Written by LW user Simon Berens.
This is part of LessWrong for EA, a LessWrong repost & low-commitment discussion group (inspired by this comment). Each week I will revive a highly upvoted, EA-relevant post from the LessWrong Archives, more or less at random
Excerpt from the post:
Like most tech bros, I’m a little too interested in productivity and optimizing my life. I’ve even made a few of my own tools to help me stay focused and efficient. In the process of trying to find and build the best productivity tools possible, I discovered common elements among all the productivity tools I found most effective.
I call such tools elastic, because of their similarities to rubber bands. And so, elastic tools
stretch, meaning that they’re designed to allow for some leeway
snap back, i.e. after stretching they automatically go back to their intended form
don’t break, in the sense that you can never stretch them too far
Elastic tools are a marked improvement over standard tools, which typically
are brittle, allowing no leeway
don’t help you get back on track
end up getting ditched
Please feel free to,
Discuss in the comments
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LessWrong for EA seems like a great idea, and a pretty mediocre specific post to choose—it’s very recent, not particularly strongly upvoted by the LW community, and doesn’t contribute any of the things I have been excited about seeing from LessWrong for EA.
Thank you for the feedback! I agree that it’s not the best one I’ve reposted. I haven’t had much time for digging in the LW archives lately though and I came across it, and it actually helped me make some concrete improvements to productivity, so I thought it could possibly help others. I am realizing now that I may be more excited about the productivity-hack genre than most, so I will keep that in mind moving forward.
If you haven’t checked out the ~30 earlier reposts, you can find them by clicking on the tag. I would be surprised if you didn’t find that stuff higher quality as they are mostly older and higher karma. Feel free to tag your own reposts as well. I think it would be great to have a collection of stuff that doesn’t just reflect my tastes/interests, and I am not sure how frequently I will be able to keep posting at this point.
I have been using Focusmate* for a while now and this post helped me realize that one of my biggest failure modes with it was not having sessions setup to begin each day. I would use it a lot for a while and then get out of the habit and my productivity would gradually start to suffer and it took me some time to realize and get back into it.
Now I have been booking first sessions out for two weeks. It’s flexible in that I can always cancel it if something comes up, but I usually won’t and it’s elastic in that even if I bail on it for the good part of a day, my first session is setup by default for me for the next day. Usually that’s enough to get and keep me on track.
*A service that matches you with video co-working partners for accountability. More about it and EA group details here.
The last link is broken, and should probably be:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZQPig66wteqwbNHGh/ea-focusmate-group-announcement
Fixed thanks!