• Decision Making
  • Limited Energy
    • “As the authors Roy Baumeister, Charles Duhigg and others have written, the more we have to think consciously about doing something, the more rapidly we deplete our severely limited reservoir of will and discipline.”  Short bursts of training is better than slow but long lasting training; same for mental and emotional activities as well as physical: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/07/19/how-interval-training-can-make-you-incredibly-efficient-at-work/
      • Try to reduce the repetitive decisions in your life: Instead of having to choose what you will eat for breakfast every…single…day…try deciding what you will eat for breakfast everyday, and then just make exceptions when you want to.  The key is that you are reducing the number of decisions you face each day so that you preserve your mental energy for the important decisions.
      • Stay tuned for an application AttemptedLiving will release to help you make decisions and save your brain power from unnecessary work.
    • Waste
      • Procrastination depletes your focus and decision making energies because you waste energy to make the decision to procrastinate, so that by the time you start work, you’ve spent energy on the five, ten procrastination decisions prior.
      • Track and reduce wasted time.  Ask yourself: Are you making good use of your brain power? What are you thinking about most of the time? Is it useful, helpful, beneficial? Don’t waste your limited resources on thoughts that yield little value.
      • I spend too much time refreshing Facebook, gmail, reddit, etc., waiting for things to happen, and then procrastinating when emails or messages/activities/events come in.  This is a huge waste of time: focus on doing active things rather than passive things.  Have a purpose.  If I’m on gmail, the purpose is to read and answer emails to move on to do other things, not to passively wait there refreshing. Also, block your time: instead of checking email every few seconds, and therefore wasting time whenever there’s nothing new, check email or social media once every hour or two, so you can process all the activity for the last hour or two all at once.
  • Accept Imperfection and Optimize for Impact
    • Sometimes you should stop and fix a problem before moving on, and sometimes you can and should just move on and be fine.  Recognize how necessary it is and decide if it’s a worthwhile investment of time and energy.  For example, I might want to read a wikipedia page about Ponies, but then on the Pony page I see a link to Industrial Revolution.  If I don’t know what Industrial Revolution is, I might want to click it, but then I might find something on the Industrial Revolution page that I don’t know, which if I click would get me further away from my goal of reading about ponies.  If, on the other hand, my interest in reading about ponies is to find out its involvement in the Industrial Revolution, then I do need to learn about the Industrial Revolution before proceeding.
    • If you have five tasks and you only have time to do three, focus on the important problems that have the greatest impact. As your life gets more complicated, you must learn to let things go: choosing which tasks to consciously fail is a strange thing to learn, but an important skill to have–from it, you learn what is truly necessary and what isn’t.
    • You don’t have to be perfect, just good enough, and you can work it out as you go. If you have time to complete three tasks, or perfectly complete one, depending on whether you can fail the other two, you should sacrifice the perfection of one to get the other two done.
      • One time, I was looking for parking, and I found a good parking spot close to the destination but on dirt, so I decided to pass on it and look for something better.  Once I passed it, someone else instantly took the parking spot I determined was not good enough. After another fifteen minutes of searching, I then had to settle for a parking spot slightly further, and still on dirt. So it is with opportunities in life.
        • The lesson here is that time is the limiting factor for perfection–instead of saying I will say yes to when I have the best option, set a deadline based on available resources, and say yes to the best option at the time of the deadline.
  • Decisiveness and Timidness
    • Timidness often results in disappointment, unproductiveness, inactivity, and depression.  Timidness is when you want something, or you have something to say, or there’s something you want to do, but you don’t get it because you’re too timid to do anything.  Given how almost nothing good comes from timidness, it will be wise to want to not be timid!
      • Timid is not the same as polite or respectful: I am not saying that you conquer timidness by simply reversing your behavior.  You still need to know when to speak up and when to stay quiet–however, when you do think it’s time to speak up and you do want to, do so: it is that case that I am referring to here, and in that case, conquer timidness.
    • Ambiguity introduces problems because you have nothing concrete to make decisions on.  Should I bring my swimsuit to the party?  If we are swimming, yes, if we are not, no.  If we are not sure….then I have to weigh regret and chance to make a gamble on what the best decision is.
      • Being decisive gives yourself and others concrete details with which to make decisions by.
      • Leadership: When it comes to a group, there needs to be a clear leader or leaders. All followers won’t work because no-one would make a decisive decision.  All leaders won’t work because no decisive decision can be made if there are disagreements, so little progress is made.  Both cause ambiguity which causes chaos and headaches from miscommunication and bad coordination.
    • Sources
      • Lack of confidence, which results in a lack of suggestions or actions.  Let’s look at the cases:
