My life improvement aspirations

Some things I would like to improve in my life:

  1. The speed at which I do things.
  2. My management of projects, activities, and life in general.
  3. My memory of important and useful things.

1. Speed

I recently re-read this very good blog post: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems.

The prescription must be that if there’s something you want to do a lot of and get good at—like write, or fix bugs—you should try to do it faster.

The message really resonates with me. Speed really is important. That got me thinking about why I am not fast.

I literally googled “everything takes me too long”, and got this Reddit thread as a result.

I don’t think this is just routine perfectionism (though that’s probably a component), because I don’t feel like doing things more quickly would result in a worse product. Instead, my feeling is that fundamentally, I just have a poor sense for time/durations, and also a poor feel for when enough is enough. It’s just a bunch of very minor inefficiencies that add up to major inefficiency overall.

Relatable! I am slow, and would like to be faster!

Of course, surprising absolutely nobody, the OP later discloses that he has ADHD - he was diagnosed as a child. I may have ADHD - it remains to be seen. I’ve been planning to get an appointment with a psychiatrist for, oh, last five years or so? Sometimes I almost do get an appointment - as in, I managed to inquire and they told me to get back to them in a couple of months. (Narrator: “He didn’t get back to them.”)

Setting that matter aside, here are some of my thoughts and plans for the future:

  1. Being good is the goal.
  2. In order to be good, you must try being prolific.
  3. If you want to be prolific, you, almost by definition, need to be fast. That means - ship fast, deliver fast, publish fast, and so on.

There are two ways in which you could be not fast:

  1. The context prevents you. You want to be fast in activity X, but activity X is surrounded by other activities which eat up all your time.
  2. The way you do the activity is slow.

You could have the most optimized system in the world for doing X, but if you are doing a million other things, it could be the case that you won’t be fast, therefore you won’t be prolific, and therefore you won’t be good - because you have no time.

The other way you could be slow is that you’re doing something the slow way. I cannot speak around any generalities in case 1, but in this case - doing something the slow way - is something that I’ve struggled with. For example, in videography, an aspirational hobby of mine, I’ve taken weeks to produce videos lasting three or so minutes. I’ve taken several months once for a single video that lasted a couple of minutes.

This is because I’ve decided to adopt an aesthetic that simply takes more than just speaking to the camera. I’ve put too much thought into various stylistic and editorial choices, to the extent that the overall production takes a long time. And while this may be a worthwhile endeavor were videography my “thing”, videography is just my hobby. I should not obsess over things. And funnily enough, the results are frequently not that… good. So I might as well skip obsessing over things.

Other ways of increasing speed, using the example of home improvement & DIY projects.

  1. First, determine whether you need to do this project.

    I’ve taken weeks and weeks to start a project, only to abandon it, and months later, hire someone to do it for me.

    I’ve lost countless hours on things like mowing the lawn - easily outsourceable.

    You don’t need to do every single thing, and in fact, it’s better if you don’t try to do every single thing.

  2. Use the proper tool for the job. This one is pretty obvious, but you’ll go really slow if you don’t use the proper tool for whatever you’re trying to do.

  3. Organize your work sensibly. There’s a good video from Essential Craftsman on how to be more productive. In it, he details several strategies, one of which is organizing your work in such a way that you don’t jump from activity to activity, but rather set up your materials and tools in such a way that you do a single thing once. Like if you’re nailing boards and cutting posts, don’t intersperse the two. You’re much faster if you nail all the boards, and then cut all the posts.

(These points may or may not apply to things outside of DIY/home projects.)

2. Management

I sometimes stumble across an old project of mine which I’ve never given up on formally, but in which I never made any progress since starting it. It could be a home improvement thing (for example, I need to pour a new floor in my garage), or it could be a coding thing (like my progress on Exercism), or it could be a blog series that I started and never continued (like PIBU1).

I forget about them!

I don’t want to forget about them!

Maybe I need to postpone them, but I’d at least like them to be relevant somewhere, in some file, so that I can consciously continue postponing them, and not just forget about them, then randomly remember them and feel guilty for not having done them.

Here, the problem is simpler, if not easy to solve. I have a management system in place for my life. I’ve tried a bunch of stuff, but finally settled on todo.txt, plus some daily todos, plus some specialized project pages, plus Google Calendar. It actually works… pretty great!

The real problem I have is: I don’t use it.

I have a system, I just don’t… do anything with it. So a decision that I am making is this: spend a couple of hours a week just - managing. I should likely create a recurring calendar event for this. But yeah, I literally just need to spend a bit more time - a couple of hours here and there - just writing things down in this extremely simple management system, and then, here and there, review it.

3. Memory

Finally, memory. I am of the school of thought that memory is underrated, more so the more LLMs become pervasive in our lives. It’s counter-intuitive, but here’s why I think it’s true: because more and more people will offload this mental weight to LLMs, it will become rarer and rarer among people, and therefore more valuable, not less.

Stonemasons today cost much more, as do carpenters, as do many other trades that didn’t completely disappear. If whatever it is that you’re memorizing isn’t going to disappear, your memory - and subsequent expertise - will make it more valuable.

Ultimately it’s also intrinsic. You want not just to achieve things with the help of search engines and LLMs, you actually want to be good at things.

I believe memory is a key component here. For some reason, many Western school systems have adopted the “understanding rather than repetition” as a philosophical maxim, but I think there may have been an overcorrection.

You need to train the “muscle” that is your memory. Certain mental activities, like math, only become ingrained when you repeat them enough times. You cannot understand whole fields unless you’re deeply familiar with the terminology, key numbers, key concepts, and so on. In short, you need to memorize things.

My answer to this is the usage of Anki. I need to either find decks relevant to knowledge that I have/want, or create them. And then, just revisit them. Spaced repetition is the most time-optimized way to build a great memory. It’s basically hacking whichever mechanism is responsible for “usage = recall”. You don’t actually have to use it in any context, just reviewing random cards will produce the equivalent powerful effect.