1. Empirically, I always start a semester well and then deteriorate, so in future semesters the rational strategy is to front-load the work however much I can. A good experiment here would be to just spend the first month getting as far ahead in the material as I'm able.

2. It's of the utmost importance that I spend the first several hours of the ( Read more... )

". . . boldness alone is not yet exploration unless it is coupled with a critical sense. . . . the more we learn to look at the individual and particular work of art as the work of skilled hands and great minds in response to concrete demands, the more we shall teach authority that what the artist needs is not more myth or more propaganda, but ( Read more... )

Here, near as I can tell, is Neil Fiore's core insight: that you have to be productive to feel productive, not the other way around. You can give yourself the short-term illusion of productive behavior by doing pseudo-work, cargo cult style, but in the medium-term your brain is not so stupid that it won't catch on to the lack of efficacy of your ( Read more... )

I've been slow to appreciate just how valuable the hours from 6 - 11am are. They exert a disproportionate influence over my estimation of how good the day was -- if those first few hours have gone superbly I can handle bad turns later in the day way, way more constructively than I otherwise would. With this in mind I've prudently declared them a no ( Read more... )

( theory and practice )

"If you're like me . . . you tend to think that the way to motivate yourself is to make yourself feel worse about something. The secret is not to make yourself feel worse and . . . not to create a sense of peril which makes you nervous . . . instead, how do you create a sense of safety, and how do you say to yourself: what do I have to do make this ( Read more... )

Cory Doctorow has some writing advice (via patrissimo). Most of it is good, and the first point about having a "short, regular work schedule" echoes this earlier post, though I push the logic a little further than he does and am not so hung up on regularity. But I wanted to pluck out the two that, for my money, were the most important because they struck me ( Read more... )

I begin to think the best strategy is to treat deadlines like they don't exist. One might dryly remark that I do this in any case, but it's not really true -- and I would point to my rising cortisol levels as they approach as evidence, if I had the convenient measuring means. The procrastinator is in fact so painfully aware of impending deadlines ( Read more... )

"We cannot think first and act afterward. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought."
-- Alfred North Whitehead "Religion and Science" (1925)

Colin complains that most people's resolutions are too airy-fairy and don't come with measurable benchmarks. There's something to this, but his ( Read more... )

Merlin Mann's simple idea of creating an e-mail DMZ as the first step to getting yourself out of a hole is one of those "duh" pieces of advice that seems obvious in retrospect, but almost nobody pokes their head up and looks around often enough to notice and say it. Just taking all the stuff that's giving you a chronic low-level sense of being ( Read more... )