Making things a choice
Making things a choice
I've seen plenty wisdom about making things a choice. From making memory a choice with Michael Nielsons post about spaced repetition. Then there is making understanding a choice from Nabeel S. Qureshi. Or just making a process a choice with checklists.
I've become pretty checklist pilled, finding them pretty useful in many places of my life. Just having to be considerate of a process is already a useful exercise. But further refinement gives the ability to choose growth and improvement as well.
But having a process or system isn't straight forward or easy, it's never just a choice. John Gall's book Systematics discuss a concept called Anergy, which is the amount of effort required to change. Adoption and following of systems requires effort. Spaced repetition requires effort in creating and studying cards, choosing to understand requires effort in drilling down & refining understanding. Developing and following a checklist requires effort for each point.
It is therefore important to understand the adoption cost, and to find ways to tastefully apply and optimize for resources. Thinking just about a spaced-repetition system. Manually writing and tracking takes a lot of energy, using a program like Anki reduces effort in tracking, modifying by plugging in a LLM to group & order cards further helps in reducing effort by allowing the user to knock out multiple learned cards.
One important factor for systems is slack. The world is detailed, not everything can be modeled and accounted for. Systems work better when they allow for a bit of slack. This is what makes checklists so great, they can be designed to allow for slack. Most of the checklists I create and follow are just a set of questions I ask myself, often I find myself even skipping questions because they don't apply. This flexibility is what allows my checklists to become useful.
Ideation:
I figured I try to ideate of some other things we can make a choice. Note - I haven't actually tried teh following but figured it would be a fun exercise.
Choosing friendship
- You can't specifically choose your exact friendship. But you can choose to regularly talk with people and develop a friendship. Just track when you last messaged a person, and if it's been a while, ask them what is up.
Choosing creativity
When put in a situation or problem, you can choose to explore the problem and solution space. Just ideate on the following axes: Intuitive idea, Convergent ideas, Divergent ideas.Choosing to be healthy
I've never personally been on a strict diet, so I don't have much insight here. I know people have trouble sticking to diets, and I myself fall into the temptation of eating unhealthy snacks. I wonder how dieting could be made to be less anergetic?
Thanks for reading.