Not as much fanfare this time. Still got the chillout and Alan Watts happening.

I've been reading Mind Hacks, and Mind Performance Hacks lately. Awesome books. They have given me the chance to look, and change my brainstate—becoming my own metaprogrammer as it were. Just recently, I ran across a great blog entry titled: 10 Reasons people make bad decisions. I'll post the basics here, but you should really head over there for the full skinny.

If you have some understanding in the ways in which your brain makes flawed decisions, you can stop to think about your decisions, and potentially avoid making them in the future. The first step is to know what these flaws are.

1. Sunk cost bias
   This one is simple. People tend to put in more value into thing that they put a lot of time, energy and resources into. Think of that project where thousands upon thousands of dollars were invested upon something that ended up not working anyway. If someone would have killed the project at the $10,000 dollar mark, then $90,000 would have been spared, but how many of us can really be the ones to say "We're throwing in good money after bad here!"
2. Egocentricism
   Egocentricism is something that everyone else has except you, right? The thing about egocentricism is that it is in our nature. There is really only one ego in our brains (usually) and ultimately, according to our brain, it is the only ego that counts. This can cause problems however, because we tend to see things happening to us as being more severe then they actually are. This is exemplified by an experiment described in the linked-to article:

   In a study conducted by Sukhwinder Shergill and colleagues at University College London, pairs of volunteers were connected to a device that allowed each of them to exert pressure on the other volunteer’s fingers. The researcher began by exerting a fixed amount of pressure on the first volunteer’s finger. The first volunteer was then asked to exert the same amount of pressure on the second volunteer’s finger. The second volunteer was then asked to exert the same amount of pressure on the first volunteer’s finger, and so on. Although volunteers tried to respond with equal force, they typically responded with about 40 percent more force than they had just experienced. Each time a volunteer was touched, he touched back harder, which led the other volunteer to touch back even harder.

3. Confirmation Bias
   This happens when our rational brains are short-circuted and we take an event and show it to be linked to our already established notions and opinions. This may be related to memes, and the tendency for memes to self-reinforce.
4. Overconfidence
   Even if you are suffering from the deepest of self-esteem problems, chances are you are overconfident about some aspect of your life. For a good example, talk to any given driver out there "All the over drivers are idiots, but I know how to drive!" Programmers are similar in this regard.
5. Dysfunctional Competition
   This is essentially the fact that our happiness tends to be measured relative to the other peoples happiness around us. We like to think that this is not true, but as this experiment shows:

   Max Bazerman from Harvard [who performed the experiment, said:] "When I ask people whether they would prefer a) $7 for themselves and for another person or b) $8 for themselves and $10 for the other person, people choose 'b.' However, when people are simply given 'a' or 'b,' 'a' makes them happier."

6. The Endowment Effect
   This is related to egocentricism. We tend to put more value on objects we already own, rather then their absolute value. In another experiment with mugs performed by Kahneman, Knetsch and Thaler, a random set of people were given mugs, and another random set of people asked to buy those mugs. The people who had mugs were only willing to part with them for $7, while the buyers were only willing to purchase them for $3. Now that's a seven dollar mug!
7. Availability Bias
   This is the effect where we tend to see probability in terms of memorable events, rather then in terms of their absolute probability. Look at the amount of fear around, and energy spent on the War on Terrorism. It is more likely that you will die from a car crash, or even an STD then a terrorist attack. This also has an effect on the micro-scale of your personal relationships. Sometimes the most negative aspects of a relationship are the ones you remember the most. When this gets combined with confirmation bias, it can make for an insidious combination.
8. Conformity
   This is an obvious one. Now I know that a lot of my frequent readers pride themselves as being non-conformist, but the kind of conformity being referred to here goes a little deeper. Buskers have known for years that if you seed your hat/guitar-case with some money, especially bills and higher denominational coins, people will generally give you more money. This is also called the "Restaurant effect", if you have 2 restaurants with one across the street from another, and one of them is seeded with people on its patio, and the other is not; the seeded restaurant will get more patrons. The effect of conformity is so subtle because most of us believe that we are somehow different, and immune from it, when we truly aren't. That means you Mr. or Miss non-conformist.
9. Illusion of Control
   This is the effect that causes gamblers to bet more on crap shots that they role verus shots that other players role, even though the probabilities are exactly the same. We seem to think that we have more control over a situation then we actually do.
10. Attribution Error
    We tend to think that people act and do things exclusively for our benefit, despite evidence to the contrary. That guy who cut you off in traffic quite likely didn't do it because he was an asshole, he was probably confused, a new driver, or even just distracted. In fact, maybe he is generally an asshole, but we tend to take his actions personally, as if he was cutting you off to be a prick at you, rather then because he is generally a thoughtless prick. The main effect here is that people tend to favor personality based explanations. It is similar to the old saw "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity." except, again it focuses on a character trait of the individual (stupidity) rather then what might be a more realistic explanation, such as a mistake, circumstances out of their control, or even other motivations.

