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## Week 3, 2023, “Week of Systems” report

### Introduction

Last week I worked on the issue of “life systems”, by which I mean systems such as to-do lists, good habits such as exercise, schedules, plans, that sort of thing. At various times in the past I’ve had various such systems, some working better than others. I used to make a list of the day’s goals every morning and cross them off throughout the day. I also keep a file called `life.org` where I keep track of to-dos and leads to look into at a later point and such. Other things I would consider “sytems” include my daily meditation practice and various attempts at regular exercise I’ve made in the past.

Keeping systems is hard because life is messy. Whole-life systems as these are truly all-encompassing, and thus they interact with all of life’s complexity. The Planning Fallacy turns any attempts at tying to-do lists and intentions to timespans and deadlines into an uphill battle. Changing your habits is famously hard. Unexpected things will happen with certainty; priorities change, capabilities fluctuate, problems spring up and solve themselves.

### Desirable Traits

The primary issue with life systems is therefore the overhead, the burden of maintenance, the stress. Rather than simplifying life, it is easy to add an administrative burden. In light of this, I’ve isolated the following properties that I think a good system should have:

- Simplicity. The overall system can not contain too many moving parts. In order to be simple to apply, it needs to be simple to explain; in order to be simple to explain, it needs to be simple.
- Smooth scaling. As life’s difficulties and my capacity to handle them fluctuate, the systems of my life need to be able to scale smoothly up and down. During tough times I need to be able to simplify my life to the most important parts; during better times I should be able to smoothly pick the rest back up where I left it. Implicit in this is also a hierarchy of priority, an order in which I drop things, a notion of what is least worthwhile at any given time.
- Malleability. As both my life and my understanding of it are liable to change, my systems need to be able to adapt with minimal burden. Because of this there ought to be few strict schemas; for, if the schema has to change, all data already within that scheme would have to be migrated.
- Evaluation. There needs to be some measure of how well things are going, in order to catch problems early and prevent catastrophic failure, and furthermore to optimize the system. Other constraints enforce simplicity here; a system of regular deadlines, for instance, would be too inflexible.

### Specifics and the Problem of Ends

The above is about as far as I got in terms of definitives. I did not start there; I started at neither the level of specifics nor of generalities, but in between, dealing with things such as “managing stress” and “measurability” and “dimensions of personal development”. At this level, however, it was far easier to write things down than to strike them through; easier to complicate than simplify, and I ended up with a basket of disjointed ideas, aims and cautions that I realized would be difficult to unify into a simple, coherent system. I was able to extract properties that the system should have, but not specifics of how the system should work.

To find the common thread and unify everything, I realized that rather than working on the level of means, I should be working on the level of ends; before figuring out how to do things, I should be clearer about what I want to get out of life. As such I’m putting the project of systems on semi-hold; I will follow up on some of the generated ideas, but put further contemplation on hiatus until the matter of ends is further clarified.

But what does that mean? Am I going to go off and go “find a purpose in life”? Will I come brandishing a grand life quest, next time I return to this topic? That is not my intention. Frankly, I don’t really know what an answer to this question is supposed to look like. Still, I don’t think I am getting anywhere simply by listing desirable things, how I originally approached this. It’s easy to list desirable things, such as physical health, mental health, a good social life, sexual satisfaction, material possessions, creative expression, learning, and so on and so on. Yet this does not converge - I can’t seem to manage to unify all this in a way that helps me set up simple systems for how to act. These axes are pluriform and largely orthogonal, so that including all of them would only helplessly overcomplicate the system; yet they have no obvious natural ordering, so the set cannot be easily trimmed.

This, I think, is the biggest open issue in this matter, the issue of motivations. It is not enough to simply enumerate things which would be desirable, without having a discriminator that can rank them. That is what I mean by “the problem of ends”. And yes, ultimately that resolves to the difficult question of what is the meaning of life? I fear that that might take more than a week to resolve, but hopefully a partial solution should still help me make progress.

### Assorted Raw Materials

What follows is more-or-less a brain-dump of generated ideas that do not fit in the earlier sections.

#### Weekly Themes & Reports

The astute reader will observe that this article itself, as a report on a weekly theme, itself constitutes a system. I have been playing with the idea of daily, weekly, monthly &c themes for a while; weekly themes seem like a good sweet spot. This is the first weekly theme so far, and I’m quite satisfied with it; having a theme gave me something to fall back on, something to work on when I didn’t know what I should be doing, something to keep in the back of my mind. Writing this kind of report on it is also helpful; it’s free-form enough that it’s not burdensome, yet the fact that I intend to report on my thoughts helps keep me focused and organized.

This gives me hope; it’s quite difficult to balance all the constraints on a good system, it’s hard to balance flexibility and structure, yet this system of weekly themes and reports seems to tick all the boxes.

