“You have to learn to be productive on demand rather than when you’re in the mood for it.”
Very true, and it’s part of the reason I like to arrange structured activities that force me, on a day-to-day basis, to do the things I enjoy. I could have taught myself programming (maybe) but taking a course as my elective forced me to actually write the code when the assignment was due the next morning, as opposed to when I felt like it. It’s a good feeling, getting something done and knowing you did a good job, but it’s depressing how bad I am at motivating myself to push through and get it done without a deadline. (I don’t know if this is true of other people, but actually I’ve been told I’m unusually productive.)
The best way to make a good use of unstructured time that I’ve ever found is to optimize towards highest utility. In plain terms, you have an ultimate goal, a be-all-end-all reason to be doing something, and you’re doing your best to achieve this goal as efficiently as possible because each time-unit of delay is negative utility.
This takes a goal, of course, which is pretty much comparable to Step 7 of 11 For Building a Goedel Machine, if you’ve seen Eliezer’s Summit presentation that touched that subject.
“You have to learn to be productive on demand rather than when you’re in the mood for it.”
Very true, and it’s part of the reason I like to arrange structured activities that force me, on a day-to-day basis, to do the things I enjoy. I could have taught myself programming (maybe) but taking a course as my elective forced me to actually write the code when the assignment was due the next morning, as opposed to when I felt like it. It’s a good feeling, getting something done and knowing you did a good job, but it’s depressing how bad I am at motivating myself to push through and get it done without a deadline. (I don’t know if this is true of other people, but actually I’ve been told I’m unusually productive.)
As far as I can tell, making good use of unstructured time is very rare.
It’s possible that conventional schooling makes people worse at it.
The best way to make a good use of unstructured time that I’ve ever found is to optimize towards highest utility. In plain terms, you have an ultimate goal, a be-all-end-all reason to be doing something, and you’re doing your best to achieve this goal as efficiently as possible because each time-unit of delay is negative utility.
This takes a goal, of course, which is pretty much comparable to Step 7 of 11 For Building a Goedel Machine, if you’ve seen Eliezer’s Summit presentation that touched that subject.