Managing Disorder in your Life

[rajlego]

I learned and have been reading a little bit about mental models and one that's been sticking with me is entropy. The main takeaway can be summarized with this excerpt:
"Entropy will always increase on its own. The only way to make things orderly again is to add energy. Order requires effort. "
On a good day, I feel pretty happy and can get a lot done. On a bad day, I spend most of the day just procrastinating at home on reddit and feel unhappy. Something that feels paradoxical to me is that for a good day to happen I have to put in effort but on a bad day it doesn't take any, but on a good day I feel happy while on a bad day I don't. Shouldn't it be easy to expend the effort necessary to keep things orderly and me satisfied? At least for me though, it feels so difficult.

There are a number of factors that contribute to entropy and require me to expend significant effort to overcome and I've been trying to get rid of them so it's easier for me to just fall into good days. The biggest factor for me is just being at home because at home I tend to procrastinate endlessly on my phone and laptop. I try to circumvent that by going every day to study with my friends but if I have a bad enough day I can't manage that and just waste my time. I've tried to improve further by not using my phone and laptop in the morning and night at home and I did manage to not use them for a while but after I break a streak it's hard to get back into it.

Do any of you have similar issues that you still struggle with or that you've managed to overcome?

Edit: I just realized after spending time on Supermemo that there are opposite factors that make it easier to be orderly. Whenever I spend time using Supermemo, I get a boost from learning that can help me power through less enjoyable things and make my time at home more pleasant. Without that pleasure, a lot of my day because very difficult. Do you guys have similar empowering factors?

 

[Jon]

I have three recommendations for you. But like everything, if you ignore them you will get nowhere.

Read the following, and in the order given:

1. "I know how to change" - this statement is false https://themindtavern.com/community/threads/i-know-how-to-change-this-statement-is-false.382/

2. The Grid - a productivity game changer (AMA) https://themindtavern.com/community/threads/the-grid-a-productivity-game-changer-ama.97/

3. Self-Directed Behavior: Self-Modification for Personal Adjustment https://www.amazon.com/Self-Directe...onal-Adjustment/dp/1285077091#customerReviews

If you have any questions about my recommendations, let me know.

 

[rajlego]

Read the first 2, downloaded the 3rd, it's almost 2 am now so I can't do it now but tomorrow I'll start on making my own grid. I did have an app on my iphone for habit tracking but when things got bad and some tasks I consistently had misses on, I couldn't keep up I just stopped checking. Giving it another go and focusing on improving from failure instead of having a perfectionist mentality will hopefully make this go at it better. Thanks for the recommendations

 

[Jon]

My recommendation is to start with very few items on the grid. Make sure it does conditional formatting so the colour changes when ticked. I found that more motivational, since you can then see more clearly gaps and try to keep the streak going. The spreadsheet is much easier and more flexible to use than some of the habit apps, in my opinion.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

While it isn't a zero-sum game, entropy and energy balance off against each other in thermodynamics. You expend energy based on there being a DIFFERENCE between two things, and using that difference as an energy source. But draining the energy brings the differences closer together until you can no longer separate the formerly different things. This principle even works at the cellular level with osmosis and "chemical potential" that drives cells to absorb X and excrete Y.

So it is with relationships. Sameness is not the basis for relationships, though we DO tend to avoid those personalities that are TOO different from our own. Too much energy isn't good. But finding our exact identical match leads to a boring situation. (True both in love and in friendship.) A little disorder in relationships is good as long as it doesn't get physically violent.

Even in our personal lives, disorder is the product of haste and of thinking (true or not) that we don't have enough time/energy to make things more orderly before we put them down. And so it is with ideas, too. Our brains get cluttered with ideas that we sometimes don't take the time to cull because we are still living on the energy of the different ideas.

That's a bit rambling, but it is I think mostly responsive to the concept.

 

[rajlego]

Started on it, yeah it is more flexible and easier to use than an app.

 

[rajlego]

While it isn't a zero-sum game, entropy and energy balance off against each other in thermodynamics. You expend energy based on there being a DIFFERENCE between two things, and using that difference as an energy source. But draining the energy brings the differences closer together until you can no longer separate the formerly different things. This principle even works at the cellular level with osmosis and "chemical potential" that drives cells to absorb X and excrete Y.

So it is with relationships. Sameness is not the basis for relationships, though we DO tend to avoid those personalities that are TOO different from our own. Too much energy isn't good. But finding our exact identical match leads to a boring situation. (True both in love and in friendship.) A little disorder in relationships is good as long as it doesn't get physically violent.

