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Ask HN: What are your “brain hacks” that help you manage everyday situations?

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Re: Ask HN: What are your “brain hacks” that help you manage everyday situations?

#311
post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

0) Keeping one's mouth shut. Trying to not have an opinion until a) having enough information b) only voicing it if it is important. I am trying to spend more time perceiving instead of broadcasting.

You should avoid voicing a judgment, but you can certainly air your thoughts and opinions as they arise. Just be open to being convinced.

exactly. if everyone is just in "absorbing" mode, who to listen to.

Re: Ask HN: What are your “brain hacks” that help you manage everyday situations?

#312
Those have been helpful for me:

- Everything as practice (great thread IMO https://www.reddit.com/r/getdisciplined/comments/8zf5uw/need...)

- “Without adversity there is no advance”, just offer the boring parts of your job as sacrifice or use as mindfulness practice, or execute them now with 100% of your attention (eg making coffee at the office say)

- Don't complain about stuff you can do in two minutes (mentally), just do it and be glad to serve others instead. This has been a great "energy conservation" trick for me, when I can do it..

- Remember Parkinson's Law...

- Just start it, a few minutes is enough. If you can cross a first small task in the beginning, that will get you going. (read here I think: https://sivers.org/book/PersonalMBA)

- Set a maximum time for some task (20min, say - good if a little unrealistic) and work with 100% intent/focus (But I can't work 8 hours like this...)

Re: Ask HN: What are your “brain hacks” that help you manage everyday situations?

#313

The attention deconcentration technique developed by Oleg Bakhtiyarov is very easy and efficient. I'm not sure if there are any good practical intros into it available in any language but Russian though (those of you who understand Russian an easily find some introductory videos on YouTube).

Tell us more, no good links on youtube (English).

Re: Ask HN: What are your “brain hacks” that help you manage everyday situations?

#316

Avoid negativity, Learning to recognize toxic people and situation would be the hack. Then exiting quickly not to return. My life is an order of magnitude better after cutting off two toxic friends and actively avoiding new toxic people and situations.

What are the red flags to quickly bucketize relations into toxic?

Re: Ask HN: What are your “brain hacks” that help you manage everyday situations?

#317
post #72

I break down hard problems I am working on into steps. https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge/blob/master/rese... And I write down and refine many rules for myself to follow in life. https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge/blob/master/focu... Eating whole food plant based diet, fasting daily for 13 hours and drinking only water and tea also greatly helped my ability to focus. I also do some exercise on my au…

thanks a lot for sharing this. I have accumulated somewhat similar notes over last couple of years but never got to a point where I was able to follow my own checklists. Often times I am too lazy to open the checklist on a web page.

I wish there was a simple app where I can keep these repeatable checklists and summon them at will depending upon the context.

Re: Ask HN: What are your “brain hacks” that help you manage everyday situations?

#318
post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

0) Keeping one's mouth shut. Trying to not have an opinion until a) having enough information b) only voicing it if it is important. I am trying to spend more time perceiving instead of broadcasting.

I do this too and it works great in personal contexts cause people love sharing their opinions and hearing themselves talk generally speaking. This is in stark contrast to the workplace where I've experienced that keeping my mouth shut in a meeting to gather my thoughts before contributing a well informed opinion, the loudest person in the room has already spoken a handful of times and left their mark and then contin…

(SME = Subject Matter Expert, presumably)

Re: Ask HN: What are your “brain hacks” that help you manage everyday situations?

#320
post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

0) Keeping one's mouth shut. Trying to not have an opinion until a) having enough information b) only voicing it if it is important. I am trying to spend more time perceiving instead of broadcasting.

I do this too and it works great in personal contexts cause people love sharing their opinions and hearing themselves talk generally speaking. This is in stark contrast to the workplace where I've experienced that keeping my mouth shut in a meeting to gather my thoughts before contributing a well informed opinion, the loudest person in the room has already spoken a handful of times and left their mark and then contin…

> Anyone else experience this? Got any tips?

Sometimes. Some things i do to ensure correct question-answer contexts:

- When in a meeting with (loud person pushing) wrong answers, ask the right questions.

- People dont understand the answer if they dont understand the question.

- Use the above to give the obvious correct solution within their context.

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