        • Case 1, you know the right thing to do.  Then it is to everyone else’s benefit that you tell them, so you are justified and being a good person by speaking up and deciding. If others disagree, then that’s fine, at least you tried.  If anything happens, talk it out.
        • Case 2, you don’t know the right thing to do.  Then all proposals are equally good, since if someone else knew the right thing, case 1 would happen.  Since having a decisive answer is better than ambiguity, put everyone out of their ambiguous misery and make a decision.  Worst case, talk it out.
      • Overly considerate: it’s good to serve and be accommodating, but not to the extreme where you don’t contribute any input or opinion, making it difficult for everyone else.  Examples:
        • If someone wants to know how much pizza to buy, and you ambiguously answer, then they don’t know how many slices to get–you are making it difficult on others, so just answer the question.
        • People put a few options up to a vote, and you are the tie breaker somehow.  Everyone knows that the process is democracy, and they have accepted whatever result occurs–they will not hold it against you for choosing something they don’t like because it’s not your one vote that caused it, it was everyone’s votes together.  Therefore, just make the choice.
        • If everyone is being overly considerate, then everyone is suffering from timidness and ambiguity: be the one to put them out of their misery.
      • Lack of self worth.
        • I usually presume I am the least desirable and least wanted person in the room. If I’m talking and someone else interrupts, I instantly give up the ground. I prioritize myself last, and see myself as a servant of the people–I see myself as a lower class citizen.
          • Recognize the context: is this true? If not, don’t act like it is.
          • If you feel this way when it’s not true, it is probably a habit built up by childhood. Overcome it (See Life Education Curriculum)!
  • Commensurate
    • Spend the appropriate amount of time based on how important or major the decision is.
      • I have a tendency to spend a lot of time on easy decisions to make myself feel better about life because it makes me feel empowered when I can take control of so many details, and very little time in difficult decisions so that I minimize the time spent feeling powerless and not in control.  This is a bad habit that results in sub-optimal spending of decision making energy, and results in sub-optimal decisions.
      • It is a waste when you overspend time, and irresponsible when you underspend. Practice to gain the experience to find the right balance
  • Spending
    • Unlike money, you cannot change the speed at which you spend time. Stinginess and the desire to save money are philosophies that also don’t apply to time: you cannot avoid spending it one minute at a time.  Too many people focus on learning how to save, but that mindset will not help you with time.  You can’t succeed in life by only knowing how to save: you must learn how to invest and spend wisely, at the fixed rate of 1440 minutes per day!
    • Understanding the Saving Mindset
      • Lack of spending can come from a lack of a sense of security–if you believe you’ll never get another something again, you will keep it and hold onto it, not letting go.  It is important to know the difference, however, between something irreplaceable and something replaceable.  Don’t overspend on preserving replaceable things, and don’t underspend preserving irreplaceable things.
      • Another possible reason is that you feel like the world owes you something, and so you mistake this individual transaction between you and another person as a relationship between you and the world–that you are justified in taking this item from this person.  This is inaccurate, and acting this way causes burnt bridges and lost friendships.
      • Financial goals: define a budget and a goal, don’t let it be a principle of saving as much as possible, because it causes you to be overly stingy all the time.  Having a budget and a financial goal takes away the stress and fear around money, and gives you a concrete detail with which to make decisions by, so there’s no ambiguity (and pain from it, see above).
        • Furthermore, few people like stingy people, and people usually remember the stingy person, and you don’t want to be known as that person.  It’s a waste of time, uncaring, mean, and builds a negative reputation.
    • I used to think sacrificing personal time was a noble thing to do, that it made me more important, because it implied I was doing work that was of such high priority that I must give my life to it.  Now I know it just means bad time management: it is foolish to damage your own health as a way to give yourself and your work more meaning.  Only do so if you actually need to.  Dedication is not measured in sacrifice.
    • Bankroll
      • A Bankroll is how much money a professional gambler sets aside for gambling, so that they don’t bet more than they can afford to lose.  You should use the same mindset for investing in life.
      • http://www.pokernews.com/strategy/bankroll-management-with-jonathan-little-part-1-8691.htm Be patient, level up slowly, after you’ve mastered the level you’re at, not before.
  • Taking Chances
    • You never know for sure if it’s going to work or not, until you try.  Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you know when it’s going to work: a lot of things are outside your control which can influence the outcome.  So get used to rejection and failure, or face the problems outlined above in timidness and ambiguity.
      • Let the other person say no: relationships, work, life, etc.  Don’t reject yourself before you are rejected: at least try.
    • Take smart risks–plan for and prepare to handle the downside.  See Handling Emotions and Problems next

