Strategic Review #006

This week suffered a disruption of the most adorable possible kind. On Sunday evening, I brought home – earlier than expected – two baby kittens. As a result, the last few days have been all out of whack as I and two little white fluff balls adapt to a new way of living. Emotionally, I’m a little frustrated at the derailment, a frustration heightened by the over all emotionality of suddenly being responsible for two tiny lives.

But while this is a temporary time sink, I am certain that in the long run it is a benefit. Overall, cats are fairly low maintenance for the emotional benefit they provide (for me at least, I grew up with cats and have wanted one as a pet for awhile) – and I brought these home as a pair specifically because they are sisters and can serve as company for each other when my attention is elsewhere.

What Am I Doing That’s Useful?

  • Consistently making pre-agendas
  • Bringing home the two most adorable little kitty cats you have ever seen in your life. Yes you are! YES YOU ARE!

What Am I Doing That’s Not Useful?

  • Spending large amounts of time on Facebook and Reddit
  • Watching large amounts of television
  • Not accomplishing tasks put on agenda for the day.
  • Letting disruptions in routine frustrate me emotionally.

What Am I Not Doing That Might Be Useful?

  • Exercising regularly.
  • Being consistent about rewarding self after accomplishing an item on to-do list.
  • Meditating.
  • Eating properly.

Actions to Attempt/Improve for Next SR

  • Restart weightlifting regimen

Scorecard of Next Actions from Previous SR

  • Rewarding self behavior consistently (Anna’s victory gesture)
  • Restart weightlifting regimen.

Strategic Review #005

A pair of bummer events added a couple of notches of difficulty to the motivation project in the latter half of this week: some fairly major health news regarding a family member (but the probability of them being fine is very, very high) and the apparent fizzling of a romantic relationship. Nevertheless, I soldier on. Though this week suggests the importance of developing more substantial coping tools, like meditation. Vitamins and walks are all well and good, but they won’t suffice in the face of the loss of a loved one or end of a serious relationship.

Overall I’m quite satisfied with this week. I’ve managed to maintain one consistent habit (pre-agendas) and buttress two more (walking and taking vitamins). But more substantially, I’ve held my own in getting myself to actually sit down and write each day. This particular project is a collaboration with a friend and I have no doubt the substantial social commitment involved is making a difference, but I’ll take the progress I can get. I have skipped days, put it on my agenda for the day and then not done it, but overall I’ve done pretty well. Today I even wrote double my daily commitment. There’s a long way to go before I’ll declare any confidence in this area, but there is progress at least.

What Am I Doing That’s Useful?

  • Consistently making pre-agendas
  • Consistently going for walks
  • Consistently taking vitamin supplements
  • Making use of productive procrastination (Note: just today I finished the French tree of Duolingo, significantly improving from my prior negligible French skills. Not a bad way to waste time, all things considered.)
  • Building habits for certain actions.
    • Sitting down in a specific spot only for writing and not doing anything else or moving from that spot before the pre-committed goal is completed.

What Am I Doing That’s Not Useful?

  • Spending large amounts of time on Facebook and Reddit
  • Watching large amounts of television
  • Not accomplishing tasks put on agenda for the day.

What Am I Not Doing That Might Be Useful?

  • Exercising regularly.
  • Being consistent about rewarding self after accomplishing an item on to-do list.
  • Meditating.
  • Eating properly.

Actions to Attempt/Improve for Next SR

  • Rewarding self behavior consistently (Anna’s victory gesture)
  • Restart weightlifting regimen.

Scorecard of Next Actions from Previous SR

  • Experiment with at least one tactic for increasing/sustaining motivation.
    • Go for walks consistently.
    • Take vitamins consistently.
    • Begin exercising consistently.

 

Strategic Review #004

I’ve just returned from working up in Northern California for four days, so there’s less to report in this week’s SR than in prior weeks. I set up beeminders for consistently taking vitamins and going for walks, but because of the weekend away, have yet to begin an earnest attempt at consistency. That process begins now, and I’m essentially carrying over last week’s next actions to this week.

Moving forward, I’ll just keep adding things to the motivation cocktail until it’s no longer a problem to get myself to do the things that I-want-but-sometimes-don’t-want-to-do.

What am I doing that’s useful?

  • Productive procrastination (reading, Duolingo).
  • Working.
  • Meeting and connecting with new people, personally and professionally.
  • Building habits and rewards for certain actions.
    • Chocolate after checking something off my to do list.
    • Sitting down in a specific spot only for writing and not doing anything else or moving from that spot before the pre-committed goal is completed.

What am I doing that’s not useful?

  • Too much time on Facebook and Reddit.
  • Being poor.

What am I not doing that might be useful?

  • Resume regular exercise regimen.
  • Writing in a “gratitude journal”
  • Prioritizing increasing my income.

