My 2016 was not a great year; though mostly not for the news that people were upset over. Really, 2016 was a time with a massive amount of mental noise, and it debilitated me. I was unable to make progress on my projects, even though I was constantly distracted by the question of what I should do for them, and I ended up spending nearly every evening with me unintentionally consuming media. Sometimes, I even caught myself—me!, who couldn’t be bothered to buy anything unless the old one had already been long broken!—purchasing things with real money to get a little rush.

Near the end of that year, I saw two videos. One was a talk about getting distracted; near the end, it asked the audience members to consider an image with one box for each week in their life. The other was an explanation of the Human Era Calendar. I was ready to put as much distance between myself and 2016 as possible (say, 10001 years), but though I agreed with the main thrust of the enumerate-your-days video, I didn’t feel up to that exact task.

Inception

So I bought the calendar—the first I’ve ever bought—and decided that, starting in 12017, I would take a moment in the evening to write down anything I had done that day that was important to me. That could be working on my personal projects, organizing the house, running a batch of errands, helping my family through sickness, and so on. Basically the only thing that I’ve ended up not recording is when I accidentally consume. If I decide “I want to play some video games today” and I play them, or “I want to watch a classic movie I haven’t seen yet” and I watch it, then I write that down—recreation is important after all—but if I land at home not knowing what to do next and just click into youtube by instinct, then that doesn’t count.

I am the worst person in the world at keeping a journal. I’ve had to keep them for school assignments before, and I think the longest I’ve ever lasted was two days. Somehow, this resolution is one I’ve managed to keep: I have written down everything important I’ve done this year. This means I have a ton of qualitative data I don’t know what do do with, but I’ll come back to that later.

The immediate thing I’ve noticed is that I am far more intensional with my time this year. I know that at night I’ll have to look at my calendar, and might have to see days with nothing written down, and know that I spent that day wasting my time on Earth. However, I also get to look at the calendar and see that I mostly do something every day. Without even noticing, I have silenced the part of my brain that wonders whether I have worth in the world: the data shows that I do.

Development

There was one time when the system failed me. In early April I fell sick, and did nothing but recuperate for a week, which is perfectly understandable. Unfortunately, even once I was feeling better I still didn’t do much of anything for over a month, with my brain using my recent illness as an excuse. The existential dread ended up feeling worse than the original having-to-stay-in-bed part of being sick.

What got me out of my funk was a change of gears. I had a vacation planned soon, and I always bring a book¹ with me on vacation. On a whim, I decided to bring Algorithms to Live By, and it sucked me in. The main lesson for me was that I learned how to better organize a to-do list. Once I got back, I immediately set to work making a program to perform this (relatively number-heavy) organization for me. In addition to being a well-defined task where I could achieve flow, the to-do list ended up making it easier for me to decide what to do with any given day: simply look at the top few things in my system.

Even this to-do list is not perfect, and I’ve had to add in additional systems. In particular, I noticed that there’s no good way to handle repeating tasks in my to-do system. Since implementing that feature would take a while², I’ve added a reminder app called Regularly for these things. It’s chill enough that I don’t feel pressured by it, but useful enough to have altered the operation of my brain. I no longer use brainpower to remember the last time I went for a walk, for example, because the app just tells me when it’s time.

Another system I added was an everyday-carry notebook. It’s a three-ring (i.e. refillable) notebook about³ A5 size with a pen loop. If I have an idea that doesn’t fit nicely into a to-do system or into a computer, I can write that idea down on paper. I’ve further adopted a policy of one page per idea, and I don’t use the back of sheets; this way I can get an overview of all the ideas by spreading them out on a desk and rearranging them. To maintain the notebook, I added a weekly garbage-collection system where I go through what I’ve written down and move things either into the trash or into a more publishable format. As a corollary, I’ve also set up a place on my computer for programming ideas, and these are also garbage-collected weekly.

By November, I noticed the system slipping slightly, and I wasn’t getting much done that wasn’t in Regularly. Thankfully, my calendar has noticed this, as two weeks are nearly blank. I therefore introduced a “day plan” system. As it happened, I had ordered some Tomoe River paper because I’d heard strange things about it, but it’s not very useful as filler paper in my notebook. However, it is large enough⁴ to comfortably fit a week’s work of daily plans on one side. I therefore added a “Plan Day” task to Regularly to trigger when I get home from work, and that gets me to think more proactively about using my day.

Analysis

This year, I’ve made progress on organization, cleanliness, productivity, mental health, and on feeling fulfilled⁵. Despite not having hard, empirical evidence, I think that these results must be due to my growing system. Unfortunately, another human can’t simply transplant my system onto themself and expect it to work. Precisely because people face different challenges, even simple systems like to-do apps come in innumerable flavors. Even my future self is a different person with different problems, and will require different systems, so I expect the systems to continue to change and grow. Nevertheless, I think there are principles that could help another person to create their own system.

