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comment by norswap · 2019-02-21T00:18:56.415Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Great post! More of an exploration than a presentation, but a thoroughly enjoyable one.

Last year, I sat down with some hard thoughts about my own life philosophy, and came out with essentially the same conclusion: that enjoying life is about the process of getting somewhere rather than about actually getting there.

There are some intriguing new elements here, including the link with entropy (though I do tend to think that the ending is perhaps a tad too abstract and speculative).

I too, was inspired by reading and quotes, here are a few that guided me in this direction, the most related of which is perhaps:

What man actually needs is not some tension-less state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.
— Viktor Frankl

(feel free to reach out, there's a whole lot more of them)

I also can't resist to link this Hunter S Thompson letter, which is perhaps the piece of writing that has influenced me the most, and is completely in line with what you propose here.

comment by anna_macdonald · 2019-02-12T23:39:03.035Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Batch processing and interrupt coalescing basically come down to scheduling the things you have to do in a regular basis in a manner so as to minimize the instances of context-switching, so as to maximize the amount of time spent on one task uninterruptedly.

Is it possible to do this if you have kids (especially little ones)?

Replies from: AlpineAlps
comment by AlpineAlps · 2019-02-13T00:41:26.773Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Speaking as someone who has a purely theoretical understanding of parental productivity. I would say that it’s possible to use ideas like batching when you have children, but the efficiency is going to be lower than if you didn't have kids. But because your time is much scarcer, minimal gains can still be very valuable.

Most of the successful examples I’ve run across have been people using batching and productivity systems to make the time they spend away from their children more productive.

An interesting exception I remember is a family that taught their children that if they needed to signal for attention while their parents where talking. They should hold their parents elbows, and the parent would acknowledge they understood by placing their hands over their child's hand. That way the parent could break the conversation at a more natural point and swich contexts more smoothly.