Actions to attempt/improve for next SR

  • Experiment with at least one tactic for increasing/sustaining motivation:
    • Go for walks consistently.
    • Resume vitamin regimen.
    • Begin exercising consistently.

Scorecard of Next Actions from Previous SR

  • Experiment with at least one tactic for increasing/sustaining motivation:
    • Go for walks consistently.
    • Resume vitamin regimen.
    • Begin exercising consistently.

Strategic Review #003

This week has been a distinct improvement. A little work has solidified for the near future, lessening – at least a little – immediate budgetary concerns. I’ve been more conscientious about going out and being social, and at the same time having unanticipated social interaction (i.e. other people initiating) pop up. Funny how that works.

I took what motivation I had and made sure to capitalize on it by reviewing the Procrastination Equation and generating specific, actionable things from its suggestion. The result is a nicely sized list of things to try and implement. I divided the Procrastination Equation suggestions into two categories, Painless and Painful. Painless being defined as any motivation that comes from a positive internal sense and Painful being defined as any tactic that motivates you by inflicting pain and propelling you by your desire to avoid more pain. I still don’t feel like doing it, but I want to experience the resultant pain even more. I would prefer to avoid the painful category as much as possible and rely on painless to the greatest extent possible. I want to do a lot of things, but I also want to feel awesome while doing them and avoid feeling miserable as much as possible. Painful strategies are useful, certainly, but there’s probably quite a bit of low hanging fruit to be gathered from the painless side before I have to mine the painful side for more advantage.

I’ve also succeeded at consistently doing pre-agendas, which ensure that the following day is never a complete waste. I still have yet to cross everything off these small daily lists at the end of each day, but minuscule is better than negligible. I haven’t refilled my antidepressant medication yet, but that’s not through lack of effort, merely the ridiculous rigamarole of our beloved American healthcare system. The gears have been set in motion and frankly, I view it more as an overcautious safeguard at this moment, something that shouldn’t be necessary provided  these other angles of attack continue on. But, planning fallacy and over preparation and all that.

What am I doing that’s useful?

  • Productive procrastination (reading, Duolingo).
  • Consistent pre-agendas.
  • Going for walks.
  • Listing ideas to increase/sustain motivation.
  • Experimenting with various ways to increase/sustain motivation.

What am I doing that’s not useful?

  • Too much time on Facebook and Reddit.

What am I not doing that might be useful?

  • Resume regular exercise regimen.

Actions to attempt/improve for next SR

  • Experiment with at least one tactic for increasing/sustaining motivation:
    • Go for walks consistently.
    • Resume vitamin regimen.
    • Begin exercising consistently.

Scorecard of Next Actions from Previous SR

  • Try consistently doing pre-agendas again.
  • Brainstorm, collect, refresh ideas about increasing/sustaining motivation.
  • At least four social excursions before the next strategic review.
  • Refill antidepressant prescription.

Strategic Review #002

This week has been an absolute disaster motivationally. There are a few likely culprits lurking:

  • An attempt to map the time that I’m currently spending, which made me acutely aware of all the time that I’m not productive and sent me into a depressive spiral. I managed three days and then was too unmotivated to keep going.
  • Catching up on bills and rapidly moving through the remainder of my checking account, itself already greatly diminished from a vacation I’ve just returned from.
  • Not having any solid work lined up to replace those funds, procrastinating looking for more work, having none of the leads return positive.
  • Overall paucity of social contact – leading me to spend too much time in my room.

The last is relatively simple to solve, and I’ve already begun to attack it with an excursion today and a planned one for tomorrow (and as I type this, more plans are forming). The time map was a worthwhile idea, but it was an experiment and sometimes experiments fail. The interior pair of points – work and bills – as is so often the case, is the major sticking point. Blegh, I don’t even want to write about it right now.

What am I doing that’s useful?

(Wow, I had to think about this one hard for a moment before anything would come to me. That’s off putting.)

  • Productive procrastination (reading, Duolingo).
  • Social contact.
  • Going for walks.

What am I doing that’s not useful?

  • Mapping time (at least, it’s not useful at this time).
  • Allowing boredom and listlessness to sap motivation.

What am I not doing that might be useful?

  • Pre-agendas.
  • Refilling antidepressant prescription (to prevent any further sharp dips).
  • Resume regular exercise regimen.
  • Brainstorming, collecting, and refreshing more ideas to increase/sustain motivation.

Actions to attempt/improve for next SR

  • Try consistently doing pre-agendas again.
  • Brainstorm, collect, refresh ideas about increasing/sustaining motivation.
  • At least four social excursions before the next strategic review.
  • Refill antidepressant prescription.

Strategic Review #001

What Am I Doing That’s Useful?

  • Making mini agendas/to-do lists for the next day the previous night.
  • Maintaining correspondence with fellow workshop alumni (John, Sandy, Ryan)
  • Keeping physical spaces reasonably tidy consistently.
  • Making procrastination more productive (Duolingo, reading).
  • Reading consistently.
  • Tracking time spent (Day 1 of 7)

What Am I Doing That’s Not Useful?

