Sunday, January 2, 2011

Efficient Independent Study


I recently dropped out of university. The degree wouldn’t have been useful enough and I can just learn inpedendantly, after all.
Other than just reading good and reliable websites I think I have discovered some useful tools for doing this. Many of these attempts at efficient multitasking. I think that a lot of people are fairly skeptical of multitasking but I think that many of combinations of activities are seamlessly efficient and sometimes even compliment each other. I do think that some of my love of multitasking (and I am confessing it is a love) comes from primitive thrill that I get from doing some several times as efficiently as another person and I sometimes am a bit naive and try to combine too many. 
General:
1. Audiobooks
I find my attention span is good enough to do light research or other do other things that people do on the internet (yes, that too) while listening to audiobooks. 
2. Music
I really like metal and I would like to familiarize myself with more. So I often listen to metal while I am doing activities that are to attention consuming for me to listen to audiobooks for. I also occasionally listen to metal at the same time as I listen to audiobooks this requires me get the volumes right but I should really do this more often.
Specific combinations:
1. Watching a movie while working out.
Maybe I just don’t like sitting still, but this is a case where I feel that the activities genuinely compliment each other. I have now got myself into a routine (a regiment) where I will not watch a movie without working out at the same time. I like movie so this encourages me to work out more than I normally would.
2. Working while listen to an audiobook
If you can do this at your job then do it. It will make you enjoy your job so much more. I see this potential for a number of jobs, consider it for yours.

Mentalistic Terms

Being depressed, I often get into conversation to cheer myself up. I form some bothersome pseudobeliefs about my self and about events relating to myself and I talking with people can often shake these. I call them pseudobeliefs because they are temporary and not usually as “strong” as regular beliefs. The problem is that I am never sure if I should respond at the level of the pseudobeliefs or the beliefs for the conversation. I am not aware of a social custom or set of common by-words that would let me signal which one of these I am operating on. 
I think that other people have the experience of these two different sorts of beliefs and don’t usually distinguish which track they are running on. It’s easier that way but as someone devoted to precision I can’t much tolerate it. I think that the best way to get these distinctions to stick is to make new words that apply to the disjuncts or make new expressions to do likewise. In the age of the internet we are in I would suggest that second would be more realistic. Something catchy that would be at home on urban dictionary would be good bet.
I’m not actually sure how helpful this distinction would be for people who do not have some intrinsic desire to clarify communication like me, I document this case more as a description of a process I think is useful; even if this case is not useful I think that it is certainly the case that more mentalistic terms would be useful.