Finished another Peterson’s lecture (see Jordan Peterson, Personality #6: Jean Piaget & Constructivism). Nothing new, but the value of those lectures lies largely in providing a set of prompts to think about, plus occasionally mentioning interesting things to research later (like Jungian “Shadow”). This one didn’t disappoint.

Did seven Yoda timers. You can spy on my progress at artyomkazak/yoda on Beeminder. The idea is that if I will do 7–10 of those every day, I will eventually build a habit of setting a timer for any non-trivial action (solving a task, googling something, unloading the dishwasher, thinking through a problem). All of those become easier with a timer, and thinking in particular improves qualitatively – I can’t generate almost any thoughts without a timer, for some reason.

Read through Alexey Guzey’s “Every productivity thought I’ve ever had, as concisely as possible”. I like how he says right from the start “Every productivity system stops working eventually and there’s nothing you can do about it” – that’s something everybody kinda knows but I’ve never seen it spelled explicitly. That post specifically wasn’t particularly useful, but the author is LW-aligned and has written several pretty dense posts that I haven’t had the time to read carefully yet, but should – e. g. “How to make friends over the internet”. Looks like a cool person overall.

Figured out how to turn off the sound for mobile notifications while still leaving call ringtones on. The magic trick is the “None” setting for notification sounds (Android, MIUI). I expected there to be a more obvious “mute/unmute” setting somewhere, but no. Now I will maybe stop missing literally all phone calls.

Spent whole two hours writing an email and not getting distracted. It remains to be seen whether not getting distracted is as useful as it seems it could be. I will keep you updated.