Murphy-jitsu for today

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 want to eat just 1 packet of Joylent today.
• I have to go to the dentist.
• I am organizing a Rationality Zurich meetup tonight.

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:

• Go to work, skip Milliway’s (name of cafe at Google’s ZRH-BRA-110 site where I work), sit at desk, make some Joylent, break fast.
• I will count how much Joylent is there left in my Joylent box, and probably order more.
• If I feel overwhelmed and need some quiet, go to a nap room and have a nap.
• What do I plan to work on today, actually…?
  • There is a task that I could get fully handed off to me from my teammate, and when that’s done, that will give me a nice chunk of useful work to do.
• If I notice I’m working on some refactoring, I’ll go sit on a couch and think about whether there’s something more useful I could be doing.
  • There’s at least one minor change I could make in another teammate’s project.
• In the afternoon, I’m going to the dentist.
• At 18:00, I am leaving work to go back home.
• Before the Rationality Zurich meetup, I’ll unwind and think about whether there’s some cool thing we could be doing today.

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