Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Life Pro Tip - What is the VALUE of "activity x"?


A very useful and worthwhile practice is to get better at assessing how valuable a certain activity is. Be it brushing your teeth, laying off certain foods, doing Supermemo, etc., whether you acknowledge it or not, you assign a certain value to things you do. That is why sleep becomes less valuable if your house is on fire (life > sleep) or you interrupt your book to talk to a cute girl (potential love > (possibly disposable) knowledge intake).

While not all decisions are as obvious as the above, here is an exercise to make assigning values easier:

The next time you have to do something (Clean the house, do Supermemo, attend class on time, etc.), ask yourself: If I could pay someone money to do this activity for me, how much would I pay them?

Try doing this as you think of various projects and activities that you need (or wish) to do. The better you get at assigning number values to your activities, the more objectively you can view your decisions as a whole.

This (And the things I'm going to post in the future) has been helpful in accomplishing tasks preventing me from learning more. After all, the quicker you can trick your brain into doing things you have to do leaves more time remaining for things you want to do.

1 comment: