HOWTO: Be more productive (Aaron Swartz: T Translations: 日本語 | Русский | Беларуская “With all the time you spend watching TV,” he tells me, “you could have written a novel by now.” It’s hard to disagree with the sentiment — writing a novel is undoubtedly a better use of time than watching TV — but what about the hidden assumption? Time has various levels of quality. If you want to be more productive then, you have to recognize this fact and deal with it. Spend time efficiently Choose good problems Life is short (or so I’m told) so why waste it doing something dumb? This isn’t to say that all your time should be spent on the most important problem in the world. Have a bunch of them Another common myth is that you’ll get more done if you pick one problem and focus on it exclusively. Having a lot of different projects gives you work for different qualities of time. It also makes you more creative. Make a list Coming up with a bunch of different things to work on shouldn’t be hard — most people have tons of stuff they want to get done.
How to Exercise an Open Mind - WikiHow Edit Article Edited by Sam Rawlins, Krystle C., Richd, Erika Altek and 105 others One hour of increased brain activity via innovative thinking or experiencing new stimuli can make you smarter, more energetic, more creative, more sociable, and more open to new experiences and ways of thinking. The key ingredients are to be open to new experiences and to make changes in previous ways of thinking about these experiences. Ad Steps 1Don’t allow yourself any dead time. 20Browse something that you are not familiar with the internet. Tips Become more like an inquisitive child. Warnings Exercising an "open" mind and "stimulating" your mind are different.
How To Stop Procrastinating How To Stop Procrastinating Be inspired to overcome procrastination. Now in beta, BuddyHive.com links random buddies to be accountable to each other as they achieve small tasks. Click above, write in a task, and we’ll find a buddy to support you on your way. Procrastination is the intentional and habitual postponement of an important task that should be done now. Procrastination is fostered by habit. Unpleasant tasks Unpleasant tasks rarely turn out to be as bad as you think.Complete these tasks first. Complex Projects Something looms ahead of you: starting a small business, getting a job, preparing the annual budget. Indecision People delay because they can’t make up their minds.Determine a time for making a decision and the criteria for making it. Fear of failure (lack of self confidence) People don’t want to face the consequences of failure, so they delay. Lack of interest You are tired or lazy. Perfectionism People delay because they want to get the project perfect.Set deadlines for yourself. Unimportant tasks
Josh Kaufman: Inside My Bald Head | The Pe Why smart people defend bad ideas - scottberkun.com [First published April 2005] We all know someone who’s intelligent, but who occasionally defends obviously bad ideas. Why does this happen? How can smart people take up positions that defy any reasonable logic? Having spent many years working with smart people I’ve cataloged many of the ways this happens, and I have advice on what to do about it. I feel qualified to write this essay as I’m a recovering smart person myself and I’ve defended several very bad ideas. Success at defending bad ideas I’m not entirely proud to admit that I have a degree in Logic and Computation from Carnegie Mellon University. The problem with smart people is that they like to be right and sometimes will defend ideas to the death rather than admit they’re wrong. Until they come face to face with someone who is tenacious enough to dissect their logic, and resilient enough to endure the thinly veiled intellectual abuse they dish out during debate (e.g. Death by homogeny Thinking at the wrong level References
How to have more confidence, emotional str EVERYBODY KNOWS WHAT IT MEANS to flinch. Example: You pretend you’re going to slug me, and I twitch or blink. I flinched. Have you ever noticed that you have a strong desire to put your hands in front of your body when you’re standing up and talking to several people who are all seated? Or say you’re telling someone something she doesn’t want to hear. If you look at someone and they then look at you and you quickly look away, you flinched. Flinching is an attempt to protect yourself, and it’s very natural. But when you have the urge to flinch and you don’t, you gain a kind of strength. And you don’t have to spend years getting good at this; you can do it the very next time you talk to someone. Refuse to flinch. Make up your mind — as soon as you notice yourself flinching — that you will not flinch. Don’t flinch, and feel the power. Then go on and expand this power by extending the practice into the psychological arena. But always and forever, wherever you flinch, you will be weak.
