A full 3 days!!! At least, that’s how long it’s been formally written up in a Google Docs spreadsheet. I’d been doing most of this for the past few weeks but not consistently enough (especially not the weight lifting and n-back, both of which my brain seems to accidentally forget more often than the other activities… also some of the exercises I only do every other day if I’m particularly sore). It’s funny how making a simple checklist can make one roughly twice as productive.
This is interesting, because I am also going down the same path: creating a list of things I need to do (daily, every so often, and one in a while). What website do you use for dual n-back task. Let me (and others) know if it’s effect. Is there any good literature/research on it? Does it help?
I’ve also been thinking about social checklists. One of Dale Carnegie’s books
is essentially four checklists already, so I just put them on a small card in my wallet for daily review.
I feel like it’s had an impact, but it’s tough to evaluate. I suppose you could assign yourself a grade and track your progress, but that seems fluffy.
Any thoughts on how to judge the effectiveness of something like this?
I wish I could upvote this comment an extra time. Atul Gawande’s article is great, and applying it to personal life seems highly worth experimenting with. I’d love to hear results from personal experiments with checklists.
I use checklists for website maintenance—I have lists of things that need to go up or change with each update. I find that when I remember to use the checklist, I’m usually paying enough attention that I’ve already remembered everything on it; it’s when I’m doing a sloppy enough job to forget my checklist that it would have been most helpful.
I’ve used spaced repetition to memorize checklists for things for me to do in certain situations and found it to be quite useful. Some of my thinking on this was inspired by The Checklist Manifesto, which I read recently. I’m still figuring out how to make my system work better and have it cover more situations, but an example of one checklist that I’ve gotten a bit of mileage out of is the one I’ve made for accessing my inner anticipation controller.
I use todoist.com to maintain a variety of checklists, from daily and the14thofeachmonth to one time next year, divided into different areas of growth (health, career, science knowledge, social/family, etc.) and non-growth-but-needs-to-be-done.
It has markedly increased my productivity on both small goals and larger life goals, and also stopped 95% of my “oh I was busy with X, so I forgot about you asking me to do Y” that used to happen to me quite a bit at home and at work.
I’m also a big fan of that Gawande article. I use lists in a couple of ways, but one relevant one is a poster I made for my bedroom wall. It’s titled “MORE USEFUL THINGS TO DO than fucking around on the internet,” and is followed by a column and a half of such activities, with room for more as I think of them (there’s a marker on a string nearby). The items on the list are a combination of practical things or chores (“do laundry” “do dishes” “practice guitar/piano”) and unnecessary things that I would like to do more often (“go for a bike ride” “call a friend” “sing”).
Obviously it’s not perfect, since I’m here, but it has taken away any possible excuse I might have to say “I don’t have anything better to do.” I might not have anything I need to do, or much I want to do, but there’s almost always something better I could do.
The only problem is that the poster’s in my bedroom, where I tended to use my laptop a lot at the time I made it. Now that I’m out of that habit (which was one of the waste-less-time-on-the-internet moves), I don’t see the poster at the times I need it most. I suppose I should move it into the office now!
Gwern from here on LW maintains an excellent FAQ about n-back. My personal experiences thus far (though I haven’t done much of it) are actually listed in the FAQ. :D The FAQ is here.
I use Brain Workshop on Jaeggi mode (a harder more test-like mode which you can switch on in the config file).
Isn’t Jaeggi mode the one that ends with a series of the same letter in the center every session to make sure there’s an equal number of matches in each session?
Most of the arguments I could imagine for that being superior are pretty tortured. You should ask Justin for the config file we used. I’m pretty sure we turned Jaeggi on at first but then turned it back off due to that artifact. I certainly found it more stimulating/difficult after Jaeggi was turned back off.
Hm, there don’t seem to be an equal number of matches in each session. Sometimes there are 4, sometimes there are 10. Do I misunderstand? Or perhaps I have a different version of brain workshop?
