I can’t speak for benkuhn, but I guess like you train all habits through trigger—routine—reward. I.e. you open a browser and think what you want to train. Then you focus your attention on the trigger, in this case “being done with a tab”. When you notice the trigger, you do your routine—closing the tab—and then you reward yourself by smiling and internally congratulating yourself on your decisive victory against the forces of evil. And then you use spaced repetition to train this. And whenever you notice you forgot to do this routine you immediately smile and congratulate yourself on noticing this, which of course means you’re more likely to remember it next time.
And whenever you notice you forgot to do this routine you immediately smile and congratulate yourself on noticing this, which of course means you’re more likely to remember it next time.
Upvoted for this part. I’m not sure if reward for noticing failure is mentioned in most self-training routines, but it feels like an important missing piece to me. The normal reaction to noticing failure is some degree of self-loathing instead, which of course encourages putting the task out of one’s mind.
Also I like the idea of simple self-congratulation as a reward. Most examples I see are things like “eat an M&M when you do what you’re supposed to”, which is useless if the thing you are trying to train is not eating junk food (or if you’re like me and will munch through the whole bag without being aware of it).
Reward for noticing failure is something CFAR taught as part of its “internal operant conditioning” suite. I don’t know if it’s strictly a CFAR thing, and I don’t know whether they still teach it.
Most of the browser tabs most people leave open are open loops serving no actual value. They’re the internet equivalent of hoarding. “What if I want this later! I can’t throw away this used paper towel/link to 4chan!”
Poorly. I’m still not very good at it. “Being done with browser tabs” is not a very concrete trigger. I’m actually considering writing a Chrome extension that will do this for me.
“closing browser tabs as soon as I’m done with them”—how’d you train this?
I can’t speak for benkuhn, but I guess like you train all habits through trigger—routine—reward. I.e. you open a browser and think what you want to train. Then you focus your attention on the trigger, in this case “being done with a tab”. When you notice the trigger, you do your routine—closing the tab—and then you reward yourself by smiling and internally congratulating yourself on your decisive victory against the forces of evil. And then you use spaced repetition to train this. And whenever you notice you forgot to do this routine you immediately smile and congratulate yourself on noticing this, which of course means you’re more likely to remember it next time.
Upvoted for this part. I’m not sure if reward for noticing failure is mentioned in most self-training routines, but it feels like an important missing piece to me. The normal reaction to noticing failure is some degree of self-loathing instead, which of course encourages putting the task out of one’s mind.
Also I like the idea of simple self-congratulation as a reward. Most examples I see are things like “eat an M&M when you do what you’re supposed to”, which is useless if the thing you are trying to train is not eating junk food (or if you’re like me and will munch through the whole bag without being aware of it).
Reward for noticing failure is something CFAR taught as part of its “internal operant conditioning” suite. I don’t know if it’s strictly a CFAR thing, and I don’t know whether they still teach it.
Why do you want to do this? Personally I get mad when I lose my old browser tabs due to Firefox’s cache getting corrupted.
Most of the browser tabs most people leave open are open loops serving no actual value. They’re the internet equivalent of hoarding. “What if I want this later! I can’t throw away this used paper towel/link to 4chan!”
Poorly. I’m still not very good at it. “Being done with browser tabs” is not a very concrete trigger. I’m actually considering writing a Chrome extension that will do this for me.