I always slept quite badly, and felt not good in the daytime. Turns out I just need to load on water a lot before sleeping. Been doing this for 4 days now, the biggest streak of me every sleeping good for as long as I can remember.
Small gifts for my gf
I wish I gave more small gifts to my gf.
Beeminder is not really helping that much, it’s hard to force myself to buy a gift.
The solution: just go to the mall once in a while to relax, and there is always a nice little thing to buy there! Just getting expose to “gift opportunities” is the key
(well yes, I could create a Beeminder goal that tells me to go to the mall)
Going out more
I’m not done with this topic yet, but it looks like the foundation for this is to be aware of what’s happening and letting yourself pick everyday.
So step #1: maintain a list of events happening this week / next week on the calendar!
Step #2: looking at it when feeling bored or wanting to meet new people
I can’t prove it, but I believe there’s plenty of small things you can do to get great results, especially if they accumulate over time (or if you don’t do them, the bad results will accumulate). Brushing teeth daily would be one example.
Here are two simple life hacks, both on the theme of Plan to Forget.
The first is from Kevin Kelly : when you look for something and eventually find it, put it back where you first looked. This applies equally to digital content — add your search term to the file name. In extremis, use Keyboard Maestro, Alfred, or similar to remap your search term to bring up the right thing. Doubly handy when you change apps and habitually keep trying to launch the old one.
The second is about physical reminders in your environment. We use the little cardboard cutouts from kleenex tissue boxes to write notes, many of which are reusable. Garbage collection, delivery expected, admin deadline, kisses my sweet, etc. Can put them out when thinking of the thing, increasing the odds of remembering when the time comes. We mostly put them on the table at the bottom of the stairs.
I think my best one is: Learn the basics of powerful mnemonic techniques
Primarily I’m referring to:
The Major System (or anything similar) for converting numbers into words
Memory Palaces
I’ve experimented with these a lot, sometimes with overoptimistic beliefs about their utility, but despite them never, say, replacing notetaking or replacing Anki, I use them constantly as a way of creating what amounts to “medium term memory” (let’s say a week) consciously controlled, with minimal effort.
I use this most often for:
Remembering short number sequences while busy, most commonly exit numbers while driving
Remembering birthdays, anniversaries, etc.
Making mental reminders to myself (I put them in a palace I think of as my “mental reminder palace”)
Memorizing the broad contents of book chapters (usually a memory palace triggered by the book cover, which leads to one image per chapter of the contents); these basically always fade over time, but they’re useful for maintaining a sense of context and history while reading a long text.
Related to the above, and even simpler: Memorize a few poems
It’s amazing what a delight it is to have something short, memorable, and beautiful to think or say in relation to some state of affairs. A good one for me this past year has been Frost’s Nothing Gold Can Stay.
You reminded me of my favourite tip related to putting things in place.
Mise en place - Wikipedia - my tip for cooking at home. Just put everything you need before you start doing it. All in proper amount. Also, keep one small bowl for peels and other trash, don’t put it to each time.
There’s an anki plugin for poems, as it happens. It helps you chain together lines by displaying a configurable number of lines and asking what comes next.
Whenever there’s an interesting poem of the day from the Poetry Society newsletter, I add it to the list.
If I used the desktop app regularly, I might have more, but I almost exclusively use the mobile app.
This means that I need to sync regularly on the desktop, which is encouraged through a combination of the maintained progress plugin’s pessimistic projections and my pjh/anki-sync metagoal that I created by connecting it to my main pjh/anki goal.
each time.