  • Not making pre-day agendas consistently.
  • Avoiding bills and correspondence because of ugh fields.
  • Not returning all correspondence promptly.
  • Not using/maintaining a GTD system.
  • Not prioritizing certain projects properly (financial)
  • Spending unproductive time on time suck websites (reddit, facebook)

What Am I Not Doing That Might Be Useful?

  • Wiping and restarting GTD system.
  • Making regular blog posts.
  • Conducting regular strategic reviews
  • Iterating through strategic reviews to continually improve productivity.
  • Performing a VoI calculation on polyphasic sleep (Sandy’s suggestion)

Actions To Attempt/Improve For Next SR

  • Precommit to actually conducting next strategic review on schedule.
  • Create pre day agendas consistently (Beeminder?)
  • Think about how to prioritize time properly for more important projects.
  • Wipe and restart GTD system.

Strategic Review: A Primer

A few months ago, I volunteered at the July CFAR workshop. Among several reasons for doing so (reconnecting with awesome people, meeting new awesome people, giving back to the community, etc.), I wanted to get a ‘booster shot’ of rationality, so to speak. I have said a few times, in conversations if not on here, that I feel like the January workshop restored me from a person that had become incapable of accomplishing almost anything to a human with an average level of productivity and agency. It hasn’t and still hasn’t produced within me the superpowers that I ultimately seek, but I hoped that the July workshop, with its evolved and iterated curriculum, might offer a fresh clue in that direction.

And indeed it did, at least I think so. Val’s productivity extra class has since evolved into a main class, “Delegating to Yourself.” Which includes (or possibly ‘still includes’ – I don’t really remember it from January) the idea of the Strategic Review, a system where you sit down regularly and go over what is and isn’t working about your own system.

Obvious, when presented to you on a platter like that; why this is something I haven’t been doing since childhood, I cannot answer, except to say I’m not as smart as I think I am.

So I had my clue – if implementing absolutely nothing else, sit down on a regular basis, most likely weekly, and conduct strategic reviews for consistent iterative improvement. This was the priority above all! If all other flanks crumble, this is the center that must be held!

And here we are two months later and I’ve just completed my second.

Oh well.

The dereliction of this blog is another thing that haunts me I would prefer not to be the case, but the thought occurred to me to kill two sphexes with one agentic stone. Publish my strategic reviews here, create social commitment to do them regularly, clarify my thinking about them in the course of writing for an external audience, and guarantee this blog regular content.

Brilliant! So this is my intention moving forward.

The concept is simple enough, and hopefully any obscurities in my description will be cleared up in the next post, which will be the first of the Strategic Review posts. One final note I will make:

In the class, Val suggested these as the questions you should ask yourself as part of the strategic review:

  • What’s right that I’m not doing?
  • Anything that I’m doing that I should stop?
  • Anything else?

I almost immediately reworded these, both to reduce the “should” framing (both explicit and implied) and to create a more active and preference based framing:

  • What am I doing that’s useful?
  • What am I doing that’s not useful?
  • What am I not doing that might be useful?
  • Anything else?

And added a specific section of things to try for next week.

Theoretically, this is the seed from which everything else will grow. If you taught somebody nothing else but the concept of a strategic review and got them to regularly do nothing but regular strategic reviews, eventually you would end up with a super powered agent. So let’s take the idea for a spin.

The Narrative Fallacy

I become more and more convinced that hacking the narrative fallacy is the key to actually increasing our own (instrumental, if not epistemic) rationality. Constructing an understanding of the world and events through a narrative seems to be hardcoded into our cognitive processes.

Stories pervade everything, this is old news. But what I find remarkable is that even those aware and ostensibly attempting to reason without it will resort to it, at least in communicating their ideas to others. Eliezer uses it explicitly at times (HPMOR being the obvious example) but uses it implicitly just as often (this is only Eliezer’s most recent post as of this writing).

Julia uses it to illustrate the appeal of the CFAR workshops to a community of fellow Bayesians.

Nassim Taleb uses it even when railing against the thing itself (Chapter 6 of The Black Swan)!

I am moderately concerned there is availability bias at work and that I am privileging the question. “What’s the key to raising the sanity waterline? Well the thing I’ve been studying and focusing on for the past several years, of course!”

But ultimately not that concerned. The narrative fallacy pervades our understanding of the world and even if it is an inherently irrational means to more rational ends, it is at there very least necessary as an intermediate step.

Testing Confidence Levels

I’m sick and it’s Sunday, so it’s a stay in bed and binge on a season of a TV show kinda day. But rationality never takes a day off!

So, I’m currently on Episode 6 of Season 1 of Homeland and I’m betting with…65% confidence that Oebql vf abg n greebevfg fyrrcre ntrag.

EDIT: Wow, this show.