Intro to and outline of a sequence on a productivity system

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[Note: this is an unedited ramble]

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to publish at least a post a week on a my productivity system.

I’ve been writing occasional posts in a series that I’ve been calling the Psychological Principles of Productivity. The idea of these essays is less to present productivity tricks, and more to use those tricks as a starting point for exploring what that must mean about the human mind.

I’ll be doing that a little bit, over the next few posts, but mainly, this is a full practical system for efficiently converting one’s time and mental energy into productive labor. If I were to sum it up, I would say this is a system for increasing the quantity and quality of one’s focused Deep Work time, up to sustainable human limits.

(This series is the successor to my SAAH model of productivity from 2016, and is similar to Leverage / Paradigm’s AVADI framework.)

Of course, what a person choses to work on is a much bigger factor in their impact than how efficiently they utilize their mental/emotional resources, but that’s not what this series is about.

Basically, this is a way for me to get a bunch of rough drafts written down, so that I have fodder to organize into a book or a Less Wrong sequence, down the line.

I’m also going to be implementing and testing a few pieces as I go: almost all of the content to come will be things that I already do, are already crucial pieces of sustaining my high productivity. But there will be some places that are still theoretical: pieces that I have reason to think are crucial, but which I haven’t gotten work, practically, yet. I’ll note these explicitly.

With that in mind, here’s an outline of the pieces to come. Note that these are strongly NOT ordered by importance (the most important factor, in my experience, is antagonistic aversions, which is all the way at the end).

  1. Prerequisites / preliminaries
    1. Healthy state
      1. Sleep
        1. Naps
      2. Exercise
      3. Meditation?
      4. Rest
    2. Mental / emotional state clear – everything is handled
      1. Other open loops in a system
      2. All emotional considerations are handled or meta-handled [1]
        1. Overwell
        2. Urge-y-ness / reactivity
      3. Outlet policies
        1. Explicit priority without an implicit 
          1. Scheduling rest and breaks 
  2. Positive factors
    1. Set up
      1. Having the item in your attention
      2. Scheduling: immediacy, urgency, etc. 
        1. TAPs
        2. Schedule blocks
          1. Murphyjitsu
        3. Habits
      3. Motivation – how it works
        1. Time horizon is overweighted
          1. But it should be propagated back from something good.
        2. Only reaching for achievable lists
          1. Committing to not adding more
      4. Momentum
    2. Hyperfocus
      1. State modulation – calm, focused, alert, energized
        1. Pumping up
        2. Bleeding off
      2. Committing to focus
        1. Distraction catching system
          1. Especially web surfing
      3. Breaks
  3. Negative factors
    1. Aversion
      1. Antagonistic aversions
        1. Focusing [1]
          1. How to make it work
        2. Watching TV is a flag that some part of the system is broken
      2. Ambiguity aversion 
        1. Operationalizing
        2. Committed engagement

 

See you soon.

My personal wellbeing support pillars

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[Epistemic status: my personal experience]

Last week, I wrote about a way that I now conceptualize my personal maintenance habits/ systems/ practice. In this post, I want to say what those practices are, in rough order of importance for me.

Regularly doing all of these, more-or-less insures that I have good productive days. Note however that various stressors can make it harder to maintain each of these practices (especially #3), and correlation is not causation. It is not entirely implausible that some of these are not doing much work, but they seem useful because the days when I do them are the days when things are going well. More randomized experimentation is needed.

Plus, of course, your milage may vary.

  1. Get enough sleep. Nap during the day if I didn’t sleep enough or sleep well. (I never used to be able to nap durring the day, but I recently developed a method for falling asleep that works reasonably reliably.)
  2. Exercise, intensely, everyday.
  3. Notice, respond to, and process my aversions/ anxieties / triggers / concerns. This one is crucial, and is the current weak point for me. Some percentage of the time, my doing Focusing fails, in that I don’t get more clarity or a next action on the cause of discomfort. I think this is a bug in my Focusing process more than an inherent limitation.
  4. Outline my days the night before.
  5. Do some hours of Deep work, especially first thing in the morning.
  6. Full inbox 0: keeping my attention clear and keeping things moving. [I wonder if this is only good because of the momentum building effects / reward of closing out a list.]
  7. Make some visible-to-me progress, on my projects, even on minor projects
  8. Take rest days (I don’t know if this is only beneficial because it aids in doing some of the things above, but I think there’s an important thing of getting a reprieve from my stressors.)

