly when I am going to worry about things I need to worry about at some other time, and putting them on my calendar, is effective in getting me to quit worrying about them now. Example: "This carpet is gross; I am going to keep focusing on my project for one more hour, then vacuum."

I have also discovered that there are a lot of things I don't actually need to worry about at any particular time -- i.e., they can be worried about when they become relevant. These don't go on the calendar, because the event they are related to coming up will trigger solving them. Example: "Where do we want to go for dinner?"

Sometimes the trigger event never happens. Thus, worry-procrastination basically eliminates worrying about things that don't happen, and the concomitant time wasted, attention diverted from tasks at hand, etc. Example: "What if friend is upset because I missed their call?", and friend isn't upset.

I still need practice at (a) identifying worry; (b) not doing it until scheduled.

I saw a comment on one of the previous rationality diary threads about starting a meditation habit by meditating for two seconds per day and later had the realization that when starting this particular habit it might be better to track different units at the beginning than you ultimately want to end up using (and can't find the original comment now). So when starting, you might just practice one breath mindfully, then increment the number of breaths. When you hit some set larger number like 8 or 10, you might switch over to counting blocks of breaths until that becomes disruptive (probably more than 2 blocks for me). Once you hit this point you're probably up to about two minutes, so you could switch over to using a timer and tracking minutes.

A few people have been expounding on the virtues of Anki decks recently. Nothing I'm officially learning at the moment lends itself well to spaced repetition, but I have become semi-randomly interested in the history of the English monarchy, so I'm using 950 years of moderately useless information as a test case to get used to the process.

A new semester has started up, and I'm signed up for three classes, as well as being a TA, as well as doing research. The original plan was to go to the first session of each class, decide which one I liked the least, and then drop that one, but turns out I really like all of them. So I think this is going to be a busy semester for me.

As a result I've been pulling out all the productivity techniques I've had in a back pocket for a while and applying them. I'm using pomodoros for all of my work it's appropriate for; I'm scheduling my next day on the previous day (and am trying to schedule as many things as I can routinely, so that I'll only have one or two decisions to make about the next day each day). We'll see how well I stay on top of things, and which of these techniques end up doing the most work (if it's possible to disambiguate their effects).

• I've been using TagTime for over a month now on my Android phone as a way to become more conscious of my emotions (ie. my tags are all feeling words). Pros: It's made me conscious that I use certain activities as a method of self-distraction and to fill time rather than because I'm actually enjoying them. I feel like my ability to quickly gauge how I'm feeling has improved a lot. It gives me a rough snapshot of how my overall mood varies, since I can flick through the timestamps and see which tags predominate. Cons: The app occasionally freezes. When the app pings me multiple times less than a minute apart, it's annoying and jerks me out of whatever I was doing. It took me a few weeks to get over any and all pings jerking me out of whatever I was doing. Conclusion: I'm leaving it installed for now, but I'm not entirely sure that I'm getting a lot of benefit out of it at this point

• I reviewed what has and hasn't worked for me in the past wrt therapy, and have noticed a pattern which I'll be bringing up at my next appointment.

• Relatedly, succeeded in changing my emotions wrt some of my self-destructive impulses, with the result that those particular impulses have almost entirely disappeared

• Failed to complete my second Coursera course within the space of a few months. I'm still trying to figure out what's going on there. My current theory is that it's a mixture of trivial inconveniences (my desktop doesn't have internal speakers so I have to locate and plug in my earbuds before I listen to anything, the individual lectures are often long enough that I have to consciously make time for them) and general lack of motivation due to current depression.

I'm working on rotating tasks to improved productivity. Downside: Most tasks require a muse; I only have two which don't. Solution: Add another task of the latter category. Writing it out makes things so clear; thank you for this Schelling point!

I've also started using a calendar.