The Opposite of Multitasking

I'm really enjoying the articles and podcasts of Farnam Street, where Shane Parrish is the writer/host. Here is an important lesson he offers: "Learning How to Think: The Skill No One Taught You." This lesson is to avoid multi-tasking. Researchers have found that the more one multi-tasks, the less effective one is at learning. When you multitask, you are always restarting, never going down to the next level. I want to be someone unique, at least sometimes. I love the good ideas of others. I swim in them most of my hours on the planet. But at least once in a while, I’d like to step out of the echo-chamber and contribute something original to the world. What I have found is that when I'm distracted by phone calls or texts even once every 15 minutes, I never develop high quality ideas of my own. That's why I need to shelter myself in blocks of many hours when I'm writing. At least 3 hours at a time. That's when good things happen. On this point, Shane cites to "Solitude and Leadership," an essay by William Deresiewicz:

I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.
This doesn't mean that exciting original ideas don't sometimes come out of no where, like a flash. Nietzsche commented on this in The Gay Science, 381. "The Question of being understandable": [More . . . ]

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The brain’s precursors to volitional action

I don't have much to add to this Wikipedia excerpt, but I saw a reference to Benjamin Libet's experiments in an article by John Horgan.  To oversimplify only a bit, Horgan argues that "free will" somehow "emerges" at a level higher than "the level of body and brain understood solely as a physical system."  This sounds like hocus pocus to me.  Here's the Wikipedia excerpt on Libet's experiments:

Implications of Libet's experiments Libet's experiments suggest to some[8] that unconscious processes in the brain are the true initiator of volitional acts, and free will therefore plays no part in their initiation. If unconscious brain processes have already taken steps to initiate an action before consciousness is aware of any desire to perform it, the causal role of consciousness in volition is all but eliminated, according to this interpretation. For instance, Susan Blackmore's interpretation is "that conscious experience takes some time to build up and is much too slow to be responsible for making things happen."[9] Libet finds that conscious volition is exercised in the form of 'the power of veto' (sometimes called "free won't"[10][11]); the idea that conscious acquiescence is required to allow the unconscious buildup of the readiness potential to be actualized as a movement. While consciousness plays no part in the instigation of volitional acts, Libet suggested that it may still have a part to play in suppressing or withholding certain acts instigated by the unconscious. Libet noted that everyone has experienced the withholding from performing an unconscious urge. Since the subjective experience of the conscious will to act preceded the action by only 200 milliseconds, this leaves consciousness only 100-150 milliseconds to veto an action (this is because the final 20 milliseconds prior to an act are occupied by the activation of the spinal motor neurones by the primary motor cortex, and the margin of error indicated by tests utilizing the oscillator must also be considered). Libet's experiments have received support from other research related to the Neuroscience of free will.
I question whether even Libet's "power of veto" is "volitional" or "free." I suspect (though I cannot prove) that it's physics all the way down and that everything felt to be "volitional" or "free," even the "power of veto" (I admit that I too experience this apparent power) is physics, not some spooky homunculus bearing our name and facial features, who is pulling our levers.

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Be careful who you choose as your friends, because you tend to imitate them.

Think carefully about who you will spend time with, because you tend to imitate the people around you. That is the message from this article from BBC, "How Your Friends Change Your Habits - For Better or Worse." Excerpt:

“There is good reason to believe that when we use normative behaviour it makes us feel good because we’re connecting with a social group,” says Higgs. “If you are with a new social group, you are more likely to imitate behaviours.”

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Movement is not necessarily progress (though it feels like it)

I've often written that humans are prone to act without a legitimate plan because it seems like Motion is Progress. No one will accuse you of failing to do something if you are doing, literally, something, even if your are acting in ways that are nonsensical, harmful, counterproductive. Motion is Progress is a fallacy. Doing something is often a bad idea. This "syndrome" is explored here by Farnam Street.

Movement offers shelter from failure. When you’re in motion, you feel like you’re doing something. We convince ourselves that as long as we’re in motion, we can’t fail. As long as we’re doing something, anything, failure can’t really find us. Movement feeds our ego. Our evolutionary programming craves the validation of others. In a world that values action and short soundbites, nuanced conversations are hard. Others don’t have time to really listen to your nuanced story as they run to their next meeting. And telling people that you’re doing nothing results in disapproving looks. Movement offers the drug of validation to the outside world. It is far easier to tell others that we’re doing something than doing nothing. And so we do.

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How to Reclaim the Hours of Your Life for the Things you Value

I'm really enjoying the writing of time-management writer Laura Vanderkam.  More important, I'm using her ideas to change my life. I discovered Laura on TED. Last week I read her 2018 book, "Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy while Getting More Done."

Laura's first order of business: In order to know how to get more out of life, you need to track your time to learn how you are actually spending your hours. Creating this inventory is critically important because humans are notoriously error-plagued when they attempt to intuitively account for how they use their time. We fool ourselves relentlessly. Laura points to studies showing that we claim to be working far more hours than we actually work. For example, people claiming to work 75 hours per week typically worked only 50 hours per week. I've been tracking my time for more than a week using a free spreadsheet, Google Sheets. My rows consist of 20 categories (sleeping,attorney work, exercising, entertainment, altruism, eating, reading, wasting time on social media, etc). My columns are the days of the week. Fitbit keeps exercise and sleep counts accurate and an insurance company app tells me house much time I'm actually driving. I estimate the other activities, inputting the data several times per day. It only takes a few minutes per day once you set up your spreadsheet.

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