Neural Gourmet | Feed Your Brain Memory Improvement Techniques from Mind To © VeerPRZEMYSLAW PRZYBYLSKI Use these techniques to improve your memory. The tools in this section help you to improve your memory. They help you both to remember facts accurately and to remember the structure of information. The tools are split into two sections. As with other mind tools, the more practice you give yourself with these techniques, the more effectively you will use them. Mnemonics 'Mnemonic' is another word for memory tool. The idea behind using mnemonics is to encode difficult-to-remember information in a way that is much easier to remember. Our brains evolved to code and interpret complex stimuli such as images, colors, structures, sounds, smells, tastes, touch, positions, emotions and language. Unfortunately, a lot of the information we have to remember in modern life is presented differently – as words printed on a page. This section of Mind Tools shows you how to use all the memory resources available to you to remember information in a highly efficient way.
Self-Discipline May Beat Smarts as Key to Zoe Bellars and Brad McGann, eighth-graders at Swanson Middle School in Arlington, do their homework faithfully and practice their musical instruments regularly. In a recent delayed gratification experiment, they declined to accept a dollar bill when told they could wait a week and get two dollars. Those traits might be expected of good students, certainly no big deal. According to a recent article by Angela L. "Underachievement among American youth is often blamed on inadequate teachers, boring textbooks, and large class sizes," the researchers said. But how, educators, parents and other social scientists want to know, do you measure self-discipline? The results: "Highly self-disciplined adolescents outperformed their more impulsive peers on every academic-performance variable, including report card grades, standardized achievement test scores, admission to a competitive high school and attendance. Some experts expressed doubt about the Delay Choice Task.
Mental Heuristics Page A heuristic is a "rule-of-thumb", advice that helps an AI program or human think and act more efficiently by directing thinking in an useful direction. Some of these heuristics are age-old wisdom, bordering on cliche, but most are actually helpful. If you want something done, do it yourself Comment: Obviously true, and doing it is usually very good for your self esteem. Never procrastinate anything you can do right now Comment: Very powerful. When you have several things you could be doing and don't know which to do: Just do any one of them! Comments: If you cannot decide between two or more possibilities, then there is a good chance that the differences don't matter. Always assume that you will succeed Comments: If you don't expect to succeed in an endeavor, then you will not do your best and will not notice possible solutions, while if you feel that you will eventually succeed you will concentrate all your power at the problem. If you can't find a solution, change the rules.
Becoming What We Are - Robert Anton Wilson Becoming What We Are By Robert Anton Wilson If you stroll through a large art museum, you will notice that Van Gogh does not paint the same world as Rembrandt, Picasso does not see things the way Goya did, Georgia O'Keefe doesn't much resemble Rivera, Salvador Dali looks like nobody but himself, and, in general, no world-class artist became a "classic" by doing what somebody else had already done or even what everybody else in his/her own era did. And in science, the names of Einstein, Dirac, the Curies, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schroedinger, John Bell etc. live on because none of them took Newton as Holy Gospel: they all made unique and unpredictable innovations in basic theory. And, in case you think this applies only to "arts and sciences," consider the most successful people in industry. Our parents wanted us to act like the other children in our neighborhood; they emphatically did not want a boy or girl who seemed "weird or "different" or [Heaven forefend] "too damned clever by far."
Procrastination - Uncyclopedia Procrastination is a form of human behavior in which an individual displays a deferment or avoidance of an action or task to a later time. Those who procrastinate may often experience Article to be written later. Update: Maybe tomorrow. July 15, 2005: Thinking about doing some work on the article. August 9, 2005: Not a good day. September 24, 2005: Procrastination is... is... aw, screw it... too much typing. January 1, 2006: People like to procrastinate. January 10, 2006: I have a plan to stop procrastinating but have not enacted it yet. January 21, 2006: Not on the front page anymore, so I'll get back to this later. January 9, 2007: Tomorrow I'll sort up this page, clean all the crap and write a beautiful and informative article about procrastination. May 10, 2007: I'm going to be busy with outside stuff, you know, laying in the grass. July 21, 2007: You know. July 21, 2013:I could work on it but its been 5 years...people can wait...I need to sleep for a few more centuries.