In a future entry, I'll explore how to work with this list of mistakes in your daily decision making and interactions.

It's our 5th year Anniversary. Wow. 5 years.

When I think back on my relationship with Shell, I think about how I was sure that this was not "the" relationship. In those early times, I recall how often everything with her could have totally gone pare-shaped.

It didn't.

But not only did it not go pare-shaped, but our relationship grew and grew. I think a large part of this is because we keep allowing ourselves, and each other room to grow. We encourage each other to develop in the directions we need to go in, with just the right amount of pressure. Even under the most stressful of circumstances and situations, we have been able to turn the worst into an opportunity for growth, change, and even intimacy.

So...

Thank you Shell. Thank you for your patience, your understanding and your love. Here is to another 5 years, another 10 years, another 50 years...

I love you.

LightCone is an interesting little dynamic RSS feed that tells you when light from the moment of your birth hits stars from within our local group. Why is this important?

From the moment of my birth, light (that I could have influenced) has been expanding around the Earth and light (which could influence me, from an increasing distance of origin) reaching it -- this ever-growing sphere of potential causality is my light cone.

On Saturday, my light cone has hit Beta Comae Berenices.

Okay, maybe it isn't important or even useful, but it is interesting.

Now that I have actually read GTD (twice) and reviewed it, I am finally ready to explain my own implementation of its process. This topic has been expounded upon at great lengths by various bloggers, so even if my voice isn't lost in the choir—or perhaps "din"—I may not end up saying saying anything new; the chief reason however, is to firm up and think about my own process of applying Getting Things done.

I am surprisingly low-tech in my implementation, my computers and PDA are secondary to my GTD process. I don't have 43 folders, and I don't own, or even want, a label maker. This is probably like heresy in some circles, but I have done the folder thing before, and it just didn't work. I also don't generate much in the way of paper reference. Some people seem to generate 6 folders-full in a work week. That is about as much as I generate over the course of a few years.

My central station of stuff collection and lists are 2 bound notebooks: one for home, and one for work. I may end up getting a smaller pocket style notebook for when I am in transit as well, but for now, my PDA suffices (sometimes I feel that my PDA is a bit of a wrench in my freshly created GTD machine). I split these notebooks into 3 major sections: daily tasks, projects, and project notes.

I date each section of daily tasks so that I can have a peek at what I did when, which is especially important when I need to look at what day I did something for client work, or whatever. I write each task down, and a little check box beside it, when it is complete I check it off. If I have decided to not do it, I X it out. When I delegate the task to someone else, I draw a left-ward arrow across the checkbox. Of course, some tasks don't get finished on that day, so I just carry it forward to the next day, and then I fill in the bottom left corner (kind of like filling in a spare on your bowling sheet). I only do this when I have finished writing in the task for the next day, lest I get interrupted in mid-carry-over and suddenly a task goes by the wayside. Horray for atomic commits! Finally, this system is great, because I can look back over a week, or a month, and see just how much I have accomplished. It feels good having this kind of permanent tactile record. I paper clip old daily pages together, so with just a flip of the notebook, I can access the tasks for the day.

