Sunny from QAD
Nice time. Here are some thoughts for possible additional timesaves:
Wake your partner up before even putting the coffee on so she can be a little more awake when she’s helping with your hair.
Sleep in your work clothes to skip the part where you get dressed.
Drive 20-30mph over the speed limit. (This is probably best as an IL strat, since if you crash or get pulled over then the run is pretty much dead.)
If you manage to get all these in a run, then depending on the length of your commute I think you’ll be able to gold this split by 5-10 more minutes.
This reminds me of something I thought of a while back, that I’d like to start doing again now that I’ve remembered it. Whenever I sense myself getting unfairly annoyed at someone (which happens a lot) I try to imagine that I’m watching a movie in which that person is the protagonist. I imagine that I know what their story and struggles are, and that I’m rooting for them every step of the way. Now that I’m getting into fiction writing, I might also try imagining that I’m writing them as a character, which has the same vibe as the other techniques. The one time I’ve actually tried this so far, it worked really well!
Thanks for your response!
Thanks for sharing!
Re the second sentence: lol. Yeah, I bet you’re right.
Your last paragraph is interesting to me. I don’t think I can say that I’ve had the same experience, though I do think that some people have that effect on me. I can think of at least one person who I normally don’t run out of gas when I’m talking to them. But I think other people actually amplify the problem. For example, I meet with three of my friends for a friendly debate on a weekly basis, and the things they say frequently run against the grain of my mind, and I often run out of gas while trying to figure out how to respond to them.
Thanks for sharing!
This very much matches my own experiences! Keeping something in the back of my mind has always been somewhere between difficult and impossible for me, and for that reason I set timers for all important events during the day (classes, interviews, meetings, etc). I also carry a pocket-sized notebook and a writing utensil with me wherever I go, in case I stumble on something that I have to deal with “later”.
I have also found my attention drifting away in the middle of conversations, and I too have cultivated the skill of non-rudely admitting to it and asking the other person to repeat themselves.
As for improvising… I play piano, and the main thing I do is improvise! I find improv sessions much easier to stay engaged in than sessions spent trying to read through sheet music.
And, I also have a ton of projects that are 1⁄4 to 3⁄4 done (though I think that’s probably common to a larger subset of people than the other things).
So thanks for sharing your experiences! I had never seriously considered the possibility that I had ADHD before, even though I’ve known for a while that I have a somewhat atypical mind. I’m gonna look into that! Makes note in said pocket-sized notebook.
Side note: I think one reason I never wondered whether I have ADHD is that, in my perception, claiming to have ADHD is something of a “fad” among people in my age group, and I think my brain sort of silently assumed that that means it’s not also a real condition that people can actually suffer from. That’s gonna be a WHOOPS from me, dawg.
[Question] Does anyone else sometimes “run out of gas” when trying to think?
Good point! I admit that although I’ve thought about this incident many times, this has never occurred to me.
I object (in theory)
When somebody is advocating taking an action, I think it can be productive to ask “Is there a good reason to do that?” rather than “Why should we do that?” because the former phrasing explicitly allows for the possibility that there is no good reason, which I think makes it both intellectually easier to realize that and socially easier to say it.
To answer that question, it might help to consider when you even need to measure effort. Off the cuff, I’m not actually sure there are any (?). Maybe you’re an employer and you need to measure how much effort your employees are putting in? But on second thought that’s actually a classic case where you don’t need to measure effort, and you only need to measure results.
(Disclaimer: I have never employed anybody.)
pain isn’t the unit of effort, but for many things it’s correlated with whatever that unit is.
I think this correlation only appears if you’re choosing strategies well. If you’re tasked with earning a lot of money to give to charity, and you generate a list of 100 possible strategies, then you should toss out all the strategies that don’t lie on the pareto boundary of pain and success. (In other words, if strategy A is both less effective and more painful then strategy B, then you should never choose strategy A.) Pain will correlate with success in the remaining pool of strategies, but it doesn’t correlate in the set of all strategies. And OP is saying that people often choose strategies that are off the pareto boundary because they specifically select pain-inducing strategies under the misconception that those strategies will all be successful as well.
A koan:
If the laundry needs to be done, put in a load of laundry.
If the world needs to be saved, save the world.
If you want pizza for dinner, go preheat the oven.
So it’s been 10 years. How are you feeling about cryonics now?
It’s been ten years. How are you enjoying life?
For what it’s worth, I value you even though you’re a stranger and even if your life is still going poorly. I often hear people saying how much better their life got after 30, after 40, after 50. Imagine how much larger the effect could be after cryosuspension!
I’ve been thinking of signing up for cryonics recently. The main hurdle is that it seems like it’ll be kind of complicated, since at the moment I’m still on my parent’s insurance, and I don’t really know how all this stuff works. I’ve been worrying that the ugh field surrounding the task might end up being my cause of death by causing me to look on cryonics less favorably just because I subconsciously want to avoid even thinking about what a hassle it will be.
But then I realized that I can get around the problem by pre-committing to sign up for cryonics no matter what, then just cancelling it if I decide I don’t want it.
It will be MUCH easier to make an unbiased decision if choosing cryonics means doing nothing rather than meaning that I have to go do a bunch of complicated paperwork now. It will be well worth a few months (or even years) of dues.
Eliezer, you’re definitely setting up a straw man here. Of course it’s not just you—pretty much everybody suffers from this particular misunderstanding of logical positivism.
How do you know that the phrase “logical positivism” refers to the correct formulation of the idea, rather than an exaggerated version? I have no trouble at all believing that a group of people discovered the very important notion that untestable claims can be meaningless, and then accidentally went way overboard into believing that difficult-to-test claims are meaningless too.
So it’s been 11 years. Do you still remember pjeby’s advice? Did it change your life?
Your comment blew my mind.
Alternative: write important things many times.