I've experimented a bit with what makes me more effective at getting stuff done while staying sane, with more failures than successes. Here is one thing that works for me: schedule as little as possible. At first it seems like a terrible idea because in lieu of a clear agenda you tend to just do the first thing that grabs your attention, and can ( Read more... )

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Pushing some prior epiphanies a little further:

* Akrasia is something of a cognitive illusion in the same way that all negative concepts are: it's not a lack of will to power but rather being overpowered by something that's introspectively opaque to us. The upshot is that you overcome it by focusing on something else in the short term -- or in ( Read more... )

"The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called spannungsbogen -- which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing."
-- from The Wisdom of Muad'Dib by the Princess Irulan
Take a random sample of a few hundred 4-year-olds. Put them in a room with a marshmallow on a plate and some ( Read more... )