Paper Lifehacks (Sabbatical Month 1)

[Reminder: My Patreon's still paused! You weren't charged last month, and won't be until March 1st, 2021]

(reading time: 7 min)

Hi you – I sincerely hope you're staying safe, now that many countries are in a Covid 2nd (or 3rd) wave. It's good that the previous measures bought us time for better treatments, so it's less deadly than the 1st wave, but still... this sucks.

Anyway, first month of my first-ever "sabbatical"!

This sabbatical is a chance for me to rearrange my life to be more eudaimonistically balanced or whatever. At first I thought, "I need to cut down on work, to make time for love and learning". But after recording what I actually do each day, hour by hour, it turns out what's eating my work & life is just plain ol' procrastination.

Which seems like a first-world problem (and it is), but here's the back-of-napkin math that made me realize how poisonous procrastination really is:

Let's say you procrastinate ~3 hours a day, on average. Blogs, news, whatever. Out of 24 hours, that's 1/8 of a day. If this stays a lifelong habit, that's 1/8 of your life. With an average life expectancy of 80 years, that's 10 years of your life stolen, by attention-economy pickpockets.

Yeah no pressure.

So, once again, I'm trying to trick myself into being a better person. I don't mean "productivity" – that's too work-focused, I'm aiming for a full human life. So let's call these... "lifehacks".

Here's three paper-based lifehacks:

1) Ritual Reward Dispenser

(can't see GIF? try here)

We've all had a self-help guru ring our doorbell asking, "Have you accepted Daily Rituals into your heart?" And as you shut the door they say, "Did you know Immanuel Kant woke every day at 5 AM, drank tea, meditated, then–"

Anyway I've joined the Daily Ritual cult. To help me keep up a ritual, I made this box – pull the tab to go through a list of tasks, then get rewarded with 100% dark chocolate! 🍫

I was inspired by Mike Boyd's Dopamine Box: it's a device that lets him flip a series of switches – one for each daily task – and when all switches are flipped it plays a lil' animation.

I loved how satisfying to use it looked. But 1) I don't know how to make electronics, and 2) I'm greedy and want a bigger reward. Hence, chocolate.

(Later I'll write a tutorial on how to make this box, but you can guess. It's just a cardstock box with a hole outside & paper tray inside.)

However, this box only works for set rituals, at set times of the day. For more flexible self-guidance, I used...

2) When-Then Flashcards

Here's how a When-Then card works. The front asks me to vividly imagine a scenario:

And the back has an action – which I'll also vividly imagine – that I want to take in that scenario:

These cards are a mix of 3 techniques. Scientific rigor is important, so here's those techniques, in descending order of empirical robustness:

1) Spaced Repetition, a simple way to remember things long-term. The spacing & testing effects are two of the most robust, replicated findings from cognitive science. I will eat a hat if Spaced Repetition turns out to be bunk. (See Table 4 of this meta-analysis. Here's a layperson-friendly summary.)

2) Implementation Intentions, or "When-Then" plans. (Meta-analysis: Replicated by independent researchers, with decent sample sizes & small-to-medium main effects. So, I'm 90% sure it's not just a p-hacked mass delusion like social priming was.)

3) Mental Imagery, popular in sports & motor training. However, a lot of the studies' sample sizes seem suspiciously small, and I don't know if imagery's benefits (if any) transfer to habits or emotions. It makes sense intuitively, and it's near-zero-cost, but take it with a shaker of salt.

Credit due: it was Michael Nielsen's essay and Andy Matuschak's notes that made me realize you could use Spaced Repetition not just for memorizing facts, but also for personal growth via self-programming!

For example, a behavioral micro-habit:

An emotion-regulation habit:

A critical thinking habit:

Or even a meta-habit:

With the Ritual Box & When-Then cards combined, I've been significantly better (though far from perfect) at staying attentive, and using each hour of my life more intentionally.

However, habits & rituals are the nitty-gritty. Sometimes you want to zoom out from the trees, to see the forest... or even the whole earth.