One important open question for me is, “when all of the above is functional, is there still and additional benefit to daily meditation?” Or, alternatively,  does daily meditation pay for itself by making any of the above (perhaps #3) easier?

Currently, I keep track of most of these in a daily checklist. This has gone through a large number of iterations over the past 5 years, but the first version was based on Sebastian Marshall‘s lights spreadsheet.

The bootstrapping attitude

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This is a quick post highlighting a recent change in my mindset that I suppose might be useful to others. (I make no claims that this shift in mindset is clear from the post.)

I used to have a bit of a “failing with abandon” problem. If I wasted most of a day, that meant it was too late to have a “good day”, and it wasn’t very motivating to get up and work on having a “slightly better, but still not very good day”. [I will get around to writing up how motivation works, sometime]. So I would something like give up on my long term goals for that day, and fitter it away.

These days, I have a different attitude. My functionality and effectiveness is a structure that depends on a bunch of different, self-supporting, maintenance processes: exercising, getting enough sleep, having my attention clear, having “everything handled”, doing Deep Work first thing in the morning etc.

These processes are self supporting in that each one makes it easier to do the others. Sort of like a reciprocal structure.

simple_reciprocal_frame

It used to be that when I looked at my lightsheet/ daily checklist and everything was red… Screen Shot 2019-07-14 at 1.52.37 PM

…I felt the weight of how far I was from hitting my goals. That feels un-motivating. What’s the point of pushing myself, if I’m not going to get a payoff?

Now when I look at today’s column, and it’s all red, my response is something like: “Yep, I’m not going to have a “good day” today, my supports are not in place. But I can start bootstrapping.” I can, starting from right here, lay the first of those supports, and start building up momentum.

This resets the reference point: I’m not expecting to have a satisfying productive day, but I can still put pieces in place, so that I can have a day like that soon.

Exercise and nap, then mope, if I still want to

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I have a new rule for myself (partially inspired by reading Scott Adam’s book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big): I’m not allowed to be mopey or depressed unless I have exercised and gotten enough sleep on that day.

If I feel some kind of despondent, and I haven’t exercised, then I’ll stop bemoaning my situation and go exercise. And if I’m running on sleep deprivation, then I’ll nap first.

I’m allowed to feel grumpy or depressed after I’ve done both of those things.

I’m doing this because, a huge portion of my subjective well being and optimism depends on sleep and exercise, so I want to always make sure that those are taken care of before inhabiting an epistemic state in which things seem bad or hopeless.

Controlled actions

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[Note: I learned this concept directly from John Salvatier. All credit for the ideas goes to him. All blame for the incoherence of this post goes to me.]

[unedited]

This post doesn’t have a payoff. It’s just laying out some ideas.

Controlled actions

Some actions are “controlled”, which is to say their consequences are very precisely determined by the actor.

The term is in reference to, for instance, a controlled demolition. A controlled demolition occurs when a building collapses in a specific pattern, compared to an uncontrolled demolition, which would just be knocking over a building, without any particular concern for how or where the pieces go.

The following are some axis that influence how controlled an action is.

How precisely predictable the effects of the action are

Rocket launches are highly controlled, in that the one can precisely predict the trajectory of the rocket. Successfully changing the social norms around dating, sex, and marriage (or anything really) is uncontrolled because human society is a complicated knot of causal influences, and it is very hard to know in advance what the down-stream impacts will be.

(In general, actions that involve physical deterministic systems are more controlled than actions that involve human minds.)

How reversible the results of an action are

But you don’t need to be able to predict the results of your actions, to have controlled actions, if your actions are reversible.

Dynamiting a mountain (even via a controlled demolition), is less controlled than cutting down a forest, which is less controlled than turning on a light.

