I used a Lights sheet ( https://www.ultraworking.com/lights ) to track the variables alongside my daily habits, to reduce overhead.
lynettebye
Karma: 1,274
Five Ways To Prioritize Better
I also shared the PayPal link out of fairness to Dony, who organizes the group.
Yes, that link is the first reply.
There’s a group for Effective Altruists on Focusmate:
(Dony Christie) “The Basic plan creates the group, and any member who has not subscribed to the Focusmate service for unlimited Focusmate sessions ($5/month) will be able to do 3 free sessions a week with either members of the EA group or the general public. Basic costs $50/month total, which rounds out to $2.50/month per person we currently have interested, and we will get even more people once the group exists and is popularized.
If you wish for unlimited sessions with other EAs (imagine a highly focused 9-5 virtual workweek with a gamut of likeminded people!), then you can upgrade to their plan at your leisure. This looks like the better option to me as the cost of crowdfunding it in order to provide unlimited for everyone seems strictly inferior to people individually getting it themselves, especially as probably not everyone will choose to do more than 3 sessions a week or even continue using the service.
To donate to help cover this, you may paypal.me or Venmo me @Dony-Christie. Suggested amounts of $2.50/person if you’re willing, $5.00/person if you’re enthusiastic; send whatever’s comfortable for you. If I receive more than the first month’s amount then I will put the extra money towards the next month (assuming we continue the subscription to future months; I’ll pay it back if not).
Here is the link to join. On the dashboard, under ‘My Groups’, check the box on the left to toggle between showing sessions for just our group and normal Focusmate. I personally booked a bunch of sessions for next week that I’d love for you to join me at; the times are 12pm, 1pm, 4pm, and 8pm Pacific time/UTC-7 each day this Sunday to Friday. You might not see my name show up because some of the sessions have me booked with normal Focusmate users, but if you book one of those aforementioned times it will switch the booking to me (or any member of the group who’s booked at that time). You can also book any other time and other EAs may probably join you by seeing and clicking on your session, or if that fails to happen then you will be booked with a normal Focusmate user unless a member of the group then books that time as well and switches the normal user out.
Let me know if you have any questions, especially if you’re new to Focusmate! I will check in with all of you to make sure everything’s working, and write a user’s guide with best practices. Let’s work on big things together!”
Self-Experiment: Does Working More Hours Increase My Output?
How Long Can People Usefully Work?
Thanks for noting this. I suspect that many people suffering from fatigue-esque depression symptoms would benefit from Wellbutrin in particular, but I want to be very careful about recommending a particular drug given that I’m not a psychiatrist and I may be missing important caveats.
This tip was intended for those things were you can really truly never do them. E.g. Since thinking more about this, I stopped folding my pjs, and found I’m just as happy this way as I was folding them perfectly Marie Kondo style.
High Variance Productivity Advice
How time tracking can help you prioritize
I’d expect that too many people apply for most units for it to be worth that much effort to game. A quick search indicates that 40-500 people might apply for a unit. If it takes someone several years to successfully apply after they are eligible, that doubles the lost earnings. They also can’t resell the unit for several decades, so they are locked in for a long time. The option value of moving in the next 40 years seems significant. https://www.wbur.org/radioboston/2019/02/20/inclusionary-development-housing-affordable https://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/style/2014/12/15/boston-housing-lottery-offers-luxury-low-cost/aAPOGUm4FwbvHExq27mDUM/story.html
Sounds possible, though most people who snore don’t have sleep apnea.
I’m curious if you’re willing to share the 30 decisions, or at least ones that aren’t too personal?
Sleep apnea is when your airway is blocked so you’re not breathing during your sleep, which results in lower oxygen in your blood and repeatedly waking up to restart breathing. This fragments your sleep and leaves you feeling tired.
For a home test, I think the patient has to set up the equipment themselves, which I expect is more likely to result in bad data. Since doctors treat sleep apnea as a chronic condition, I would be surprised if sleeping in another bed caused it.
That sounds like what I heard – one doctor told me that home sleep tests were useless but insurance companies try to push people to use them instead of in-lab sleep tests because home tests are way less expensive. From reading elsewhere, it sounds like a home test might work if one has severe sleep apnea.
The purpose of Stimulus Control Therapy is to avoid implicitly associating the bed with being awake. Just guessing, it seems reasonable that greylag is correct about sexual activity being a concession to practicality. I suspect that most people would resist any advice to switch their sex life to the living room.
Honestly, the main thing was to start treating my life as an experiment. Before that, I was just doing what the doctors told me without checking to see if their recommendations actually produced good results. For me, experimenting mainly meant that I 1. tried tracking a bunch of things on my own and analyzing the results, and 2. was willing to try a lot more things, like caffeine pills and antidepressants, because the information value was high. (I first did my research and, when relevant, checked with a doctor, of course.) I think there was a mindset shift somewhere along the way explicitly rejecting that the status quo was innately good. If I was unsatisfied with something, I could try to change it, and I was effective if it got better. After I started experimenting, I prioritized experiments to deal with the bottleneck of fatigue and it was fairly straightforward.