Goals

I need to do a better job setting goals for myself and keeping them. I've decided to start using beeminder to keep track of a few things that I do while not at my computer, and rescuetime to help me track what I do do at my computer. Beeminder says that most of the goals people set with it are "Do more" type goals. I should probably make a few more of those, but my natural tendencies that I feel the most need to combat tend to fall in the do less category. (Actually, "measure more" might be a better description of what I should be doing than "do less" since simply keeping track of how much I do of a given activity seems to help me dramatically cut back on it. But I'm measuring for the sake of doing less.) Unfortunately, I think beeminder defaults to saying that I did zero of something if I don't enter data, so the easiest way for me to cheat with "do less" goals is simply to stop entering data. That might be one of the reasons that the other type of goals tend to be more popular, at least it might explain differences in repeat users. People are probably more likely to keep track of their goals if failing to track them results in presumed failure rather than presumed success.

I want to go to bed at midnight, get up at six, and get eight hours of sleep a night. I know that this is impossible, but each of these goals seem plausible to me. Six seems like the right time to get up. Midnight seems like the right time to go to bed, and eight hours of sleep seems like the right amount of sleep (and of the three, getting enough sleep will probably will have the biggest impact on my long term quality of life).

This is one of the reasons I like "do less" goals. Spend less time sleeping sounds like a really bad goal, but I think a lot of "do more" goals implicitly include something like "spend less time sleeping." The hard part about setting better priorities is figuring out what to cut, just like the hard part of budgeting is figuring out what not to buy. But sometimes, something is obviously extravagant. I spend an extravagant amount of time showering and eating breakfast right now. I'm unemployed right now -- working on my own projects. -- so, for now, I don't have enough pressure to finish things quickly in the mornings unless I keep track of exactly what I'm doing. However, my tendency to take longer than necessary showers and spend a lot longer than necessary eating breakfast began at my last job. I ate breakfast at my desk, which was probably a bad idea, because multitasking actually reduces efficiency, but in my last few months before I quit, improving efficiency at my desk ceased to be something I was trying to do. The worse thing was that I started taking showers after I got home from work because starting work on time without getting up earlier than necessary conflicted with spending an extravagant amount of time in the shower. Those are my first two beeminder goals. I'm going to wait until I gather more data from using rescuetime to figure out what my goals should be with regard to the time I spend at my computer.

I don't really have a good sense for how much time I spend doing what while at my computer. Once I have a better feel for that, hopefully, I will see that a few particular uses of my time seem particularly over-represented relative to what I would consider optimal. Most of the ways in which I use the computer are ways which I would consider productive, just like showering and eating breakfast are things I would consider productive. I basically use it to read, write, and occasionally to code. All of which are things that I think I should be doing. I would consider reading the news to be one of the least productive forms of reading that I can do, unless I am specifically reading with an eye for figuring out what makes some particular journalist particularly appealing to a general audience (e.g. reading Mitch Album way back when he was still a sports columnist would have been productive reading for any aspiring writer). I never read the news this way, so it's unlikely to do me much good. What benefit do I derive by following political scandals? I suppose if I were commentating on them, I could argue that I'm doing research, but I'm not doing that either. In contrast, reading smart people make informed judgments about the world seems like a very productive use of my time, especially if they use statistics to do it. Similarly, reading people who write well seems like a good use of my time to me (since I am aspiring to become a writer). If I had to explain what is wrong with Kant in a single sentence, I would say that Kant was a philosopher who spent more time writing down his own ideas than he spent reading other people's. Reality doesn't actually work the way Kant imagined it, so his philosophy is irrelevant at best and damaging in the usual case. People learn by practice, but people also learn by watching, listening, and changing their minds. What you learn be practice is relevant only to the extent that what you've learned by watching, listening, and changing your mind has led you in a good direction.