How much you “own” the results of your actions

Inventing and then open-sourcing a new technology is uncontrolled. Developing proprietary software is more controlled, because you have more ability to dictate how the software is used (though the possibility of copycats creating can create similar software mitigates your control). Developing software that is only used within one’s own organization is more controlled still.

Processes that are self perpetuating or which take on a life of their own (for instance, sharing an infectious idea, which then spreads and mutates) are extremely uncontrolled.

How large or small the step-size of the action is and how frequent the feedback is

It is more controlled to cut down a tree at a time, and check the ecological impact after each felling, than it is to only check the ecological impact after the whole forest has been removed. Careful gradual change is more controlled.

(Unfortunately, many actions have different effects at large scales than at small scales, and so one doesn’t get information about their impacts until the action is mostly completed.)

 

In general, there’s a pretty strong tradeoff between the effect sizes of one’s actions, and how controlled they can be. It’s easy to keep many small actions controlled, and nigh-impossible to keep many large actions controlled.

Problems requiring high control

Some problems inherently require high control solutions. Most construction projects are high control problems, for instance. Building a sky scraper depends on hundreds of high precision steps, with the later steps depending on the earlier one. Building a watch is a similarly high control problem.

In contrast, there are some problems for which low control solutions are good enough. In particular, when only a single variable of the system being optimized needs to be modified, low control solutions that move that variable (in the right direction), are sufficient.

For instance, removing lead from the environment is a moderately low control action (hard to reverse, hard to predict all the downstream consequences, the actor doesn’t own the effects) but it turns out that adjusting that one variable is very good move. (Probably. The world is actually more confusing than that.)

 

The seed of a theory of triggeredness

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[epistemic status: not even really a theory, just some observations, and self-observations at that.

Unedited.]

Related: “Flinching away from truth” is often about *protecting* the epistemology

“Triggered” seems to be a pretty specific state, that has something of rage, something of panic, and a general sort of “closing in” of experience. I think it might be a pointer to something important (I postulate a related triad of triggeredness, trauma, and blindspots, and blindspots seem like a crucial thing to have a better grasp on.) So I’ve been paying attention to my own triggeredness.

I’ve noticed that I feel triggered in only two situations.

Adversarial forces

The first is when there’s something that I think is important, but I anticipate adversarial forces, either in me or external to me, that are threatening to erode my commitment to that important thing.

For instance, if I have a standard that I’m trying to hold to, but I expect (or project) that someone is about to try and argue me out of, or social pressure me out of it. (Probably, it is necessary that I be unsteady in my commitment to that standard, in such a way that some part of me expects me to be improperly argued out of it, and something important will be lost? If I were confident in my view, or confident in my ability to respond and update sensibly, there wouldn’t be an issue.)

An example: If someone makes even mild, good-natured attempts to convince me that I should impair my cognition, or drink alcohol to relax, I might become filled with triggered rage.

[This is not quite a real example for me, but it is very close to a real example. I in fact, have trouble writing a real example, because my every attempt to fill in the what they are suggesting I do are obvious strawmen that don’t come close to passing the ITT. I get things like “meld with the crowd”, or “surrender my independence” and start feeling slightly triggered. I think I can’t currently see the real thing clearly.]

Another example: I think that I should only use CFAR units that I personally use. I agreed to teach Aversion Factoring, explicitly with the condition that I say clearly that I used to use it, but now use Focusing with a dash of IDC for processing aversions. Someone who wasn’t aware of that, asked (in a way that I guess felt presure-y to me?) if they “could convince me not to tell the participants that I use Focusing/IDC instead?” I got slightly triggered and snapped back, “absolutely not” (in a kind of mean way).

Impossibilities of crucial communication

The other is when there’s something important to protect, but I don’t expect to be able to comunicate what it is to the relevant actors, perhaps because the true reasons don’t seem defensible.

For instance, if I’m on a team and we’re considering bringing on a new member. Most people on the team feel excited about the new guy. I don’t want him to join, but despair of compelling them. (It feels to me like the excited people are being reckless with our team and I’m going to end up leaving it.) I feel a triggered panic.

