Starting the challenge today, making this comment for accountability. I have 48 bugs in my spreadsheet, with rows for the date added and date solved. I know I'm eight months late to the party, but I'll post updates and take part in the challenges as I go. Thanks for putting together a great sequence!

I wonder if all of the CFAR techniques will have different names after you are done with them :) Looking forward to your second and third iteration.

Putting all of my TAPS on post it notes on my wall so I see them when I wake up. This should make a good trigger for keeping them in mind during the day. It also gives some potentially free utility over time in the form of "see that wall? All those notes are different habits I was able to cultivate".

I'm posting here to hold myself publicly accountable for taking on this challenge (starting yesterday), when I generated 80 bugs (many of these are likely to be broken down into more smaller bugs, so I'm inclined to be satisfied despite not reaching the magic total of 100). In fact, posting this comment is the last bug I'm tackling today to complete today's Yoda Timer exercise to kick off my being a more active member of this community.

• I committed myself to leave a comment on every post/YouTube video/reddit thread I Interact with since I have a pretty strong aversion for online interaction and asking for help on the internet.
• I do TimeTracking for all my activities and don't really look at the data all that much, so I put a reminder to look through all I did at the end of the day and search for areas to optimize.
• I made a commitment to be more critical in my media consumption by at least writing some notes on everything since I tend to just 'like' or 'dislike' stuff without forming an actual opinion.

Many of my best resolve cycles boiled down to finding and ordering something on Amazon; thanks in large part to Andrew Critch leading by personal example this got trained into a TAP and now I do it more or less automatically. The most recent thing I ordered, after trying it at the last CFAR workshop, was a bunch of pedialyte.

Very simply, I don't brush my teeth as regularly as I ought: Therefore, I put a sticky note outside my bathroom door reminding me to do so.

What I enjoyed about this most was that often, solutions to one problem fed into partial solutions to others. Keeping my phone out of my hands directly on waking meant organizing all my small-item chargers next to the front door, which is the most convenient and correct place for them, anyway.

I've been finding Yoda timers helpful, but not because they show "look how much you can do in 5 minutes!" - many of my tasks had to do with cleaning things up around the house, and these tasks take at least an hour to actually accomplish.

There was some clutter in my kitchen from more than 2 years ago, including a container of Soylent powder, some syrups that I used to flavour plain Soylent, and bottles of vodka and rum. I only drink ready-to-drink Soylent (I had ordered the powder to try it out, but it's not as convenient as RTD Soylent), and there's now enough variety in the flavours of Soylent that I don't have any need for extra flavours; I also no longer drink alcohol, because the idea of putting poison into my body to relax just doesn't seem appealing to me these days.

Beyond all the unused items, the area was also just very dusty. I could have easily cleaned the area a long time ago, but it never really registered on my radar as a problem that needed to be fixed. Yesterday, walking through my house as part of the Bug Hunt, the messiness of the kitchen (as well as other parts of my house and car) stood out to me, so I made a note of it as a bug to potentially fix, and once I had chosen that bug for my Yoda timer, even though I knew it would take more than 5 minutes to thoroughly clean the area, the Yoda timer gave me just enough space to create a plan in my mind and rally the motivation to actually tackle this problem that has been there for a long time.

Was procrastinating doing anything that asks for white vinegar for years because the lid is annoying to open. Took exactly 20 seconds on the yoda timer to realize that another brand of white vinegar with another kind of lid must exist. 

Thanks for posting all of this :)

I totally agree that we need to more systematically practice rationality. What matters is how well we actually use these tools, not how well we could use them in perfect contexts when explicitly prompted to. 

Most of the bugs were solved through rapid googling, which felt a little like cheating, but was probably the best method.

Results
- Realized the shelf on my desk was only used ~ once per month, and removed it, giving me more work space.
- Found trivially easy healthier breakfasts.
- Resolved to continually add gratitude notes to anki at least once a week. Method is to appreciate the item on the card, visualizing life without it to better feel the value.
- Learned about linters for technical writing like vale, and plan to incorporate. Found a book to skim later.
- Reread https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4K5pJnKBGkqqTbyxx/to-listen-well-get-curious [LW · GW]
and made notes on how I can approach conversations differently. In particular "if a solution to someone's problem looks obvious, assume it isn't and try to understand why."

 

I hit some nice and easy challenges today - replacing my shoes that have holes in them, getting a new ice scraper that isn't broken in half, and setting some reminders to take out the trash before it overflows. 

The most successful Yoda timer-like item I've hit recently was upgrading my work setup. I work at a small built-in desk in my apartment, too small to fit two monitors. I also use the desk both for work and for school/videogames. For a long time, I just dealt with working on a small single monitor and having to get under the desk to unplug my mouse and keyboard from my work laptop at the end of the day and plug them into my personal computer. A few weeks ago, I finally decided to see if there was a better way, and ended up purchasing an ultrawide monitor and a USB switch. Now I can have two large windows open on my screen, and I'm a single button press away from swapping inputs!