That said, I think that the best learning is also oriented. The world holds way more information than anyone can learn in one lifetime and the amount of information in it is growing exponentially. Because of the growth, even achieving immortality wouldn't solve the learning problem. I can learn mandarin, I've spent a few hours starting to do so, but is learning Mandarin actually a good use of my time? Probably not. There's practically nothing that I am well-suited to do in my current state that I would come to be better-suited to do simply by speaking Mandarin fluently. And speaking Mandarin fluently really isn't a useful skill in isolation either. If I find myself in a business role that has me traveling to China (or Singapore!) regularly, it probably will make some amount of sense for me to resume studying Mandarin. I would somewhat like to do that... but not so strongly that I should put a major emphasis on studying it right now. So that's a useless thing for me to learn (at present) that I have (correctly) quit learning (for now).

I'm also really interested in biology and somewhat interested in nutrition and medicine. Is this a useful subject for me to continue reading about? At present, the answer is also "no." It would be a useful subject for me to read about if I were doing something with that information. I'd like to eventually write about biology. If I want to write about biology eventually, I should probably start by writing about it before I have anything particular that I'm trying to say -- just reading and reacting to what I read. Doing so would allow me to orient my learning and practice what I want to be doing in a way that leads to increase in a relevant skill.

Similarly, I've always been fairly interested in business, finance, and investing. If I'm going to spend time reading about finance and investing, I think I also need to spend more time writing about it and linking back to what I have read.

I'm thinking of splitting my blog into several more topics so that I can better keep track of what I'm doing, and keep my thoughts sorted into neater categories, if I start taking this approach. Eventually, I'm also going to want to write things that increase my ability to draw an audience to my writing. Hopefully, I can start to do that by the end of this year, but I don't want to put energy into that particular endeavor until I've got something finished that I want to be drawing an audience towards. In particular, I want to finish writing the book that I've set as my highest priority, before I begin seeking to draw an audience to my writing (by posting on forums and online magazines that let me direct an audience back to my other writings).

So I'm going to orient my endeavors. For now, I think I should down-regulate my interest in biology. I won't resume that interest until I've made substantial progress in the other areas I'm discussing below.

Becoming a good investor seems like the best path to long term success in this world. I think I should maintain and probably even increase my interest in that. If I do that, it should also become a good topic for me to write about, which means that I should create a new blog devoted to investing, where I keep track of my thoughts in relationship to investment ideas, specific and general (and constantly remind any hypothetical readers that no matter how much my opinions sound like advise, they are simply opinions and not investment advice).

Another interest I should probably maintain is my interest in coding, because, honestly, I'll probably have to get a job in software development again once I finish writing my book. It's what I'm most qualified to do at the moment, and it's a career path for which there is also a lot of demand. I might or might not have anything to say about that before I do re-enter the workforce. Once I do, I want to start posting to Bad Code Considered Harmful again, at least twice a month.

I think I also should continue to read and review books. In fact, I should probably make reviewing books that I've already read a higher priority than it is now. I'll plan to write one book review today, and to make maintaining that blog a higher priority than maintaining Informed Dissent, at least while I can still think of books that I really ought to review. (Most of my books are unfortunately in storage in Chicago, and I'm living with my dad in Pennsylvania, so I might need to hold off on reviewing some of them until then, but I've read a lot of my dad's books and most of the books that I have with me, so I should be able to write at least fifty reviews before I run out of books that I have on hand.)

Informed Dissent is going to be where I keep track of everything that doesn't fit well into other broad categories of life and thoughts. It's going to mostly deal with behavior optimization, writing about writing, everyday life, plans, and responses to things that I read on the internet that don't fit into any of my other categories. It's going to be about those things because that's what I naturally do write about a lot of the time, not necessarily because it's what I should write about. But I do think that most of those topics are worthy of some focus, so I don't feel the need to get rid of them. By themselves, none of them are particularly useful. Writing should for the most part be about something worth saying -- writing about writing makes a lot more sense in the context of also writing other things well than it does when someone only writes about writing. Similarly, behavior optimization without using that behavioral optimization to accomplish other things makes practically no sense.

Finally, I need to finish my book (which I'm not discussing in more detail because I always get more nervous about writing it -- and my progress slows -- after I discuss it in detail). I did make progress on it yesterday. I didn't end up trying to write a bad version of each of the places I'm stuck. When I read one of those sections to refresh in my mind what I should be doing, something clicked just enough for me to continue working on the real version of that section. Hopefully, the same happens again today!

(And now, in keeping with my new tradition, I must edit this document.)