This impossibility of communication is often due to some conflation of separate things, or bucket error, either in me, or in others.

Example: a person is considering taking some action, X. I think X is doomed to fail, but it is nearby to action Y, which I think is important or valuable. I’m afraid that the person will try X and it will go poorly, and onlookers will not be able to distinguish X and Y, so and so everyone gives up on Y as untenable. If I could convey that X and Y were meaningfully distinct, then there wouldn’t be an issue, and I wouldn’t need to be triggerd about it.

Common thread

There’s a thread in both of these of “something important to me is threatened because I can’t articulate what it is or name it right.”

Why does outlining my day in advance help so much?

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[epistemic status: Hypothesizing. Pretty stream of consciousness. I’m rereading Thinking, Fast and Slow right now, and that has clearly been influencing my thinking.]

Advance outlines

More than a year ago, I read Cal Newport’s Deep Work: Rule’s for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Overall, I wasn’t that impressed with it: it seemed to be mostly fluff. There was one practice that I picked up from that book however, that made the time cost of reading it (actually, listening to the audiobook) worthwhile.

Newport recommends outlining your day, hour by hour, before the day starts. This outline is not intended to be a ridged schedule however: you’re allowed to deviate from the plan. However, if you do decide to change what you do in a given time block, you have to put that on the outline, and also reschedule the rest of your day in light of that change.

(It’s possible that I’m misremembering the actual procedure that Newport recommends. I think that his version has two side by side columns, one with a pre-made outline and the other to be filled in with how you actually spend your time? What I do, at least, is fill out a new column every time I make a decision to deviate from my schedule outline. It looks something like this:

IMG_2702.JPG[1]

In practice, I often don’t keep this up for the whole day. For the day shown above, “writing” ended up turning into a debugging meeting with a friend/collaborator, alternating with writing, and then going home to pack. [2] )

Outlining my day in advance like this has a pretty large effect on “how well my day goes” overall, my subjective sense of my own focus and productivity. The effect is not as large as waking up early and doing Deep work [3], but it is larger than the effect of a 20 minute meditation. My guess is that the effect is larger than regular exercise, but I’m much less sure of that. (All of these are eyeball’ed subjective estimates. It’s quite possible that my affect heuristic is failing me here, if my subjective sense of wellbeing does not correlate well with my actually getting things done and moving towards my goals. I really need to figure out some better metrics for my own effectiveness.)

A priori, it’s a bit surprising that writing a schedule that I’m not even going to stick to would have such a large effect. Why would this be?

I don’t know. But here are some hypotheses. These aren’t mutually exclusive. For all I know they all apply. I think at least some of these point at interesting psychological phenomena.

Hypotheses

Hypothesis 1: It causes me to load up my goals and priorities in some kind of short term memory or background awareness. 

This might be subtle; I don’t know. There’s a thing about having my goals “loaded up”, or at hand to me, not far from my thoughts. Sometimes (like after a workshop, and before I have had time to orient) I don’t have my goals loaded up. I’m not taking actions to hit them, and I’m not experiencing any anxiety about them. I might spend the morning (or the day) doing whatever random thing, because I’m something like not tracking / not paying attention to / not primed to pay attention to / not remembering the things that I care about and want to accomplish? [I should probably study this experience more, so that I have a better sense of what’s going on.]

I think that one of the things that’s happening is that the outlining activity causes me to “load up” my goals in short term memory.

Hypothesis 3: It clarifies time scarcity and tradeoffs

There’s a temptation (for me at least) to act as if there’s infinite time. “I do want to write today, but I’ll do it later.” That kind of postponement feels costless, but it really isn’t. Something has to give. The procedure outlined above gives me a much more visceral sense of the scarcity of the time resource, and forces me to confront the tradeoffs. (For instance, I didn’t do math on July 1, I met with Diva instead. But that was a conscious choice.)

Being aware of the limits on my time supports me in spending it well. I’m less apt to waste time if I’m viscerally aware of what that actually costs.

Hypothesis 3: It allows me to rehearse my day / set TAPs / biases later decision moments

There’s something magical about walking through my day in some detail that, for instance, just making a todo list of three or four priorities, doesn’t do.