Your life is finite

The sooner you realize that everything that is “you” will eventually be packed into a box, the sooner you can start choosing what to do with the time that is given to you.

The purpose of a human life is to design a life it wants to live

This one is from CGP Grey, and although it sounds absurdly circular, it may be the only answer to existential dread that the physical world might be all there is. Note especially that design is a serious discipline: i.e. designs have meaningful consequences. Spend the time to think critically about the design of your life and what it is that makes that design good or bad.

Conscious action

An important part of any system for self-improvement is to have your decisions become conscious where they were previously forced on you by your habits and environment. You probably already know what is good or bad, but if you aren’t asked to think about it, it’s very easy to end up choosing the bad way.

Situationalism

Humans are mostly driven by their environment rather than their internal attributes. It is thus no use saying you wish to get better; you must create situations that encourage yourself to strive for betterment.

Humans are memetic creatures

Humans are animals, and so to serve as a habitat for our genes we have biological needs. However, what makes us special may be our incredible capacity to serve as habitats for ideas, so it should be no suprise that we also have memetic needs. Just as animals must eat, sleep, deal with waste, and breed, humans must read, rest, discard low-quality ideas, and educate.

Make the robot do the work

Human time extremely valuable, so use machines to perform menial tasks where possible. A particular sore spot is bookkeeping your actions: what order to do tasks in, what ideas you would like to develop, what you have agreed to do on any particular day, &c. Machines are a double-edged sword, however; make sure the machines you use are actually pointing you towards your goals instead of similar-seeming goals you don’t want to accomplish.

I don’t want to state exactly what I will do in the following year, since that has a tendency to lock-in plans instead of goals—and as we know, planning is essential but plans are useless. The fact is, if I could know what would be good to do next year, I’d’ve already done it. Thus, I will simply state a few of the things I might want to keep my eye on:

• The action-analysis loop — Although I feel good, I have made no attempt to quantify, or even qualify that feeling.
• Longer cycles of action — My current systems are day-based, so I find myself without the dedicated focus needed for longer-term projects.
• Variation in the amount of action — Mike Hurley talks about the importance of having “light” and “heavy” work weeks, and I may experiment with this idea.
• Prediction system — Achieving long-term goals requires long-term planning, and that is likely to be aided by systems that can tell me when I have the time and resources⁶ in the future to work on them.
• Friction to using and improving the system — I seem to have not improved my to-do site at all in the last several months, though I have ideas about how it could work better.
• Downtime — Finding the balance between avoiding burnout and slacking off is tricky, and my monkey brain certainly doesn’t help with it.
• Building new habits — Active decisions are slow to compute whereas habits are fast, so I’d like to see how much and how quickly parts of my system can become improved habit, and how much of it even should become habit.
• Time tracking systems — I sometimes wonder how much time I actually spend on things, though closing the action-analysis loop qualitatively may be enough of an answer for now.
• Wireheading⁷ — I’m not sure I need to be worried yet, but there is always the possibility that a system may subvert the intension of its designer by fooling its beneficiary with artificial happiness.
• Calendar supply — By the time I thought of ordering the 12018 calendar, it had already sold out, so I’ll have to make do with a Bob Ross calendar for (ugh) 2018.

References

• Inside the mind of a master procrastinator — a TED Talk that analyzes procrastination both incicively and humorously. Despite the light tone, it doesn’t shy away from the animal nature in humans, or the inevitability of death, which makes it quite effective for figuring out what’s going wrong when you don’t seem to be getting anything done.
• Going Pro — a video essay on recognizing and combating your own resistance to embarking on creative tasks. It serves as an excellent introduction for how to orient your mind towards big, important tasks; in my case, that task is living a life I’d be proud of.
• Cortex Podcast — a podcast where two self-employed people discuss their working life… when they aren’t being Apple fanboys. Although the podcast is not a dense source of advice, it can be inspirational, and the hosts are experimental and thoughtful when it gets down to it.
• Algorithms to Live By — a book with advice on big topics from efficient scheduling to how to minimize regret to the purpose of government, and more things than I’d like to list here. Against stereotype, the book actually advises a certain amount of chaos; this means that the math is simple to use day-to-day, and that you spend more time accomplishing your goals instead of calculating. There’s also freely-available video that you can watch before you buy. This comes highly recommended if you’re going to start designing your life.
• Less Wrong — an organized blog mostly devoted to rationalism, though there are important lessons for productivity, life, and goals. Beyond the direct advice, knowing your biases, regardless of your goals, is far too important to ignore this resource, even if I personally disagree with some of the author’s conclusions.
• A New History for Humanity – The Human Era — just a well-done video explaining the Holocene Calendar. It’s not like this specific video has anything to do with systems for life, but if you don’t watch Kurzgesagt (In a Nutshell), I highly suggest it.