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Murphy-jitsu for today

Posted on 2018-03-14

An experiment in writing out and publishing my Murphy-jitsu for today. I have put this in as a reminder for the last ~5 days. The implementation so far has been just “grab a tablet and plan out the day, without real Murphy-jitsu”. Let’s see what happens if I give it some more structure.

What am I planning to do today?

I need to remember around 13:00 that I have the dental appontment, and to go home by ~18:00 so I am around by the time people start appearing. Let’s set an alarm at 13:00 and 18:00. Done.

The way eating just 1 packet of Joylent might go wrong is:

I feel frustrated and tired and depresssed sitting at my desk, and I default to going for a snack.

What has helped me avoid such situations the last ~5 days was instead going to a sleep pod and having an hour or so of sleep.

I feel annoyed by the feeling of hunger, and also I have slight heartburn for some reason. It would be nice to solve both of those.

Yesterday, I decided to work on implementing a new system. Let this be one step. But still, there’s things which I am not working on towards today. Like maybe getting some exercise to burn off more calories, and I am also not doing anything about my master’s thesis. Part of me feels a bit annoyed, but I think it’s actually fine that I’m not doing anything about those things today. I have a full-time job, a dentist appointment and a meetup in the evening.

I feel that there’s more I could be doing as the current organizer of Rationality Zurich. Maybe there needs to be some soul-searching. I currently don’t actively care as much about rationality-as-actively-trying-to-believe-true-things. Good things I like are tribe-type feelings and what could help could be accountability and goal-setting and stuff. However, those things are pretty different from epistemic-rationality things some rationalists do, like explicitly betting on beliefs. After I arrive home, I could see if I can come up with some cool thing people could do at today’s meetup.

Actually a good thing would be building a scaffolding of “you can always do better than you are doing and that’s a thing to celebrate”.

So, plan for today:

Intentions are entered into Complice, and I can look over them in the evening to see how things went.