3) Whole Life Journal

This book will contain a record of my entire life, on a week-to-week basis.

Each page is split into 14 rows by 2 columns, so that each page has 28 cells, and each two-page spread has 56 cells.

The first four pages mark the years of my life, up to 112 years. Each completed year has a small summary of the most personally important events that year. My life's 25% complete: (redacted for privacy)

The rest of the book contains a week-by-week summary for each year, on each two-page spread. 13 weeks(!) 'til the end of 2020:

I've been doing the Whole Life Journal for a month now. Three notes:

1) I still get a sense of vertigo knowing this tiny book, weighing less than a kilogram, will contain my entire life in such granular detail.

2) Seeing the journal count down the remaining weeks of the year, and remaining years of my life... helps remind me of my priorities. I don't believe in "death makes life meaningful" (that's like saying divorce makes love meaningful – life & love are already meaningful) but knowing I have a literal deadline is... a heckuva fire under one's ass.

3) No life-changing insights yet! But I've only used it for a month. Maybe by the end of 2020, seeing all my weeks in juxtaposition will reveal patterns in the forest of my life, that I couldn't see down in the underbrush.

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We'll see if these paper lifehacks actually work long-term! If you're inspired to try one of the projects above, let me know how it goes! :)

What else I did last month:

• Safely visited other Canadian cities to move to. Ottawa is gorgeous and the air's so clean! Plus, after living in dense cities all my life, maybe it's time I try living in a "small town". I'll probably move after the pandemic. If any of you are in Ottawa, let me know!
  
• Started learning AI with two free, interactive textbooks:
  • FastAI (co-written by Jeremy Howard, now famous for his early #MasksForAll advocacy) and
  • Neural Networks and Deep Learning (by Michael Nielsen, who's done all kinds of amazing work, including in explorable explanations/"tools for thought")
    
• Read a bunch of papers. Most were okay. However, there's one I highly recommend, especially if you're into math education: A Mathematician's Lament by Paul Lockhart (2002). It's not a new argument – and "pure" discovery learning turned out to be flawed after all – but the Lament is so passionate, so poetic, with so many actual-laugh-out-loud passages, I can't help but fall in love with it.
  
• I used my UV-mapping-with-paper-towels technique to design a felt glove with clay claws:

It's for... uh... "Halloween". Yeah. Yeah let's go with that.

Also, some stuff I'll do this month:

• Keep practicing AI, drawing, and voice feminization.
  
• Finally learn basic first-aid. Last night, I hugged my housemate's husky and exclaimed I WUV YOU and she bit my face. The wound's 1.5 inches long. I'm fine: cut's shallow & she's had her shots.
  
  Still! About dang time I actually learned how to do first-aid – (did you know you're NOT supposed to clean superficial wounds with alcohol or peroxide?) – instead of smearing blood on my keyboard while frantically looking up instructions.
  
  Up next: Nicky's "cute anime girl with face scar" look...
  
• Last week I discovered a crazy idea. Like, almost P = NP crazy. If I'm right, it's a mechanical computer that a child could make out of cardboard that solves the NP-Complete SAT problem – and thus every NP problem, like breaking public-key encryption – in constant time. And not via exponential parallelism: its space complexity is linear.
  
  I doubt it'll really work, but I've been obsessing over it for a week and I can't see why it shouldn't work. I'll publish an essay about it this month. (With layperson-friendly explanations of time/space complexity, natural computing, etc)
  
  I'm usually open with my work but this time I'm actually paranoid about getting scooped. So, here's an MD5 hash of the idea's outline, to say "dibs", should I be scooped: C0FD20B65B51423D670D9A63D3CB324D
  
  If all the bitcoin gets stolen this month I promise it's not me. I don't have that much cardboard.

Anyway, that's all I got! Let me know if you try any of the Paper Lifehacks, or if you have your own keep-self-on-track techniques that you recommend I try.

Stay safe! And if you're American, go check if your state allows early voting!

💖,
~ Nicky