The projects section is full of lists-with-checkboxes, that are basically a list of all the projects I am involved in. In the GTD vernacular, they are a combination of the 20,000 ft. view, the 10,000 ft. view and the projects view. At work, this is a list for each project, but for home, I maintain separate lists for my PHP projects, website projects, commitments to friends and family, music, and all the other insane shit I am involved in. Frequently the project lists will have sub-projects such as a list for my Meditation project, or a list for the S9y plugins I am working on. The list also serves as a someday-maybe list.

Finally, the project notes are more free-form: mind maps, outlines, scrawled notes, images and all project support materials all go in there. I try to reserve at least one page for each set of notes.

Frequently I will need to transfer things between work and home, or write down notes and ideas, or even process incoming stuff as it occurs to me. I do all of this on my PDA, to be transfered to either my Work Book or Home Book as the situation demands. It also serves as my "tickler file" for any of my time sensitive personal or contractual obligations. At work, Outlook performs the same tickley function.

I have tried a few different methods that just don't work at all for me. The first of which was a pure PDA solution. You'd think that it would; they're small, portable, and fun to play with. The problem however, is that graffiti as an input mechanism just sucks; it is too slow for me to generate the volume of text that a daily task list entails. If the lag between thinking thoughts and writing them down is too great, I am liable to forget a few tasks before I can get them down. That is no good.

I've also tried a wiki implementation—also no good. The latency between updates was too large (more a fault of my server/connection then the wiki itself I am sure) and it lacked portability or flexibility. Sure a wiki is available everywhere, that is, assuming you have a computer. You can't really add drawings or mindmaps effectively in a wiki either. Outlook wasn't even in the running. It isn't that portable unless you are a Microsoft junkie, and while it has a lot of beef, it all seems to be in the wrong places.

So why does my method work for me? Well first of all I am a real hard core stationary geek. I love stationary. So an excuse to have 2 notebooks (as well as a journal and sketchbook) is a-ok with me. Raw paper and pen is easy to work with, adding tasks and notes are easy. Everything is immediate and available. It is also easy to get very free form, sometimes a task can be a quick sketch—a picture is worth a thousand words. The stacking and permanence of the tasks are also a visual reminder of just how much I am getting accomplished which feels great, and being a stationary geek, I love filling notebooks up with useful stuff.

As I work with the system, I see some of the problem areas that need fixing. The more savvy amongst you will notice that I completely skip the whole concept of the context based lists. I haven't yet had the workload at work to warrant that kind of list, but that day is fast approaching. At home it is another story entirely . Instead of doing a weekly review, and making context lists, I do a daily review instead. I prefer this method for now, as I have a few scant hours in which I can get the stuff I need done at home, so there isn't much in the way of context shifts happening. I have enough time to get a few important things done, a few smaller things done, and then its bedtime.

Also, in my notebook, I have intermixed my someday-maybe projects with my current projects. This is mostly just how I work, jumping from project to project on a series of whims, based on what my current interests are. This intermixing may make some of the more organized of you cringe, but so far it seems to be working for me, allowing me to get a lot of my smaller "maybe at another day" tasks completed, or that much closer to completion.

Keeping track of my time sensitive tasks is a hard one. Mostly I just need to get more into the habit of using my PDA and Outlook calendar. Really it is just a case of paying attention to them.

Finally, one final nitpick I have is that i haven't gotten into the habit of dating my notes. This isn't fatal, but it could be potentially useful.

In the future I am going to start playing with some more, and better, contextualizing. Contexts like @home or @work are just far to wide and far-reaching for my needs. I will quite likely drill down to things like inCode, inPhotoshop, etc. Most of my context shifts happen on the computer, rather then in the world around it. Instead of keeping separate context lists, I will probably maintain the daily lists, as it gives me a set of goals to reach, and just use "icons" instead.

I hope this little foray into how I get things done inspires you, or at the very least interests you. Now, do any of you other stationary geeks wanna hit up an office depot? Lets go!