As mentioned in the final exam, here’s my personal summary of how I experienced hammertime.
I feel like following the sequence was a very good use of my time, even though it turned out a bit different from what I had initially expected. I thought it would focus much more on “hammering in” the techniques (even after reading Hammers & Nails and realizing the metaphor worked in a different way), but it was more about trying everything out rather briefly, as well as some degree of obtaining new perspectives on things. This was fine, too, but I still feel like I haven’t got a real idea about whether things such as goal/aversion factoring, mantras, internal double crux, focusing or timeless decision making actually do anything for me. I applied some of the techniques once, but it didn’t really lead to any tangible results. I may have done them incorrectly, or I may need to practice more, or maybe they just don’t work for me, and it’s now up to me to figure this out in detail.
I derived a lot of value from creating and frequently updating the bug list. TAPs are a neat concept, and those that work are really helpful, but many fail for me. Maybe I’ll get a better feeling for which triggers work for me so I can tell beforehand instead of going through days and weeks of consistent failure with a trigger. Design surely works, but I’ve got some aversions to applying it which I’ll have to unravel. CoZE is something I never really doubted, and I like the new framing of basically just becoming the kind of person who’s open to new things, as opposed to forcing oneself to do scary things. I’ve been following the “all else being equal expanding my comfort zone is good” heuristic for a few years already, and will continue to do so, as my natural instinct otherwise is usually to exploit rather than to explore.
Yoda timers/resolve cycles and murphyjitsu probably had the greatest effect on me. On day 10 I murphyjitsued three of my major quarter goals and increased my expected value of how many of them I’d achieve from 1.24 to 2.08 in the process. At the time these were merely predictions and would be worthless if they were not correlated with reality—now however I can say that I’m on track to reach 2.5/3, and I’m highly confident that murphyjitsu made a huge counterfactual difference and I hadn’t simply been underconfident before.
I followed the sequence with a group of other people, sharing our progress in a slack channel, which kept up my motivation and probably made it a lot more interesting than “merely” following a year old sequence on my own, so that’s certainly something I recommend to others who are interested in giving it a try.
To provide some numbers, I’ve identified 175 bugs by now, 35 of which I consider solved, and around half of which I expect to solve within the next year, which isn’t overly ambitious but still in the order of “life-changing” if things work out, which sounds good enough for me.
Update a year later, in case anybody else is similarly into numbers: that prediction of achieving 2.5 out of the 3 major quarter goals ended up being correct (one goal wasn’t technically achieved due to outside factors I hadn’t initially anticipated, but I had done my part, thus the .5), and I’ve been using a murphyjitsu-like approach for my quarterly goals ever since which I find super helpful. In the three quarters before Hammertime, I achieved 59%, 38% and 47% respectively of such goals. In the quarters since the numbers were (in chronological order, starting with the Hammertime quarter) 59%, 82%, 61%, 65%, 65%, ~82%. While total number and difficulty of goals vary, I believe the average difficulty hasn’t changed much whereas the total number has increased somewhat over time. That being said, I also visited a CFAR workshop shortly after going through Hammertime, so that too surely had some notable effect on the positive development.
My bug list has grown to 316 as of today, ~159 of which are solved, following a roughly linear pattern over time so far.
As mentioned in the final exam, here’s my personal summary of how I experienced hammertime.
I feel like following the sequence was a very good use of my time, even though it turned out a bit different from what I had initially expected. I thought it would focus much more on “hammering in” the techniques (even after reading Hammers & Nails and realizing the metaphor worked in a different way), but it was more about trying everything out rather briefly, as well as some degree of obtaining new perspectives on things. This was fine, too, but I still feel like I haven’t got a real idea about whether things such as goal/aversion factoring, mantras, internal double crux, focusing or timeless decision making actually do anything for me. I applied some of the techniques once, but it didn’t really lead to any tangible results. I may have done them incorrectly, or I may need to practice more, or maybe they just don’t work for me, and it’s now up to me to figure this out in detail.
I derived a lot of value from creating and frequently updating the bug list. TAPs are a neat concept, and those that work are really helpful, but many fail for me. Maybe I’ll get a better feeling for which triggers work for me so I can tell beforehand instead of going through days and weeks of consistent failure with a trigger. Design surely works, but I’ve got some aversions to applying it which I’ll have to unravel. CoZE is something I never really doubted, and I like the new framing of basically just becoming the kind of person who’s open to new things, as opposed to forcing oneself to do scary things. I’ve been following the “all else being equal expanding my comfort zone is good” heuristic for a few years already, and will continue to do so, as my natural instinct otherwise is usually to exploit rather than to explore.
Yoda timers/resolve cycles and murphyjitsu probably had the greatest effect on me. On day 10 I murphyjitsued three of my major quarter goals and increased my expected value of how many of them I’d achieve from 1.24 to 2.08 in the process. At the time these were merely predictions and would be worthless if they were not correlated with reality—now however I can say that I’m on track to reach 2.5/3, and I’m highly confident that murphyjitsu made a huge counterfactual difference and I hadn’t simply been underconfident before.
I followed the sequence with a group of other people, sharing our progress in a slack channel, which kept up my motivation and probably made it a lot more interesting than “merely” following a year old sequence on my own, so that’s certainly something I recommend to others who are interested in giving it a try.
To provide some numbers, I’ve identified 175 bugs by now, 35 of which I consider solved, and around half of which I expect to solve within the next year, which isn’t overly ambitious but still in the order of “life-changing” if things work out, which sounds good enough for me.
So, overall: Thanks a lot alkjash!
Update a year later, in case anybody else is similarly into numbers: that prediction of achieving 2.5 out of the 3 major quarter goals ended up being correct (one goal wasn’t technically achieved due to outside factors I hadn’t initially anticipated, but I had done my part, thus the .5), and I’ve been using a murphyjitsu-like approach for my quarterly goals ever since which I find super helpful. In the three quarters before Hammertime, I achieved 59%, 38% and 47% respectively of such goals. In the quarters since the numbers were (in chronological order, starting with the Hammertime quarter) 59%, 82%, 61%, 65%, 65%, ~82%. While total number and difficulty of goals vary, I believe the average difficulty hasn’t changed much whereas the total number has increased somewhat over time. That being said, I also visited a CFAR workshop shortly after going through Hammertime, so that too surely had some notable effect on the positive development.
My bug list has grown to 316 as of today, ~159 of which are solved, following a roughly linear pattern over time so far.