Quantified Son

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Today my ADD took me on a very interesting journey which may end up destroying itself once for all! The idea is to design our own experiments for behaviour change by quantifying the change we wish to make resulting in the vastly improved (but perhaps unbearable) Quantified Self! A lot of tracking the good and bad behaviours is involved. But, someone has eliminated coffee with such ideas and someone else has proved butter makes you smarter!

For example, I know searching for papers related to my research frequently has me easily distracted by easily digestible but useless sites (duh!). But, if I can quantify how much, how long I was distracted and how much better I worked when I desisted, I might end up enhancing my productivity (and lose the ability to gather interesting tools forever! Hey, is this why youngsters who are a lot less disciplined at work end up changing the game altogether far more often than less-young-fogeys like me?). Of course, keeping track of all the focus and non-focus time itself is a distraction.

Maybe I could use this to improve all of my son's bad habits which drive me up the wall too - not packing his school bag, leaving his books all over the place and making me buy replacements, losing toys and sobbing his heart out, forgetting to take a bath etc... etc...

I am going to try and quantify surfing time during planned work. And get Gau to improve any one of the zillion things causing a meltdown in our evenings. I have to quantify one thing in terms of more time for Lego/ reading a new series.

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