What I am thinking about at the moment 🤓 and why my profile is not my full name 😶
Effective altruism community building 🏕️
I used to do a lot of effective altruism community building and I am currently thinking about how the effective altruism community can maximize its expected impact, given the rapidly changing conditions.
My own personal productivity and wellbeing bottlenecks : why I think prioritising working on these is important, progress I have made and my current challenges
I suspect that working on my personal productivity and wellbeing bottlenecks is a great way for me to increase how much impact I can expect to have over my career.
I am currently focused on working out how to become much more reliable than I am/have been in the past.
In particular, I am working on finishing my top priority tasks in a timely manner, becoming better calibrated on what commitments I can and cannot meet, getting better at promising the 5th percentile scenario rather than the 50th (or the 95th) and on becoming better at quick communication when plans break. I find this quite challenging for a number of reasons (one of those reasons being a cluster of personality traits that got me an ADHD diagnosis and another being a number of non-ADHD mental health/self-esteem issues that I’m slowly but surely working through).
Progress I have made so far 🤩: I have become much more self-compassionate over the years which has helped a lot with a lot of the mental health struggles I’ve had.
I have a process that works for getting me to consistently start on my top priority (but is very time-consuming and maybe only works consistently when I control enough of the variables, e.g. I’m not sure it would work if I had a very different home environment and work environment to the ones I have now).
My next challenges 🧗🏼: I struggle to keep the scope narrow enough to finish a lot of what I start. I finish what I want to finish some of the time, but nowhere near consistently enough for me to feel like I won’t become the bottleneck sometimes in a team (and therefore slow the progress of the whole team a lot).
I also find it very hard to under-promise (I sometimes find it hard to accept that I realistically need to promise to do 15% of what I think is actually possible when I’m excited about things, especially when everything I’m saying no to feels important if I could fit it in).
More broadly, I am currently thinking about how to leverage the upsides of being a bit more ADHD than the average person and managing the downsides to still reach the payoffs I care about.
Please do reach out about pretty much anything (as long as you’re okay with me maybe not getting around to replying because messages and emails, every now and again, turn into a massive ugh field and I can only progress on so many ugh fields at a time 😊😶🙃🌞).
Why my forum username is not my full name 🤫
I don’t have my full name on the forum because, even though anyone who knows me in person can probably tell who I am because I always say the same things (I’m a bit of a broken record sometimes), I want to be able to be honest about how I’m thinking about the best strategies to increase my expected impact over my lifetime. This means I want to sometimes discuss my personal productivity bottlenecks and my mental health (as I do here) and also how I’m working on these. I don’t necessarily really want to be this open about my mental health and other parts of who I am right now that I am working on improving (to, hopefully, do more good in the longer term) with anyone who thinks to google my full name.
(But I promise I’m still a real person—though maybe that is what a fake person would say 😅)
Once we believe something, once we care about something, we all tend to forget the often long journey to that worldview and that passion. We enthusiastically feel like because it is now obvious to us that it always was and then talk to others like it is no big deal.
Usually, if you don’t have an exceptionally weird disposition, questioning everything you think about the world and everything you care about is a challenging journey. I took more time to come around than I remembered for a long-time, once it all felt obvious to me. The memories of everything it took to change my mind came back to me slowly. This is so human I think. We move on fast once we believe something, no matter how long the journey took. Once we believe something is true, it often feels like we always knew it deep down (when actually, I think our brains just conveniently forget that so we have more space to think about new things).
Remembering that changing your mind and accepting that you were wrong in the past and that all your future plans might be worth changing is bloody hard. For people to think clearly, they often need room and support. They also need permission to think differently! These are really hard questions! Smart people definitely can very reasonably disagree.
The role, I see, of a community builder, is to create a space where people can safely think about what they think and what they care about. It is not to convince them of any one particular answer or any one particular value system. It seems fine to nudge people towards a wider moral circle. It seems fine to present people with why you believe what you believe. The rest is an open-minded, open-hearted, curious conversation.