Self Improvement: Part 1: Mindset and Logic, Part 2: Planning, Part 4: Motivation

External Resources

• How to Make Hard Choices by Ruth Chang (TED Talk) – explores the nature of choices.

To find out when more Life Education Curriculum (Self Improvement Section) is released, subscribe on the side! Follow on Twitter, on Facebook, on Google+, on Tumblr.

• Planning
  • Make Action Plans
    • When I cleared my schedule so that I controlled 100% of it, I realized I hit around 30% of my productivity goals, and the only things I ever got done were the ones I prioritized and committed to doing, because those were the only things I kept track of and had detailed plans with a time and date and location.  The others, a list of “I want to do this” but with no action plan, did not get done.
    • I also noticed that for my commitments, I would typically overshoot the planned time by 50%.  This is for two reasons, 1. I hadn’t learned to accurately predict how long tasks will take because I only just started, and 2. I never set END times.  I set a start, but no end, because I wanted flexibility.  However, the cost of this flexibility was the schedule was unreliable: depending on mood and chance, I’d get variable amounts of work done.
  • Defeats Laziness
    • People often blame laziness for why they don’t get things done.  This is a red herring that distracts from the truth: you set yourself up to trigger laziness and failure when you fail to plan ahead. In fact, not having a plan, is basically planning to be lazy and fail.
    • Example: I’m hungry, but I’m too lazy to cook, so now I’m going to scramble together a low quality meal, or eat out, or some other short term quick fix that isn’t ideal.  This entire scenario would be avoided if you had defined when you were going to eat, and, since you have that information, planned on when to begin preparing and cooking food so that it would be ready at the time you planned to eat.  Having a plan does two things: 1. If you know when you will eat, and you get hungry before that, you can tolerate the hunger because you know how long you will need to wait–in particular, you don’t let the hunger affect your decision making adversely (you make more rash decisions when hungry).  When you don’t know how long you have to wait because you don’t know what you’ll cook or how long it will take, then you will be uncomfortable from the hunger and try to get food asap.  2. If you know exactly what you need to do to prepare and cook the food, then executing is very easy: no frantic, time constrained, last minute thinking while uncomfortable due to hunger.  Instead, the whole process is smooth and comfortable because you planned well.  Planning weakens laziness.
    • Another way of looking at how effective planning is at solving laziness is as follows: When you don’t plan ahead, then you don’t have a solution when a problem arises, and so you try to come up with an easy, lazy way out because you want to solve your hunger asap, since the longer solution would be too much work and time.   When you do have a plan, then before the problem occurs, you already have the solution.  The problem is solved before it even happens–you cook or prepare the food and meal before you got hungry.  Thus, being too lazy to cook no longer becomes a problem.
    • I hope this lesson teaches you not only how to conquer laziness, but also some self awareness, and awareness of reality and how the world works, so you know to blame the “right” thing: planning, not laziness.
  • Deadlines
    • I used to have the false notion that deadlines imposed by society and school and other people were cruel and unnecessary.  Deadlines were cruel because they caused stress and punishment of some kind when failed to be met. I thought they were unnecessary because who cares when it gets done, can’t we just be more patient–why are we always in a hurry?  Hurry, I thought, is an artificial human creation: it’s just as good later as it is now.
    • However, I have since learned that deadlines are both necessary, and innocuous.  I learned it was necessary when I thought about food and water.  Having grown up poor, I got used to very erratic eating times, and my stomach learned to never be or feel hungry.  However, I took this too far when I would feel hungry, but be too lazy to get food (see planning above), so I’d use my ability to not feel hunger to my advantage and just not eat.  I ended up in the ER and I learned that there is a deadline for hunger.  In the existential sense, that experience taught me that there exists a legitimate reason for a deadline to exist, therefore shattering my prior belief of the contrary.  I thought about it more, and I realized food that I buy from the store has deadlines in the form of expiration dates.  Surely the food did not expire because it was cruel to me.  Therefore, I learned that deadlines are necessary, and innocuous.
      • Furthermore, as I became involved in more complex organizations where people had dependencies on other people, the importance of meeting deadlines became clearer: you are wasting other people’s time when you make them wait.  In business, the window of opportunity may pass if you wait.  This taught me that deadlines again don’t exist for cruelty, but rather for productivity.
