I was a July minicamp attendee. I did the big reading through the Sequences thing when lukeprog was doing it at Common Sense Atheism, so I’d day fewer of the benefits were rationality level-ups and more were life hacking. Post-minicamp I am:
doing sit-ups, push-ups, and squats every day (using the apps from the 200 situps guy), up from not doing this at all
martial arts training four times a week (aikido and krav) again, up from not doing things at all
using RTM to manage tasks which means
dropping way fewer small tasks
breaking tasks down into steps more efficiently
knocked off about three lagging tasks (not timebound, so I was making no progress on them) in the month that I got back
stopped using inbox as task manager, so I could actually only keep emails I was replying to in there
using beeminder to get down to inbox zero (currently three)
working in pomodoros has sped up my writing to the point where:
I miss doing a daily posts to my blog more rarely (one over two weeks compared to 0-2 a week) and have had more double post days than previously (which translates into higher page views and more money for me)
Less time writing left me more time for leisure reading
I should add that I had a bit of a crestfallen feeling for the first few days of minicamp, since being more efficient and organized feels like a really lame superpower. I expected a bit more of it to be about choosing awesome goals. But then I realized that I’d always be grateful for a genie that magically gave me an extra hour, and I shouldn’t look a gift genie in the mouth, just because it wasn’t magic.
So, now that I’ve got more time, it’s up to me to do superheroic things with it. Once I finish my Halloween costume.
I should add that I had a bit of a crestfallen feeling for the first few days of minicamp, since being more efficient and organized feels like a really lame superpower.
This. Holy cow, I worried I was the only one who felt a bit of a letdown during minicamp and then started noticing afterwards that my ways of dealing with problems had suddenly become more effective.
OK, those count as benefits. We shouldn’t just give all the credit to the lifehacking community, since LW/SI successfully got you to implement lifehacking techniques.
Of course, anything can be called instrumentally rational if it works, but I wonder how other approaches compare to explicit rationality in successfully convincing oneself to lifehack . For example, the sort of motivational techniques used for salespeople.
I’m not sure. One thing that worked pretty well for me at minicamp was that the instructors were pretty meticulous about describing levels of confidence in different hacks. Everything from “Here are some well-regarded, peer reviewed studies you can look at” to “It’s worked pretty well for us, and most of the people who’ve tried, and here’s how we think it fits into what we know about the brain” to “we don’t know why this works, but it has for most people, so we think it’s worth trying out, so make sure you tell us if you try and get bupkis so we’re hearing about negative data” to “this is something that worked for me that you might find useful.”
I think this is a pretty audience-specific selling point, but it did a great job of mitigating the suspicious-seeming levels of enthusiasm most lifehackers open with.
I was a July minicamp attendee. I did the big reading through the Sequences thing when lukeprog was doing it at Common Sense Atheism, so I’d day fewer of the benefits were rationality level-ups and more were life hacking. Post-minicamp I am:
doing sit-ups, push-ups, and squats every day (using the apps from the 200 situps guy), up from not doing this at all
martial arts training four times a week (aikido and krav) again, up from not doing things at all
using RTM to manage tasks which means
dropping way fewer small tasks
breaking tasks down into steps more efficiently
knocked off about three lagging tasks (not timebound, so I was making no progress on them) in the month that I got back
stopped using inbox as task manager, so I could actually only keep emails I was replying to in there
using beeminder to get down to inbox zero (currently three)
working in pomodoros has sped up my writing to the point where:
I miss doing a daily posts to my blog more rarely (one over two weeks compared to 0-2 a week) and have had more double post days than previously (which translates into higher page views and more money for me)
Less time writing left me more time for leisure reading
I should add that I had a bit of a crestfallen feeling for the first few days of minicamp, since being more efficient and organized feels like a really lame superpower. I expected a bit more of it to be about choosing awesome goals. But then I realized that I’d always be grateful for a genie that magically gave me an extra hour, and I shouldn’t look a gift genie in the mouth, just because it wasn’t magic.
So, now that I’ve got more time, it’s up to me to do superheroic things with it. Once I finish my Halloween costume.
This. Holy cow, I worried I was the only one who felt a bit of a letdown during minicamp and then started noticing afterwards that my ways of dealing with problems had suddenly become more effective.
OK, those count as benefits. We shouldn’t just give all the credit to the lifehacking community, since LW/SI successfully got you to implement lifehacking techniques.
Of course, anything can be called instrumentally rational if it works, but I wonder how other approaches compare to explicit rationality in successfully convincing oneself to lifehack . For example, the sort of motivational techniques used for salespeople.
I’m not sure. One thing that worked pretty well for me at minicamp was that the instructors were pretty meticulous about describing levels of confidence in different hacks. Everything from “Here are some well-regarded, peer reviewed studies you can look at” to “It’s worked pretty well for us, and most of the people who’ve tried, and here’s how we think it fits into what we know about the brain” to “we don’t know why this works, but it has for most people, so we think it’s worth trying out, so make sure you tell us if you try and get bupkis so we’re hearing about negative data” to “this is something that worked for me that you might find useful.”
I think this is a pretty audience-specific selling point, but it did a great job of mitigating the suspicious-seeming levels of enthusiasm most lifehackers open with.
How are you both posting more to your blog, and spending less time writing?
I’m writing faster when I work in pomodoros and when I write on the train on the long schlep to aikido.
Where I just broke my toe. Oh no, negative utility alert!