A full 3 days!!! At least, that’s how long it’s been formally written up in a Google Docs spreadsheet. I’d been doing most of this for the past few weeks but not consistently enough (especially not the weight lifting and n-back, both of which my brain seems to accidentally forget more often than the other activities… also some of the exercises I only do every other day if I’m particularly sore). It’s funny how making a simple checklist can make one roughly twice as productive.
This is interesting, because I am also going down the same path: creating a list of things I need to do (daily, every so often, and one in a while). What website do you use for dual n-back task. Let me (and others) know if it’s effect. Is there any good literature/research on it? Does it help?
Hey, me too! I guess we all read this.
I’ve also been thinking about social checklists. One of Dale Carnegie’s books is essentially four checklists already, so I just put them on a small card in my wallet for daily review.
I feel like it’s had an impact, but it’s tough to evaluate. I suppose you could assign yourself a grade and track your progress, but that seems fluffy.
Any thoughts on how to judge the effectiveness of something like this?
I wish I could upvote this comment an extra time. Atul Gawande’s article is great, and applying it to personal life seems highly worth experimenting with. I’d love to hear results from personal experiments with checklists.
I use checklists for website maintenance—I have lists of things that need to go up or change with each update. I find that when I remember to use the checklist, I’m usually paying enough attention that I’ve already remembered everything on it; it’s when I’m doing a sloppy enough job to forget my checklist that it would have been most helpful.
I’ve used spaced repetition to memorize checklists for things for me to do in certain situations and found it to be quite useful. Some of my thinking on this was inspired by The Checklist Manifesto, which I read recently. I’m still figuring out how to make my system work better and have it cover more situations, but an example of one checklist that I’ve gotten a bit of mileage out of is the one I’ve made for accessing my inner anticipation controller.
I use todoist.com to maintain a variety of checklists, from daily and the14thofeachmonth to one time next year, divided into different areas of growth (health, career, science knowledge, social/family, etc.) and non-growth-but-needs-to-be-done.
It has markedly increased my productivity on both small goals and larger life goals, and also stopped 95% of my “oh I was busy with X, so I forgot about you asking me to do Y” that used to happen to me quite a bit at home and at work.
I’m also a big fan of that Gawande article. I use lists in a couple of ways, but one relevant one is a poster I made for my bedroom wall. It’s titled “MORE USEFUL THINGS TO DO than fucking around on the internet,” and is followed by a column and a half of such activities, with room for more as I think of them (there’s a marker on a string nearby). The items on the list are a combination of practical things or chores (“do laundry” “do dishes” “practice guitar/piano”) and unnecessary things that I would like to do more often (“go for a bike ride” “call a friend” “sing”).
Obviously it’s not perfect, since I’m here, but it has taken away any possible excuse I might have to say “I don’t have anything better to do.” I might not have anything I need to do, or much I want to do, but there’s almost always something better I could do.
The only problem is that the poster’s in my bedroom, where I tended to use my laptop a lot at the time I made it. Now that I’m out of that habit (which was one of the waste-less-time-on-the-internet moves), I don’t see the poster at the times I need it most. I suppose I should move it into the office now!
Gwern from here on LW maintains an excellent FAQ about n-back. My personal experiences thus far (though I haven’t done much of it) are actually listed in the FAQ. :D The FAQ is here.
I use Brain Workshop on Jaeggi mode (a harder more test-like mode which you can switch on in the config file).
Isn’t Jaeggi mode the one that ends with a series of the same letter in the center every session to make sure there’s an equal number of matches in each session?
Most of the arguments I could imagine for that being superior are pretty tortured. You should ask Justin for the config file we used. I’m pretty sure we turned Jaeggi on at first but then turned it back off due to that artifact. I certainly found it more stimulating/difficult after Jaeggi was turned back off.
Hm, there don’t seem to be an equal number of matches in each session. Sometimes there are 4, sometimes there are 10. Do I misunderstand? Or perhaps I have a different version of brain workshop?