For the past week, I’ve been experimenting with a morning and night ritual when I wake up and before I go to bed.
The morning ritual consists of an affirmation about winning, a recitation of the heuristics I’m currently trying to get myself to employ (things like flipping a coin when my options are close enough in utility to make thinking too hard about it a waste of time and energy, checking my to-do list as soon as I walk through the door, or not putting off necessities like sleep and food for “just a minute while I finish this..”.), and a brainstorming session. I finish by repeating the winning affirmation. The idea here is to get myself into the right mindset to tackle the day and keep the tools for doing so on the brain.
The bedtime ritual consists of me listing what happened that day with minimal commentary, reviewing my morning idea list, scheduling any ideas that warrant further thinking about or doing, and a declaration that the day is over and that I can do better tomorrow, starting with a good night’s sleep. I also stuck a “Cthulhu fhtagen” at the end of it because it seemed to lack a cool note of finality. The idea here is I suck at remembering things as they actually happened, and all my self-reflection about today’s mistakes and plans for tomorrow need to be acknowledged or I’ll be up all night worrying about whether I’ll forget everything by morning. I plan to review these lists weekly, starting today.
I’m not allowing myself to alter these rituals more than every two weeks, so it has some consistency.
How it’s going:
I feel like I’ve been considerably more effective. I do remember the first few heuristics more often in the situations when I need them. I also notice when I FAIL to use them a lot more, both right after the fact and during the daily review. I’ve gotten more things accomplished each day (smaller tasks especially, so I probably need to work on granularizing my bigger projects) and noticed several little slots of usable time that previously seemed to blend into big blocks of “Morning”,”Work”, and “Evening”. I’m sure it helps that I haven’t touched fanfiction.net at all this week. Some of the heuristics in the morning ritual are poorly defined and so harder to implement than I’d realized.
The no-modifying stipulation is killing me. I know that tinkering with these every few days like I want to takes away from the overall ritual effect and stops me from being able to accumulate long-term information on what does and doesn’t work, but I keep wanting to do it anyways. This new version was bound to have some bugs that obviously need fixing from the first run, but I’m trying to break my habit of ignoring my own rules as soon as they get a little inconvenient.
I notice I’ve been getting up early since I started clearing my head of loose ends before bed. I’m not sure what’s up with that. I actually started timing my rituals the last two days and realized that I could not have sustained this new habit if that wasn’t true, because my current versions take around 45 minutes to get through.
Ideas from the morning’s brainstorm get a significant delay in implementation, which was in part by design so I don’t start 75 different half-baked schemes that sounded good at the time I thought of them. I schedule anything obviously time-sensitive right away. But the delay till reviewing it, then another delay till morning to start on it still irritates me. I wonder if there isn’t a better way of doing it.
I’m no stranger to trying different rituals myself. In fact, I’ve read a lot of personal development. But I still find it hard to implement things for any length of time.
One of the lessons I’ve learned is keep things as simple as possible—simpler than you think is reasonable. For example, my bare morning ritual, which I stick to most of the time, is about 15 minutes, but makes my mornings far more pleasant. A second lesson that is 100% ingrained in me is to wait awhile before thinking something is a success.
It’s so cool that another SLC LWer takes these things seriously—which is why you should help me put together an instrumental rationality subgroup.
EDIT: I didn’t see that you stop yourself from changing the ritual more frequently than every two weeks. That’s something I myself have trouble with—I kept wanting to update my rituals every few days for awhile, until recently, when i decided to just say heck with the rituals for now, I’ll just start with something easier.
Haha, well that takes openness: first, I wash out my eyes, pee, drink about 8 oz water, and eat a bowl of cereal. This takes about 5 minutes. Then I log onto my computer and read a few posts from the archive of one of my favorite bloggers for about 10 minutes; this allows me to both wake up gradually and painlessly, and to start the day feeling a bit smarter and more inspired. After this I try to work on some of my most important work for the day to get that done early.
I kinda wish I did. No, I’m “just” a student. I mean, I’m going to be studying my whole life, so this is just a more concentrated, and credentialed, time of study. I don’t even have a part-time job, although i did recently. The ‘most important things’ can be for school, psychology labs, clubs (including the LW Meetup I’ve started), or for more personal endeavors (like working on self improvement goals).
