Here are the two most effective “quick trick” tactics. I say “quick trick” because they tackled the symptoms not the root cause (albeit effectively) via brute force, leading me to eventually burn out and abandon them:
Boss as a Service: The most extreme tactic I’ve tried. You pay someone each month to be your “boss”, meaning you send them your goals for each day/week and then you report back to them at the end of the day/week on how you did. Was very effective, but was too draining so I stopped using it.
Focusmate: Lets you do 50-minute work sessions with your camera on with a stranger. You each say your goals in the beginning of the session and then work the rest. It increased the probability that I would actually work on my goals but wasn’t foolproof. Since the sessions required a taxing amount of focus, I eventually stopped scheduling them.
Meditating and exercising daily as well as the Pomodoro method didn’t seem to have much of an effect on staying focused on goals. Also, taking the meds with food seemed to make me less bouncy and more likely to actually work on my goals.
MarcelloV
Another solution may be to somehow turn off your fierceness, by devoting yourself to meditation or psychotherapy or something like that. Maybe that’s the right answer for some people. I have no idea. But it doesn’t seem the optimal solution to me. If you’re given a sharp knife, it seems to me better to use it than to blunt its edge to avoid cutting yourself.
This seems like sunk cost fallacy. If your goal is to maximize your happiness in life, then you shouldn’t base your decision off of the abilities you have now if utilizing them won’t make you happier. This seems like an easy path for the stereotypical Gifted Kid to fall prey to: having succeeded by unhappily working themselves extremely hard through high school and/or college, and then feeling like they need to continue performing at that level since they’ve already built up so much knowledge, accolades, job connections, etc.
I also have this problem and the same experience with ADHD meds. I tried a bunch of tactics that I can go into if you want but they all had varying degrees of success. Annoyed of trying quick tricks, I tried going for the root cause.
I thought the root cause was related to low willpower, so I tried multiple things that have been shown to improve willpower in studies (meditation, exercise, squeezing a hand grip) but I didn’t see much benefit after at least a month of doing these actions daily so I stopped.
I then thought that maybe it’s not so much low willpower but rather low conscientiousness (one of the Big Five personality traits). They seemed similar but studies distinguished between them so I tried to peruse the research on ways to improve conscientiousness. Unfortunately, the studies I read all seemed to be tied to some unique therapy that was only broadly described and I wasn’t sure how to find someone who specializes in those techniques. There was one 2021 study that used an app to successfully improve this, but the app isn’t released it.
If you find a solution to this problem, please let me know.
Are you sure about the Harris-Benedict formula? It seems like Mifflin-St Jeor is the most reliable. Nonetheless, I’m curious if you have any recommended articles/books on diet and mental health?
These are nice, for the friends recommendation one just be cautious of offering unsolicited advice and other-optimizing
What dose do you use when you do it that early? At the end of section 3 in the post you linked that recommends taking it that early, it seems like the conclusion around the proper dose for this case is murky.
I’m not very familiar with academia, but have you considered sending this to the authors of the paper to a) see if there are any mistakes you made and b) help them avoid similar errors in the future?
But I acknowledge that this could lead to a long email exchange that you may not want.
This article may help you, albeit Clubhouse is currently invite-only
Do you know roughly what the breakdown is for the types of rooms on Clubhouse? e.g. what % of the rooms are casual conversations/shooting the breeze (think “Just Chatting” on Twitch.tv) vs. people talking about topics that you can learn from vs other?
Can you elaborate on how you use it to help install TAPs? I’ve been experimenting with cards with a trigger in a specific situation on one side and the action on the other, but I’m wondering if there are better ways.
Very interesting idea. I’ve also built my own piece of productivity software for myself since ideas out there were lacking, although it’s centered around strict accountability that I don’t think the App Store would allow.
The Paul Graham article you linked is centered around startups, so if you are using this for the possibility of creating a startup then there is one caveat: the value proposition you describe is eliminating decision fatigue by removing features irrelevant to you. But as you create stuff for more and more people, then you’ll add more and more features that are each used by your audience but to different degrees (e.g. perhaps 20% of your audience can’t live without feature 1 and the rest never use it, but a completely separate 30% of users love features 2 but no one else uses it). Eventually your original value proposition will erode and it will be similar to other solutions. But if you aren’t doing this for a startup, then you can ignore this.
To elaborate on this, the odds of cryonics succeeding are estimated to be between .23% in the pessimistic scenario and 15% in the optimistic. Contrast this with the 1 in quadrillion (or a similarly high number) chance of the mugger being honest in Pascal’s mugging.
Perhaps I am overthinking this, but when it comes to applying your knowledge gained through spaced repetition, is there a difference in how effectively you can apply it in these two situations?
You spend time memorizing what a function is. A function comes up in a problem in a very similar format to how it looked on your Anki card. You are able to understand it because the prompt of the function in the problem causes you to recall your understanding from studying and then apply it.
You spend time memorizing what a function is. A problem comes up that can be solved by using functions. However, the problem doesn’t explicitly mention functions like in #1; it’s up to you to recall your understanding of functions and recognize that this is a time to use them without seeing the prompt that you studied with.
In case this example is too weird or confusing, you can think of the using Anki for memorizing cognitive biases; you’ll be able to recall the definition of them, but how much will spaced repetition help you recognize when cognitive biases pop up in your life (so that you can employ whatever counter-measures you see fit)?
Honestly, I could do another 100 tweets on what this looks like in each case. The delicate dance of beliefs, emotions, strategies, behaviors, and tools that can be combined to internalize a new way of being.
I would love to see further discussion of what the solution looks like. Is there any writing out there that discusses this?
I’m not a psychologist/psychiatrist, but isn’t personality not very mutable past the age of around 7? At least without psychedelics or brain damage or something?
I’ve read that this is a common myth and that personality continues to change throughout our lives (1, 2). According to some psychologists, this could be related to the end of history illusion.
The book Personality Isn’t Permanent talks a lot about personality myths and ways to change one’s personality. In the section on how to change one’s personality, he suggests (albeit doesn’t cite studies) that the reason personality changes less in adulthood than childhood may be because our environment becomes more constant and environment can shape personality.
It seems that they can use vitrification as opposed to solely freezing the body, and this is more effective at preservation. Here’s a paper about scientists vitrifying a rabbit kidney then rewarming it and successfully putting it back into a rabbit (h/t wait but why). However, it seems that each organ must be studied so that it can be successfully vitrified given its unique complexities, so we can’t just apply that paper’s solution to every organ.
This seems to be almost exactly what you are suggesting. At the end of the article he seems to offer an open invitation to receive their vaccine. While there is no mention of their vaccine’s efficacy in the article, the article was written in late July so the team may have more updates by now if you reach out to them directly.
I’ve used the DelayWebpage extension. It can delay the loading for websites you choose but doesn’t offer some features mentioned in the article such as resetting if you alt+tab or increasing the wait time each check.
I’m not sure if I’m understanding your question correctly; are you asking whether you’re obligated to act in accordance with what worked in the past for you? One response could be that if you always follow what worked in the past, then you’d be akin to the recluse, constantly exploiting and never exploring. This means you could miss out on great opportunities that are not part of your past experience.
Was “Rest Days vs Zombie Days” removed from LessWrong, or at the very least available online anywhere else? I can’t find it either via Google search or LessWrong’s site search. All I see is “Rest Days vs. Recovery Days” by Unreal from 2019.