#### Dynamic Automatic Recall of Intentions

I like to keep to-do lists, both short-term and long-term, but long-term lists can be hard to manage. It’s natural to add things to them faster than you can tick them off, it’s normal to have more things you want to do than you actually end up doing. However, unless you are very aggressive about cutting things out, this tends to lead to a large to-do list over time, with many things of low priority on it. This makes it much more effortful to maintain and to extract activities from it, defeating the purpose of a to-do list, which for me is primarily to get all of these things out of my head and onto a document.

It would be much better if to-dos were instead served up to me automatically, letting me choose on the spot how to deal with them. Options for “dealing with them” could be, for instance:

- Move them from long-term to-dos to short-term to-dos
- Delete them
- Ask again later

This way, I would not have to personally worry about forgetting anything; I would not have to manually sort through the long-term to-do lists. Metadata such as deadlines could also b eattached to the to-dos, though I need to be careful not to overcomplicate things.

#### Chatbot as UI

In context of the previous section I’ve been thinking about how to best send myself notifications. I’m sure there’s turnkey solutions for this, but the matter is personal and simple enough that I’d rather roll my own thing than rely and work around something readymade. I considered phone notifications and email notifications, but I found what I think would be a nicer interface: a Discord bot.

I use Discord to communicate with most of my friends, so it is under my eyes a lot of the time; furthermore, it allows for bidirectional communication with the bot, something which would be harder or at least clunkier with, say, email. I don’t like relying on a proprietary platform like Discord, but realistically I rely on it for the more important matter of communication with loved ones already, so I’m willing to compromise.

I would not want this to be the only interface, however; I would want the underlying data to be stored in a simple, human read- and writeable format. Currently I write to-dos using org-mode, and I quite like that experience, but I don’t know how I feel about having an automated program read and write to an org file.

#### Catastrophic Failure

I’ve spent a good chunk of time thinking about “catastrophic failure”. By catastrophic failure I mean the bad days, weeks and months. The times when you get nothing done. When you fail to wake up in the morning, brush your teeth, clean the house, exercise. When getting meaningful work done is not even on the table. I sketch here an extreme case; milder equivalents are possible.

The mechanism at play here two me seems two-fold. First of all, there’s a failure to measure; we push ourselves past the breaking point because we fail to realize that we are close to the breaking point. Second, there’s a failure to scale things. It really shouldn’t ever be the case that we fail to even take care of ourselves, surely we can muster at least that amount of bandwidth? We often spread ourselves too thin, we are reluctant to drop less important things for more important things, and end up failing at both. This helped me derive the desirable traits of evaluation and smooth scaling.

I am now armed with some principles for preventing catastrophic failure, but I haven’t made much progress on recovering from catastrophic failure. That’s still an important open problem. It’s important to have a plan for this scenario, because when we are in that deep dark well, it becomes very hard to muster the level of clarity and willpower necessary to climb back out.

#### The Matter of Mood

Mood matters. Inspiration matters. It is far easier, it takes far less energy, to do something we feel inspired to do, something that we are in the mood for, than something that’s a pain in the butt. This is a natural part of the dance of life, the chaos of existence, but my models currently do not take it into account. I have taken into account variations in the quantity of our capabilities, through the trait of smooth scaling, but I have yet to deal with variations in the quality of our capabilities and desires.

#### The Practice of the Practice

My meditation practice intersects strongly with this topic, yet I have not yet managed to marry them effectively. This is a very promising direction of thought that I fully intend to follow up on.

### Weekly Diary

This week was pretty tough, but I managed to mostly turn it around towards the end. I struggled with depression, loneliness and avolition. I dropped my daily meditation streak and indulged in too much cannabis. I spent a lot of time reading, mainly LessWrong. Having this weekly theme helped, since at least I was managing to make some progress on some things. In the end this report ended up being far longer than I had anticipated, certainly far longer than my notes for it, so I guess I made more progress in the end than I thought I did.

I struggled with all the things that this document is supposed to help resolve. Too many things I feel like I ought to be doing, too little progress on anything material. Doing nothing causes ennui, but choosing to do one thing over another feels pointless and arbitrary. It’s hard to keep many plates spinning, it’s hard to know where to start picking them up when you drop them.

### Next Week

I’m gonna leave this topic here for the time being. I don’t think I have what I need to continue the research, so I’m just gonna wait. I’ll try and follow up on some of the more actionable things, try and pick earlier systems of to-do lists and so on back up. I intent to follow up on the Discord-bot-as-planning-interface idea too.

I’ve been enjoying reading and learning a lot lately, so maybe next week (really, this week; it is Monday) will be the Week of Learning. I also want to try writing more. I’ll take it easy, keep things flexible and open-ended, not put too many expectations on myself.

### Closing Words

I feel a lot better now! Bringing myself to write for this blog was quite a hurdle, but overcoming it has energized me. I look forward to writing more. Bless you, dear reader. May you be happy, may you be at peace, may you be free from suffering. May you be kind to others, may you find meaning, may you be victorious.