For the past week, I’ve been experimenting with a morning and night ritual when I wake up and before I go to bed.
The morning ritual consists of an affirmation about winning, a recitation of the heuristics I’m currently trying to get myself to employ (things like flipping a coin when my options are close enough in utility to make thinking too hard about it a waste of time and energy, checking my to-do list as soon as I walk through the door, or not putting off necessities like sleep and food for “just a minute while I finish this..”.), and a brainstorming session. I finish by repeating the winning affirmation. The idea here is to get myself into the right mindset to tackle the day and keep the tools for doing so on the brain.
The bedtime ritual consists of me listing what happened that day with minimal commentary, reviewing my morning idea list, scheduling any ideas that warrant further thinking about or doing, and a declaration that the day is over and that I can do better tomorrow, starting with a good night’s sleep. I also stuck a “Cthulhu fhtagen” at the end of it because it seemed to lack a cool note of finality. The idea here is I suck at remembering things as they actually happened, and all my self-reflection about today’s mistakes and plans for tomorrow need to be acknowledged or I’ll be up all night worrying about whether I’ll forget everything by morning. I plan to review these lists weekly, starting today.
I’m not allowing myself to alter these rituals more than every two weeks, so it has some consistency.
How it’s going: I feel like I’ve been considerably more effective. I do remember the first few heuristics more often in the situations when I need them. I also notice when I FAIL to use them a lot more, both right after the fact and during the daily review. I’ve gotten more things accomplished each day (smaller tasks especially, so I probably need to work on granularizing my bigger projects) and noticed several little slots of usable time that previously seemed to blend into big blocks of “Morning”,”Work”, and “Evening”. I’m sure it helps that I haven’t touched fanfiction.net at all this week. Some of the heuristics in the morning ritual are poorly defined and so harder to implement than I’d realized.
The no-modifying stipulation is killing me. I know that tinkering with these every few days like I want to takes away from the overall ritual effect and stops me from being able to accumulate long-term information on what does and doesn’t work, but I keep wanting to do it anyways. This new version was bound to have some bugs that obviously need fixing from the first run, but I’m trying to break my habit of ignoring my own rules as soon as they get a little inconvenient.
I notice I’ve been getting up early since I started clearing my head of loose ends before bed. I’m not sure what’s up with that. I actually started timing my rituals the last two days and realized that I could not have sustained this new habit if that wasn’t true, because my current versions take around 45 minutes to get through.
Ideas from the morning’s brainstorm get a significant delay in implementation, which was in part by design so I don’t start 75 different half-baked schemes that sounded good at the time I thought of them. I schedule anything obviously time-sensitive right away. But the delay till reviewing it, then another delay till morning to start on it still irritates me. I wonder if there isn’t a better way of doing it.
I’m no stranger to trying different rituals myself. In fact, I’ve read a lot of personal development. But I still find it hard to implement things for any length of time.
One of the lessons I’ve learned is keep things as simple as possible—simpler than you think is reasonable. For example, my bare morning ritual, which I stick to most of the time, is about 15 minutes, but makes my mornings far more pleasant. A second lesson that is 100% ingrained in me is to wait awhile before thinking something is a success.
It’s so cool that another SLC LWer takes these things seriously—which is why you should help me put together an instrumental rationality subgroup.
EDIT: I didn’t see that you stop yourself from changing the ritual more frequently than every two weeks. That’s something I myself have trouble with—I kept wanting to update my rituals every few days for awhile, until recently, when i decided to just say heck with the rituals for now, I’ll just start with something easier.
What is your 15 minute morning ritual?
Haha, well that takes openness: first, I wash out my eyes, pee, drink about 8 oz water, and eat a bowl of cereal. This takes about 5 minutes. Then I log onto my computer and read a few posts from the archive of one of my favorite bloggers for about 10 minutes; this allows me to both wake up gradually and painlessly, and to start the day feeling a bit smarter and more inspired. After this I try to work on some of my most important work for the day to get that done early.
You work at home?
I kinda wish I did. No, I’m “just” a student. I mean, I’m going to be studying my whole life, so this is just a more concentrated, and credentialed, time of study. I don’t even have a part-time job, although i did recently. The ‘most important things’ can be for school, psychology labs, clubs (including the LW Meetup I’ve started), or for more personal endeavors (like working on self improvement goals).