Summary: I have updated on being more conscientious than I thought.
Since most of the advice on 80.000 hours is aimed at high performing college students, I find it difficult how much this advice should apply to myself, who just graduated from high school. Previously I had thought of myself as talented in math (I was the best in my class with 40 students, since first grade), but mid- to below average in conscientiousness. I also feel slightly ashamed of my (hand-)writing: most of my teachers commented that my texts were too short and my writing is not exactly pretty. I was diagnosed with ADHD with eleven and even with medication, my working memory is pretty bad. Even though I have started to develop strategies to cope with my disabilities, I wasn’t sure how I was doing compared to those classmates that performed better in writing. So I just assumed that they must be way more productive. Recently I thought it would be interesting to try to predict my final grades by predicting the grades for every subject using Guesstimate (Unfortunately I later put in the grades I got in the end without saving my initial model. If someone is interested I can try to recreate it). This proved to be more useful then I thought: It was a major update for me being more productive and conscientious compared to the rest of my class.
Together with another student, I got the highest grades in German (my native tongue) in my final exam (13 out of 15 points), because I practiced writing (Exams).
I think I would not have realized that I had false assumptions about my performance if I had not seen the difference (There were 3-4 additional students in my class who I thought would be better than me in the final exam) between my prediction and the outcome.
It is not like I was bad before in German, but I attributed a lot of the credit to my teacher liking me. Since a second teacher graded my final exam, this effect shouldn’t be as great.
Thanks for your post! I also tried to track my productivity and mood (to get better about reflection and to track the impact of adhd medication) in my journal until I got frustrated with how much these metrics seemed to shift over time when I reviewed them in retrospect. It could be my memory that tricks me, but I think at some point, I slipped into the habit of rating my mood for the day as a 4 just because I didn’t take enough time to reflect (my scale goes from 1-5). I also think that the ratings were much more influenced by how I felt in the evening. Descriptions like the ones in your post could make this problem less bad: descriptions along the lines of “4: feeling neutral for most of the day, but 2 hours that were very nice” (I’ll have to think about this scale more) might make this work for me again.