I had a strong urge to skip bugs when casually doing this exercise last month. The following thoughts came up:

• This one isn't actually an easy bug, move it to level 2 or 3
• This one can't be fixed without a change to my habits, which almost by definition can't be done in a single 5 minute session
• I could fix this with a purchase but the price of the item is higher than the benefit of the having the bug gone (i.e, I would not pay $150 for this bug to go away, but I would still consider this a bug)

Writing this out helped me figure out some potential antidotes for this round. Here's what I told myself:

• Who cares. Do them in order. Try it for 5 minutes (you'll be surprised how wrong your simulation is)
• Even if you can't find the answer, brainstorming for 5 minutes might get you closer
• If the bug is too abstract, breaking it up into more concrete pieces is a good use of 5 minutes

Bugs fixed this time

1. Need new underwear and socks: googled, read some quick reviews, and ordered. Very satisfying, took 10 minutes
2. Can't find a nail file: texted family group chat and was lead to one within 30 seconds. Felt kinda magical, took 1.5 minutes total
3. Don't know my greek letters: Downloaded an anki deck of them after reading a few reviews of different options. 3 minutes total (this isn't solved per se, but it will now take care of itself)

Bugs worked on but not fixed

1. I don't watch the movies on my "to watch" list - I'll scroll through Netflix trying to find the perfect one, give up, and watch nothing
   • I ended up brainstorming 8 possible fixes and reflecting on this. It's an unassumingly tricky bug.
   • Brainstorming for 5 minutes made me think about how I spend my free time; a not-small percentage goes to me neither enjoying myself nor being productive (watching YouTube videos I don't like, flitting from headline to headline, etc).
     • (IIRC) there's a part in Infinite Jest where a character's phone rings at the same time the doorbell rings and he gets so perfectly stuck between the two possible actions that he gets (psychologically) torn apart and paralyzed, unable to take either action, plunged into a valley of misery, made worse by the fact that he's aware of the self-imposed nature of his paralysis
       • I often feel like this when I get stuck while picking between doing something productive or (harmlessly) hedonic - at the minimum I could be enjoying myself. The worst case is being stuck in between with a vague panicky-yet-tired feeling I get, doing something neither productive, enjoyable, or necessary
         • This thought made the brainstorm worth it and I'll likely revisit it
2. Redness around nose:
   • I've tried to fix this with a face-cream recommended from Reddit before, but didn't really see any fix. This bug has a slight hopeless vibe to it, but I did the 5 minute timer anyway
   • Researched again and found that I might've been using the cream wrong. Though in another thread many people expressed frustration with their inability to fix it even after seeing a dermatologist.
   • I decided that I will try the new face-cream technique for 3 days. If it doesn't get better from that I'll delete this bug. I'm the king of my list and that is how I will it

most successful were

• cleared my desk
• ordered window curtains
• did initial body photos for tracking progress in sport and stretching + scheduled next checkup

1. I plan to take a sabattical next year. Wrote an impressive researcher in a field I'm interested about to hear about any research opportunities in the pipeline.

2. Formalised my morning-routine in a document to decrease time spent reading about other's meditation before I start my own. Reviewing notes from last session, finding a relevant passage in my book.

3. Set up a routine to stay in touch with a far-away friend. Asking kindly about thoughts on a subject, and about what I can help him with.

4. I'm often distracted in my long study sessions by a desire for food. Made a routine to ensure snacks are in my room, not in the dorm-kitchen, without them spoiling.

2. consisted of many sub-items, so I count it as 2 separate items ;-)

It seems this method is very useful for meaningful tasks with some negative affect that I've been putting off without any good reason. Thanks for this!

Did this today. Results:

1. set a reminder every evening to make a schedule for the next day (problem this was solving is that lack of schedule means I procrastinate somewhat endlessly on things)

2. cleaned up the many bags lying around my closet door. now it is much easier to approach and use my closet.

3. looked into what grocery delivery services exist, made an Instacart account, decided to do the free trial of their annual subscription, and preliminarily decided that if that goes well I intend to just go ahead and pay for the annual subscription. (for this to be fully solved I still need to go ahead and actually try ordering some stuff; that's a more-than-5-minutes task probably)

4. I do a few weights exercises every day and I'd noticed that as I get stronger some of the exercises are no longer hard enough. so I thought through the exercises I do and decided on which ones I'd increase the number of reps I do and by how much. this also let to me adding a new exercise to the routine upon realizing it would be a good idea.

5. my tea drawer had too much stuff in it and was hard to use. I thought I'd need to fix this by just getting rid of some tea I don't care about very much, but it turned out that just consolidating the tea into fewer boxes sufficiently solved this problem for me.

I said yesterday that none of my many bugs felt like difficulty 1 because if something is actually quickly solvable I would have probably fixed it by now. All of the above were listed as difficulty 2 (except #3 which was 4 or so), but clearly they were in fact things I could fix right now, they just felt vaguely aversive or did not quite reach the priority level at which I'd actually make an effort to fix them. (I guess 1, 3, and 4 are not actually fully solved as I'll need to follow through with these changes to see if they're actually effective. But they at least have a good chance of already being solved, and if not then they're on a path that will almost certainly lead to them being solved.)

I guess 5 minutes is longer than I thought.

I see this comment but not your other one – we're not holding comments for moderation. I'm guessing this was a random hiccup due to flaky internet (although possibly on our end).

This is basically Allen's "Getting things done" 2-min method, I think. Just doing very short tasks right away to clear away the (mental) clutter. I think it's a good idea to practice this, but I also think that the opposite is also good, i.e. ignoring the small things and focusing all time and energy on one big thing, first thing in the morning. Unfortunately, that way, you will do your thing, but ignoring small tasks will also lead to a dirty apartment, eating crap and not practicing the guitar... So I think, for me personally, every morning has to be one big thing, with Yoda timers sprinkled throughout the rest of the day.

I ordered a new clock on Amazon, cleared my desk, sent several emails, and cancelled some email subscriptions I no longer wanted. I also decided on specific later times to do a few things, but I will need to wait and see if I successfully do those things.