In order to schedule in blocks like that I have to visualize how my day will go in at least a little detail. And I think that future-pacing my day like that makes it easier to execute.

I’m not quite sure why this is. It might be something like that walkthrough lightly sets some TAPs, and particular, TAPs for transitioning between tasks.  For instance

TAP: Finish meeting with Ben -> walk over to my desk, take out “How to Prove It” and start reading the introduction).

Note that my current procedure does not have me visualizing the scene in detail like that, or explicitly setting TAPs. But maybe something like that is happening subliminally, as I think about how long I need to do a task and where I’ll be at that time of day, etc.

Another model in this vein (or maybe another frame on the same model) is that scheduling introduces a bias or directional tendency to my decision points. Throughout the day, I have a small hundreds number of moments when I need to determine my next action. Those moments include when I feel like getting up from writing to pace, or if I should go make food right now, or if I’m going to sit down to work on that python script I was writing, or if I should do Focusing on that thing in my belly.

Such decision points inherently entail ambiguity. Furthermore, there are really a large number of factors to take into account: my energy levels, what I feel like doing, if I have enough time to make progress on a thing, the nature of the tradeoffs between the various good things that I could do etc. I have policies and TAPs for making some of these decisions (one wants to live a choice minimal life-style), but most of these moments still entail some level of ambiguity and cognitive effort. And the more of the decision that falls to my current less reflective self, the more likely I am to follow a path of least resistance: taking a break instead of finishing this post, or doing something good but not crucial.

I think having rehearsed the decision in advance takes some of the load off, there’s a sort of echo of having already chosen, I’ve carved a shallow rut, so that the thing that my more reflective self decided was best to do at this time is the path of least (or less) resistance.

Interestingly, this maybe the same mechanism as hypothesis 1, except where Hyp 1 is about loading up goals, Hyp 3 is about loading up task-transitions. And the mechanism in question is starting to look suspiciously like priming.

Let’s clarify that claim explicitly: the main reason why prescheduling works is that it briefly puts my attention on my goals and the tasks to achieving them. This leaves a kind of mental “residue” [4], those goals and actions are more cognitively available. And therefore, those actions are given higher decision weightings at ambiguous decision points. [Plus, it makes time scarcity feel real. (Hyp. 3)]

Next steps

I’m not sure if any of that was even coherent, or if it is, if I’ll think that this is correct in a week.

After writing this, it seems like the natural next thing to do is goal-factor. Is there a way that I can get all the benefits of this procedure more cheaply? If I find a strictly better procedure, that’s a win. If I find a procedure that hits some but not all of the benefits, that would give me more data about the physiological structure in this area.

 

Notes

[1] I was nocturnal for this day because I was transitioning in advance for a Europe trip.

[1] I can easily check, because I separately track all my time in Toggl.

[3] I find that my day goes better the earlier I wake up, and that this trend is robust all the way up to as early as 3:00 AM. It’s really amazing to have long blocks of uninterrupted work time, while it’s dark and the rest of the world is sleeping. Unfortunately, this has the obvious tradeoff of making it hard to  meet with / spend time with other humans.

[4] I believe this is a technical term used for the cost of attention switching?

_Why_ do we fear the twinge of starting?

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[epistemic status: As always, I’m not claiming that I’m saying anything new. This might “just” be hyperbolic discounting.

Also I don’t know if this is true. I didn’t apply my regular level of skepticism to these ideas yet, and some of them are probably wrong or meaningless. Work in progress.]

Followup to: Working hurts less than procrastinating, we fear the twinge of starting

Here’s a puzzle:

I, like most people I think, am happiest when I am working hard on something: solving a problem, learning something, or otherwise exerting myself. But even though I subjectively enjoy working, and enjoy it more than not working, I do occasionally procrastinate on doing those things. Which is kind of weird: if my work time is more enjoyable than my not work time, you’d think that I would always be glad to move into working (and to be fair, most of the time, I am).

