One of my interests is "bootstrap" methods. That is, a minimal set of habits or processes, that when adopted end up making you cool down the line. For example, "study the habits of successful people" might be a good habit. If you do that, you might find yourself adopting other good habits.
As such, I often ask people what habits lead to all their other habits, and about habits in general.
The following bootstrap procedure is courtesy to P Christiano:
- At the end of the day, review what happened. What went well? What could have gone better?
- For everything that could have gone better, write down something you will do to make sure it goes better in the future.
- No repeats. That is, if you write down "Talk to Mary before scheduling lunch", and you find yourself not talking to her and would write that down a second time -- don't. Come up with a new intervention the second time.
Today's challenge was to try it out, but I set a timer to do it once an hour, rather than once a day, for the sake of compressing it down.
It went pretty good, actually.
One of my early failures was that I was vaguely thinking of things I could do better, without having a list or turning them into action items. It's important to go meta with these processes to fix bugs like that. In fact, P points out you don't really need rule 3 for this reason.
The note-taking app from yesterday was useful again today.
Nothing big to report, just another experiment.