    • I also learned that the stress and anxiety I felt surrounding deadlines was an emotional response that I was in control of, and that I should learn to manage.  It was my fault I felt the stress, not the deadline’s fault.
    • I hope this lesson teaches you awareness about reality: there’s no avoiding deadlines, so it’s time to learn to deal with them successfully (plan) and stress-free (Handle Emotions and Problems section below).
  • Procrastination
    • Is often caused by the stress and anxiety associated with work.  Let’s understand what’s going on if that’s the case: stress and anxiety prevents me from doing work, so I procrastinate.  Then, when the deadline approaches, I am legitimately stressed and anxious about finishing in time, classically conditioning stress and anxiety with working.  The cycle repeats.  (http://attemptedliving.com/2014/02/17/the-habits-you-will-form-in-life/)
    • Time Management
      • Solution: Plan ahead.  (See Planning:Defeats Laziness above)
      • I used to be someone who crammed as much as possible, up to the day of the test. I thought that was a sign of intelligence: that I was making the best use of the most amount of time compared with my competitors.  However, I now know it’s just a sign of poor time management–should have scheduled all my studying beforehand to reduce pressure on the day of the test, so that I can perform without stress and therefore perform more successfully.
    • (Decision Making: Limited Energy)
  • Commitments
    • Not only is this a signal of priority, but it is also how you ensure get things done, ensure reliability, security, comfort and peace of mind. It is easy to make commitments, but hard to keep them.
      • People often derive too much pleasure from the act of making a commitment, feeling a sense of responsibility and the success that comes with the commitment before they have followed through with it.  While it is nice to anticipate success, don’t let it distract you from the truth: you haven’t actually committed until push comes to shove, the time for action arises, and you stay true to your commitment.  “80% of life is showing up” – Woody Allen; similarly, we can say 80% of a commitment is actually doing it, 20% is making the commitment.
      • Often times you will write down items on a TODO list or a planner, and end up with a mighty long list.  You could rank them by priority, but there’s no certainty as to how far down the list you’ll get.  Making a commitment to a reasonable and realistic number of items ensures that those items will get done for sure, allowing you and those who are depending on you, some peace of mind.
    • Another impressive benefit gained from making commitments is that you manage and reduce your time wasted being indecisive and having self doubt.  Example: An activity is offered once a week for 10 weeks.
      • 1. If you commit to only one week at a time, you have to spend time thinking about the decision to commit, 10 times.  If you commit to all 10 weeks, then you spend 10 times less time thinking about the decision.
      • 2. If you commit to only one week at a time, every week you might question whether this commitment was a good idea or not, and this self doubt will waste time and energy you could spend on better things like improving your life or being happy.
        • This is particularly important because when you’re embarking on long term projects or goals, the incremental progress that you make during the execution is difficult to notice.  For the same reason you don’t notice your friend’s hair growing if you see them every day, but you do notice a change if you see them months apart with a new hairstyle, you won’t notice your skill or project improvements until after many weeks.  Thus, you must commit and follow through with the full 10 weeks, or else you will have quit because you felt like you haven’t made any progress, even though you were actually on the path to achieving your goal.
      • 3. Also, when you only commit one week at a time, it becomes very easy to not finish the activity, because you can stop anytime.  If you’ve committed to 10 weeks, then the risk of quitting is lower than before.
    • When you think about things at a larger timescale, on the order of weeks or months instead of days, you can plan for and achieve bigger things, which is exciting.
  • Habits
    • Committing to a habit is the most powerful and timeless commitment you can make.  Committing to a habit means you develop a habit, and consciously don’t let it be changed.  3 advantages are
      • 1. You get it done, even when you don’t feel like it, because you automatically do it out of habit.
      • 2. You waste less time being indecisive: the decision was made when you built the habit.
      • 3. You worry less about quitting, because it will take more effort to quit than to continue.
    • http://attemptedliving.com/2014/02/26/build-a-habit-app-android