Here’s what a think is happening:

Starting to work pretty much always entails an increase in cognitive effort [1]. Humans are at some fundamental level lazy, and tend to flinch away from cognitive effort. It has a bit of of a sting to it [does it always?].

Now this effort is rapidly compensated, as one gets into the flow of working. However, I think that there are different subsystems in the brain that are tracking reward at different timescales. For the subsystem that is tracking reward in the next 30 seconds, working represents only the cost of cognitive effort, and none of the benefit of flow. The subsystem that is tracking reward on a timescale of hours, however; is nearly indifferent between getting into flow right now, and five minutes from now. So there’s a constant incentive do delay, just a bit, even to your detriment.

I bet there’s a math of this. In fact, I think that this might be just entirely be what the the book Breakdown of Will is about.

Some implications and related thoughts

I think this might explain something about “productivity momentum“: if it is shifts in the level of cognitive effort that are hard, then you just stay at a particular level of cognitive effort (or something like that? It seems like the level of cognitive effort must very throughout your working). or maybe you’re more willing to exert cognitive effort when it looks like it’s paying off. Similarly, think this might explain why outlining my day in advance is so useful and I think this might have something to do with why getting up and working first thing is so good for me.

Habits: I think that in many cases, habits are smoothing over this effect, by making exerting effort the down-stream thing to do. For instance, I find it much easier to exercise when I’m at home, than when I’m traveling. I think this is due to a number of reasons, but at least one of them is that at home I have a chain of familiar TAPs that guide me into exerting myself. When traveling, I don’t have those TAPs and need to force myself to do it much more. [I’m not sure if this makes any sense.]

I think a similar dynamic occurs with a more frequent kind of procrastination: avoiding looking at something true and bad. For a simple example: Your project is behind schedule. Once you consciously acknowledge that fact you’ll feel better and be able to respond more effectively. But first there is the pain of the situation, before one acclimates to a new setpoint of the way the world is. So the same dynamic occurs.

When I adopt this frame, I am inclined to adopt a policy / habit of noticing flinches, and doing the thing anyway, for just a bit (5 minutes). I can then get more data about if it is actually a good idea, or if I actually want to. Unfortunately, this policy trades off against making more deliberate choices: the space in which I would procrastinate is the same space in which I would pause to consider what the best corse of action is.

 

[1] Sometimes I’m thinking about something and energized about it, and am bursting to sit down to write. In this case it seems that physiological arousal is turned on, and cognitive effort is already recruited.

 

 

Some musings on deliberate practice

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[Epistemic status: unverified postulates. Probably not the right ontology, or even first order factors.]

A few years ago, I taught myself to touch-type in Colemak mostly using the online software keyber.com. I came back to this recently, to see if I could increase my typing speed further. In particular, it seems like one of the main things slowing me down is punctuation, which I didn’t train at the time. So I’m focusing on that this week.

This seems to be going much better / faster than when I was originally learning to touch type, and it’s inspired me to write some notes about deliberate practice.

Speed

I used to practice Parkour with Duncan. He had a saying, about learning new parkour motions:

First do it right. Then do it smooth. Then do it quiet. Then do it fast.

Where, actually, by the time you’re doing it right smooth, and quiet, you’re automatically doing it at speed.

I think this generalizes. Or at least the “do it right, before you do it fast” part does. When you’re learning something you first and foremost want to focus on doing it right, no matter how slowly.

Practicing touch typing, at least when I’m starting out with some new keys, is extremely deliberate: I might pause for a half second before I hit each key, verifying that I am about the hit the right one.

I tend to speed up automatically as I start to get a handle on it, and have more of a sense of the rhythm. If I make more than a few (3?) errors, I go back and slow down.

Obviously, in some domains, its pretty hard to adjust the speed: juggling comes to mind. There’s probably something that can be done about that.

Note and counter-rehearse errors

Going slow also lets me pay attention to specific errors. The nature of the touch typing task also helps a lot: keystrokes are discrete, and I have clear feedback about if I hit the right key. (This is probably harder in other domains.)

