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Give "fake" meaning to your life (Just Another GOE Draft)

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Paul Keith:
Just another GOE draft from my notes. This one is purely a list and I never tied all the references together to create an article --- although the entries underneath each item was spontaneously type written for this topic.

Also: Fake meaning sounds like visualization-lite but it's different. Visualizations take effort and habit-formations and even the lite-techniques take repetition. Fake meanings on the other hand don't require work. In fact, you're already applying it in your life already. It's all about whether you want to or not. Sometimes authors throw in some additional questions as fluff or fake depth but that's something I won't include even if it does make the whole thing sound better. This thread is just here as a framework to say "Yes, it exists. Yes, you're doing it. Yes, you're not helpless to tweak it." and "here's some examples."

Be the HeroBook: http://www.amazon.com/Be-Hero-Powerful-Overcome-Challenges/dp/160509000X

Not a fan of the book's theme but it is what it is: A cleverly marketed, pocket sized, "written like fiction" book that probably comes off more useful than any of my comments in this thread.

I'm not shilling the book but it is what it is: The book is written as a motivational guide that also benefits your productivity.

This thread here is more about jump starting the discussion on the productivity concept + some examples without any real intent to produce a specific productivity guide.

Daily Astrology ReadingsThis was when I was using IGoogle and could read an entire section of Daily Horoscopes easily.

Casual people who put faith on generic readings already know this but I just modified this with productivity in mind. (i.e. I let the readings determine my day.)

It's also the Britney Spears of this concept. Tons of people do it already but they don't really think about it and don't really get the chance to optimize it for their lives.

24-hour SignificanceCopy paste

I follow a somewhat similar pattern in which each week day has a different significance.

Mon. is the day I focus my all totally on what I perceive as things to progress my life.

Tues. is the day I focus all my energies on Book Reading and other catching up on self-help topics.

Wednesday is the day I focus on improving my way of communicating with others. This can involve observing movies and reading non-fiction to writing stories and all that.

Thursday is what I consider catch-up day in which I focus all my energies on things I need to catch-up on.

Friday is what I dub a Sabbath version of a day in which I totally focus my entire day on resting including stopping most PC work by letting it scan for viruses and defragmenting and other low-key stuff.

Saturday is Review Day in which I do all my backups and catch-up on anything I want to reread, re-do or work on.

Sunday is what I called Riskless day in which given two choices, I choose the one where I just hang out. Say playing a game when i'm bored rather than learning anything or sleeping instead of trying to finish a videogame.

None of this is connected with any schedule I make and they're more like mindsets on how to approach the week but still I find it's ability to make me productive not as "accelerative" as I'd want to be. Maybe you could give some more hints on the troubles you encountered with your approach? That seems to be an underrated detail with articles of this theme.
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Apparently the method I listed here is called the Auto-Pilot schedule

My apologies for those who think I was copying a method without telling the name. I didn't know this method had a name already before I wrote it here.
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1st action after waking upSource: Cory Doctorow (forgot the direct source, it was a video with him and the xkcd artist about productivity)

Another common theme in fitness but underrated in productivity guides. The fogginess of waking up can often put you in the zone in whichever action you first start with.

I was tempted to make a list called "Morning Habits lite" but dropped it because it doesn't really work that way. After the 1st action, it's all on you and your productivity efficiency.

Btw, this works everytime you wake up. It doesn't matter if it's night time or day time. At least, from my short experience with this.

Use Tarot Card Significance as Priority DeciderSounds like a rehash of the above Daily Astrology trick but this one's more of an alternative to answering questions/brainstorming/someday/maybe/life mindmap ------> (You've encountered this if you read enough productivity guides)

I actually have a TreeForm doc of some of these questions but I haven't made time to learn the website yet and don't know how to make the file public so here's the Facade.com example of what I mean by tarot cards.

(P.S. I don't have any real experience with tarot card readers and so all my test of this has been with using Facade.com's free Q&A generator.)

Should I create the GOE give fake meaning to my life thread?

The point is to just self-interpret the results and then apply it to your actions.

I forgot the word but the reason the answers aren't important is because they work like this.

Yeah, same as Daily Horoscopes but the difference is that you get more of the professional 1-on-1 "answer to your question/task" effect as opposed to a generic daily recommendation.

It's mostly for people who set priorities but don't really get much out of those priorities and constantly set them inefficiently. Of course, there are probably better "hard" models to reference to but this is a good showcase of how you can put "fake" meaning in any segment of your productivity system.

Take advantage of archaic time modelMore of a reminder that clock time doesn't exist and you can cheat it any way you want despite the numbers written on your digital watch: (It definitely helps if you minimize hard schedules for necessary tasks and drop things like scheduled TV shows)

From:Technopoloy pg. 13-15

This is what Marshall Macluhan meant by his famous aphorism the "medium is the message". This is what Marx meant when he said, "Technology discloses man's mode when dealing with nature." and creates the "condition of intercourse" by which we relate to each other. It is what Wittgenstein meant when, in referring to fundamental technology, he said that language is not merely a vehicle of thought but also the driver. And it is what Thamus wished the inventor Theuth to see. This is, in short, an ancient and persistent piece of wisdom, perhaps most simply expressed in the old adage that, to a man, with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Without being too literal, we may extend the truism: To a man with a pencil, everything looks like a list. To a man with a camera, everything looks like an image. To a man with a computer, everything looks like data. And to a man with a grade sheet, everything looks like a number.

But such prejudices are not always apparent at the start of technology's journey, which is why no one can safely transpire to be a winner in technological change. Who would have imagined, for example, whose interests and what world-view would be ultimately advanced by the invention of the mechanical clock? The clock had it's origins in the Benedictine monasteries of the twelfth and thirteenth century. The impetus behind the the invention was to provide a more or less precise regularity to the routines of monasteries, which required among other things, seven periods of devotion during the course of the day. The bells of the monastery were to be rung to signal the canonical hours; the mechanical clock was the technology that could provide precision to these rituals of devotion. And indeed it did. But what the monks did not foresee was that the clock is a means of not merely of keeping track of the hours but also of synchronizing and controlling the actions of men. And thus, by the middle of the fourteenth century, the clock had moved outside of the walls of the monastery, and brought a new and precise regularity to the life of the workman and the merchant.

"The mechanical clock" as Lewis Mumford wrote, "made possible the idea of regular production, regular working hours and a standardized product." In short, without the clock, capitalism would have been quite impossible. The paradox, the surprise, and the wonder are that the clock was invented by men who wanted to devote themselves more rigorously to God; it ended as the technology of greatest use to men who wished to devote themselves to the accumulation of money. In the eternal struggle between God and Mammon, the clock quite unpredictably favored the latter.

Use simulation games to stress-test your productivity system for the masses:Just an idea I never really got to test.

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