Even in our personal lives, disorder is the product of haste and of thinking (true or not) that we don't have enough time/energy to make things more orderly before we put them down. And so it is with ideas, too. Our brains get cluttered with ideas that we sometimes don't take the time to cull because we are still living on the energy of the different ideas.

That's a bit rambling, but it is I think mostly responsive to the concept.

This reminds me of this article and the section on learn drive and entropy. To derive pleasure from learning, your brain wants something novel but not too novel that you can't understand it. If there's not enough novelty, it's not pleasurable, it's just boring. For relationships, you want enough novelty that you don't get bored but not so much that it's just crazy.

I would agree that disorder is the product of haste, if I had twice the work I have now it wouldn't be disorderly if I knew I could manage it all. I guess again the above model works, if you have too little disorder (or too much predictability and order) in daily routine you just get bored but if you have too much disorder and unpredictability you get stressed.

 

[Jon]

Hey, nice work rajlego! Over time, you can change it, find things you have difficulty in getting yourself to do and so on.

Any chance you can also post your image on The Grid thread too, so others can see what you have done? It gives people more ideas on how to create their own Grid when there are two examples. It gives me ideas too!

Edit: That is some serious Supermemo studying you are doing there!

 

[rajlego]

Just posted on the grid thread, after 2 weeks I'll post another image as a followup. Could you post one too to see how yours is doing now?

Whenever I do use Supermemo, I tend to use it a lot but I'm still having trouble sticking to a schedule and consistently getting 3+ hours done with it. Hopefully I'll be able to improve that with my grid.

 

[Jon]

Ah yes, a follow-up would be good. If you have difficulty sticking to it, you can also start your own public accountability thread like I have, with my six-pack challenge. Research shows that making it public helps. My experience has taught me that it helps too.

Three hours on Supermemo is a lot! Are you a student?

 

[rajlego]

makes sense, I'll post periodically here but I have some IRL friends too that I think I could ask to show my grid periodically.

I'm not a student (yet), since graduating in 2017 I've been on a long gap year. I wasted most of the first year and a half but ever since I started studying 2 or 3 months ago I've been trying to spend a lot of time with supermemo both because I enjoy it but also because there are so many useful things to learn. From next month I'll be doing a Japanese language program and I likely won't have as much time for it though.

 

[Jon]

Yes, there is something about Supermemo that is addictive. It's a great tool that hardly anyone knows about.

 

[rajlego]

I think I've been getting a bit of impostor's syndrome because of that, I've had a great experience using it but it's hard to think I'm really learning all that much when there are so many people that get by without it

 

[Jon]

Yes, you are right. Some people will know less than you or learn using more inefficient tools. But over time, you will incrementally learn more knowledge than they do.

Notice in your sentence that you are conflating two different things. People get by without it, but get by with what? Learning? Your stats in Supermemo tell you that you are learning all the items in there. So if you are not putting anything in there, you are not learning much. But if you are, you are learning 95% of it because that is the algos default.

Maybe you need to read something like, The Compound Effect. It will give you a better appreciation of what tiny incremental changes can do. Here is a link to a good diagram on it:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/7wnLdbZD7Hw/maxresdefault.jpg

 

[rajlego]

I've been trying to understand that image briefly every day for the last 3 days but I'm still confused, I'm gonna go through this summary with IR

 

[Jon]

The Compound Effect is good, but so is The Slight Edge. Both books are rated highly on Amazon and they are a good read covering largely the same topic. You can search for The Slight Edge images instead. It might make more sense.

Incidentally, it is a good hack to look on Amazon.com (wherever you live) so you can get a feel for if a book is popular or not. Just look at the review count and rating. I do it all the time.

 

[rajlego]

I thought I sent a reply Monday but I guess not. I just looked it up and found this video and wow is the concept valuable. I'm looking forward to seeing how the before/after looks like on my grid.

I usually try to check on goodreads instead of amazon, I find goodreads a bit more accurate.

 

[Jon]

The concept is indeed a huge one. When you are young and have time on your side, the potential implications are even greater.

Have you still been using the grid?

 

[rajlego]

Still using it, I wish I'd started using it 1 week earlier because from last last Wednesday I starting working on university applications on for one week from then my schedule collapsed and I'm still trying to rebuild it. At least I have data and it's made me make sure to do some things I wouldn't normally ensure more frequently be completed.

 

[Jon]

That is why I suggest you start small, with few items on it. Life gets in the way.

If you just do not have time to do stuff during certain times, block them out in grey beforehand. If you look at my grid, you can see that at the weekend, there are some things that I do not do. You could adopt the same method. I notice on your grid, you have them greyed out before you enter stuff, which is not how mine is. It is white. Perhaps you have misinterpreted this aspect of the grid.