But every time I make an error, I notice specifically what it was (“I hit the “y” key with my ring finger instead of the “semi colon”), and mentally pseudo rehearse the reflex that I want to execute instead (reaching up to hit “semi colon”).

I’ll typically go back to the beginning of the session and play it through again. Having just noted the error and the correction, I usually do it correctly on the second run-through.

Vary psychological sliders

In addition to speed, it feels like there are other high-level scaler variables that I can adjust up and down. I’m not sure that I’m naming these right, but some of them include

  • “intensity”
  • “commitment to accuracy”
  • “speed”
  • “sloppiness”
  • “calm” or “settledness”

This is something like the intention that I’m holding when I’m practicing. It seems like good deliberate practice is mostly a matter of identifying which slider(s) are relevant and holding those in the right place (which might be an extreme or a sweet spot in the middle of the scale, depending), while doing the activity.

Perception of Progress

If it feels unmotivating to sit down and do deliberate practice, that’s probably because you don’t viscerally perceive yourself to be making progress. Feeling yourself get better is almost always engaging (?).

 

The two-way connection between thought-content and physiological state

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[epistemic status: argument, followed by hypothesizing.]

Exercise for state-shifting

Here’s a useful trick for those of you who don’t know of it yet: you can use very brief exercise to quickly shift your physical/mental/emotional state.

Suppose that you’re agitated or anxious or energized about something, but you don’t have time to engage with it at the moment. You’re about to go into an important meeting, and it be disruptive for you to be experiencing agitation about something unrelated.

One thing that you can do in this scenario is 90 seconds of cardio: do 60 pushups, or do jumping jacks, or sprint. At least in my experience, this disrupts the agitation (clearing my mental pallet, at it were), so that I can go in and put my full attention on the meeting.

I recently experienced this on a larger scale: after touching a very deep trigger / trauma for me, and having a more visceral reaction reaction than I’ve yet experienced. I was still very triggered about it and ruminating on it, an hour after the initial trigger-event.

The advisor I consulted told me to exhaust myself: to do squats to failure, or to do tabata sprints. Not having a squat rack available at the time, I went outside and did some (bad) 20 second sprints. I was much calmed by the time I finished.)

Implications

In my sleep post from last month, I ended by outlining a very simple model:

I’m awake because my body is physiologically aroused.

…Which is caused by attention being absorbed by something that’s in some way energizing or exciting.

…Which is probably because a goal directed process in me is trying to get something (by ruminating or planning or whatever).

Or, stated visually:

Physiological activation diagram 1

However, the fact that you can use exercise to shift your state suggests that this causal flow is not so simple.

Short, intense, physical exertion is sort of like manually resetting the physiological activation node, by “washing it out” with all the state characteristics implied by exercise (or something).

But the fact that this works, and (at least sometimes) you don’t immediately go back to ruminating, suggests that the causal connection between mental content and physiological activation can go both directions: your thoughts can change your level of arousal, and your level of arousal can change your thoughts. Which gives us a causal diagram more like this one:

test1

Elaborating on that model

[Epistemic state: The following is a working hypothesis.]

My current working model has it that you have effectively two “immediate states” or working memories”: that of your system 2 (that’s the standard one), and that of your system 1 (the felt senses and bodily auroral).

Each one has a limited capacity. Just as you can’t keep track of more than a few ideas at a time, your body can only have one(?) overall physiological state. Otherwise 90 seconds of cardio would not “wipe the slate”.

Each of these “states” can influence the other: Your physiological state can influence your mental content (this happens deliberately when one does Focusing), and your mental content can influence your physiological activation (remembering a task I forgot can induce panic).

More thoughts

I frequently experience myself becoming more activated when I lie down to go to sleep. I hypothesize that when I let my mind wader as I’m falling asleep, I often hit upon either, a new exciting idea, or some area that I’m anxious or fearful about. This triggers an activation response, and then a positive feedback loop between the two states.

(Notably, distracting myself by, for instance, reading a comic book for a while, allows me to fall asleep. Eating something also helps, and sometimes masturbating. I speculate that distraction is intervening on the mental content, and eating is intervening on my physiological activation, because digestion activates PSNS. Masturbating might be both?)