This post is part of AttemptedLiving’s Life Education Curriculum, a collection of core knowledge everyone should have.

Self Improvement: Part 1: Mindset and Logic and Part 3: Decision Making

To find out when those posts, and other life education writing, are released, subscribe on the side! Follow on Twitter, on Facebook, on Google+, on Tumblr.

• Exercise: Describe yourself honestly.  Great, now go through the list, and begin working on the ones you want to, one by one.  Beware, there is no simple answer to anything–you must make a judgment call based on the context.
  • Bad traits to have: unorganized, unfocused, uncommitted, inconsistent.
• Mindset and Logic
  • Excuses only have power if you give it to them. It is a defeatist mentality, and a denial of the reality that you can do something about it. Find out what you can do about it and do it.  Something you can’t do anything about isn’t an excuse, it’s an obstacle to overcome.
  • Blame: I used to place blame on external forces outside of my control, since if I didn’t play a part in causing them, what responsibility do I have over it?  However, I have since learned that it is to my advantage to learn how to predict, respond to and manage external forces.  Furthermore, I have learned that some external forces, I can actually make them go away by ignoring or denying their influence because for some, it’s my choice to let them in.  Figuring out which you can do that for, takes life experience.  Try saying no, and if the external factor forces its way back in, then you know you can’t ignore it.
  • If you always make an exception, then it’s no longer an exception but a habit.
  • “First thing tomorrow” never works unless you are actually someone who is productive in the morning.  Do it now, or schedule it for when you personally are most productive–afternoon, evening, night, etc.
  • Teamwork
    • Learning this is going to be one of the most important lessons of your life: When and how to delegate and ask for help, so you have a team support you rather than go solo.  “If you want to go quickly, go alone, if you want to go far, go together.”
      • Practice.  Resources to be written later.
  • Patience
    • Sometimes we become frustrated when we see ourselves repeating a bad habit we want to change.  However, it is important to understand that even if you make the same decision as before, being aware of it is the first step towards fixing the problem.  Being aware in the moment of the decision is the next step.  Then being aware, and sometimes making the right decision is the next step.  Then, with continued focus and experience, you build the habit that you want to have. The key to it all is to be conscious of your reality, and what you can do about it. That is what this section is about. Once you become self aware, then you can choose to change or stay the same.  (The Stages of Correcting a Bad Habit)
    • You also need to realize that the world changes slowly, and no matter how hard you try, or how much time and resources you spend on something in the short term, there are many things that can only achieved over a long period of time, so you must wait and be patient.
  • Corrections
    • When you make corrections, do so at the schedule level.  You should be thinking about commitments and habits within the long term, not about each particular incident of a commitment or habit–that’s inaccurate.  From statistics, we know that anecdotal evidence can skew reality and having too few data points makes the data unreliable and our decisions made on that unreliable data, risky.
    • When you do think about each particular incident, be sure to include sufficient context: what were all the events and factors leading up to the incident that might have played a role?  If you’re good at tennis in the afternoon, but bad at it in the evening, it might be because you get drunk during dinner, not because you’re not good in the evening.
    • Again: don’t mistake an individual event for a cause of a particular outcome: it was the entire process leading up to it.  So deal with chunks, a schedule, and make revisions to the whole schedule when appropriate.
  • Quality
    • Quality does not necessarily go up with [investment of] time.  A professional chef or tennis player can do something extremely difficult, very quickly.  Quality goes up with a combination of skill and time.  Don’t fall into the trap of throwing time at a problem or task, thinking that will increase the quality: if you don’t have the skills, you could take forever and never finish.  Instead, know when you’ve reached your limit, and move on to another task to get more experience and practice, which translates into greater skill.  http://attemptedliving.com/2014/02/04/what-is-skill-talent-potential-smart-intelligence/
    • Sprints – Burst based investments strategy of time and energy
      • Pro: You get a lot of work done in a short amount of time.  Con: you miss out on compound interest if you space it out too far.  A little bit every week for 10 weeks pays dividends with less effort, headache, and stress than 1 week of overkill work.
      • Skills decay.  Unlike in stocks, where compound interest can grow without your input, skills must be maintained and kept sharp–you must feed it like a plant.  Neglect will kill it.  After the 1 week of overkill, your skills will decay over the next 9 weeks so that when you start again on the 11th week, you won’t be as good as someone who worked weekly.
  • Focus
    • The reality is, you can’t have everything.  Trying to fit 20 ounces into a 16 ounce bottle is futile: you’re playing a game that you’re guaranteed to lose.  Don’t waste your life.  Instead, pick a focus, and you’ll at least get that one thing done.
    • On quantity: From a strategy point of view: Strategy A is to try to get too many things, say 10 things, done and fail.  Strategy B is to try to do a reasonable amount of things, say 5, and succeed.  Repeating Strategy A will be repeating failure.  Repeat Strategy B twice and you will have achieved the 10 things.
    • On Quality: Don’t get distracted by other things–you need to get all your frequent flier miles on the same airline.  If you practice a year of tennis, a year of violin, a year of science, you probably won’t achieve the quality of someone who put all three years into one activity.

This post is part of AttemptedLiving’s Life Education Curriculum, a collection of core knowledge everyone should have.

Self Improvement:  Part 2: Planning and Part 3: Decision Making

To find out when those posts, and other life education writing, are released, subscribe on the side! Follow on Twitter, on Facebook, on Google+, on Tumblr.