Be Careful What You Think

In Western culture, it's commonly considered a sign of intellectual freedom and ability to think about and consider several points of view before advocating a certain one. In our world, it makes sense to debate the pros and cons of various opinions - the good and the bad - before coming to a conclusion.

But consider this - the way the human brain works, in order to evaluate whether something is true or not, you have to, for a moment, believe that is true. This is because our minds contain a model of how the world works. When considering a statement, we evaluate it by adding it to our model and then checking whether the model still seems valid or not. If it seems valid, we accept the statement as true. If it doesn't, we reject it as false.

This means that for an instant, in your worldview, that statement - however ridiculous - is true. And this affects us. The first time you think that thought, it affects you a little. The more you dwell on it, the more it affects you. The better the thought originally fit in your mental model, the stronger its effect on you.

For example - if you keep thinking of how much better your coworker Joe is than you at your job, then even if you don't actively obstruct Joe's work, there will likely come a day when you have the opportunity to hinder him without anyone finding out, and you will take it. Once you take it, hindering Joe in the future will become okay. What was once an immoral thing - something you might never have considered - becomes a real possibility. Additionally, if you are naturally a jealous person, or are in an environment where jealousy is the norm, your mental model will be more accepting of such thoughts, and your progress down this path will be faster.

Therefore, don't just be a vacuum cleaner, absorbing every piece of information that comes your way. Carefully evaluate what pieces of information will guide you towards being the person you want to be. Be a person who thinks good thoughts. Don't expose yourself to wicked ideas unless you have a good, solid framework that will help you discern the right from the wrong. The human brain is like a sponge - wipe it in muck and it becomes dirty. Dip it in clean water and it absorbs the water and even cleans itself. Be careful what you choose to put your brain in - be careful what you think.

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Creating simple logging "apps" with Google Forms

If you want to improve something, you've got to measure it first. Putting numbers on things helps us tame the wild waters of instinct and gut feeling. It helps us break things down and make them easy to understand. Numbers help us improve.

I've often felt the urge to create a means of recording something or the other in my life, and when I've had this urge, I've often fantasized about whipping out my Eclipse instance and putting together wonderful Android app that lets me record that thing and has a few dozen bells and whistles to boot. Of course, this never gets done, since I've never needed to record anything badly enough to create a dedicated app for it.

Recently though, I discovered a lovely shortcut to doing this, using Google Forms. I'm going to describe how to do that in this blog post. I mentioned in another article several ideas to help productivity. One of these was a recording what you eat and correlating productivity with it, so I chose that as my initial logging "app"/webpage.

Here's what the final result looks like:

This allows me to enter what I ate for dinner, breakfast, and lunch, and then in a 1-5 scale, rate how productive I felt at work and at home. The real trick was to keep the form simple. Once I conceived the idea of making this form, I wanted to add all sorts of bells and whistles - for example, if I wanted to track productivity, shouldn't I look at other major indicators? Maybe I should have a field for sleep, and another for any snacks that I ate. What if there were extenuating circumstances, like a friend visiting from out of state?

In the end I decided to include a catch-all "notes" field at the end of the form (not shown in the screenshot). I knew that if I made it too complicated, it would just be an excuse for me to procrastinate from filling it out at the end of the day when I'm tired anyway.

How to create the form

Step 1: Go to Google Forms and create a forms with the fields you want. In my example, I used type "text" for the breakfast/lunch/dinner fields, type "scale" for the rating fields, and type "paragraph text" for the notes field. This is what my "dinner" field looks like: 

Step 2: Make sure multiple responses per person are allowed in the form settings on the top of the page. 

Step 3: Go to File > Send Form. This will allow you to get the link to the form.

 

How to add the form to your phone

Step 4:  Copy the link and send it to your phone. You could just email it to yourself if you don't have a better way of doing it. 

Step 5: Open the link on your phone. On my Android phone, Chrome has the option to "Add to Homescreen":

If you tap that option, the OS will add an icon representing this form to your home screen. You can tap the icon, and it will open up your browser of choice with the form loaded! 

So there you have it - using this technique, you can make what is essentially a quick "App" to record any data you might want to on a daily or weekly basis in a convenient way using Google Forms. Whenever you want to check out your responses, and data logged so far, just log into your Google Drive, open up the form, and hit the View Responses button:

 

It might not be as neatly executed as a real app, but it will get the job done, and you can do it in five minutes, instead of spending hours coding an app!

Drop me a comment, letting me know what you use this technique for. :)

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Book Review: The Checklist Manifesto

I recently picked up The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande, recommended to me by rave reviews on Amazon. However, once I picked up the book, I felt like it left much to be desired.

I was really pleased, initially, that it was a mere 200 pages. I reckoned I could knock it out in a week, and I was right. The unfortunate part was that it felt like I really long article that had been fluffed up into a book. They key point the author is trying to drive home is that checklists are useful because humans are fallible and they make elementary mistakes. He does this through the use of many many anecdotes, spread across three industries - medicine, construction, and aviation.

The writing style of the The Checklist Manifesto is in the classic pop psychology fashion - riveting anecdotes told over the course of a chapter or so, punctuated by studies and statistics, often also told in an anecdotal manner. This isn't necessarily bad - the Gawande just doesn't have enough content to support it. Other, similar books have better structure. The Power of Habit is divided into three parts - the habits of individuals, those of organizations, and those of societies. Switch by Chip and Dan Heath has its three steps of change. The Checklist Manifesto is just barely meaningful meandering.

What The Checklist Manifesto does get right, however, is its core point. Atul Gawande is a surgeon, and as a software engineer it's hard for me to relate making websites to the life-or-death situations that surgery brings, it's easy to translate what he's advocating to developer terms - that in the end, human beings have limited cognitive capacity, and that the best way to unleash higher potential is to automate away the grunt work, so that more cognitive capacity can be spared for the really important stuff. Checklists are a means of such automation.

He also advocates checklists as a communication tool - the checklist becomes a tool of who needs to communicate what at different stages of the operation. This makes sure that everybody is on the same page regarding the operation, and allows anybody to bring up any concerns, and makes sure everybody knows all the relevant information before beginning the operation. He cites an example of one operation where something critical the anaesthesiologist should have known was only communicated to him because the checklist caught it. In this case, the patient might have died, had that critical piece of information not been communicated to the anaesthesiologist.

So long story short - the book is a nice, short read at 200 pages, but it could've been shorter still. Check it out The Checklist Manifesto on Amazon if you'd like to read it (disclaimer- that's an affiliate link).

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Lessons From Building My First Website

I made my first website at http://searchgovernmentjobs.org/ a few days ago - it's at a thin wrapper around a government API that I found at http;//digitalgov.gov. It allows you to search the government API for jobs using queries, examples of which I've included on the search page. The results are all from http://usajobs.gov.

My original intention was to just get something out there on the internet. In doing so, I learned some valuable lessons:

• I learned about DigitalOcean (disclaimer: referral link), based on a question I had asked on HackerNews
• I learned at least the basics of navigating the default Django stack that comes on a DigitalOcean Django droplet. See my post here for one such lesson that I learned. 
• I learned how to buy a domain name at 1and1.com. (disclaimer: referral link)
• Fun Fact: I had originally intended to name the site: searchgovernmentjobs.us - but it turns out that using the .us TLD forbids you from using the privacy coverage provided your hostname provider. It has to do with the rules of the organization that administers the .us TLD. 
• I learned how to configure the 1and1 DNS record to point to the nameservers at DigitalOcean
• I learned that there are Adsense alternatives. I'm using Chitika for the moment. (disclaimer: referral link)

Now that I have the site up, I'm going to look and see if I can do some SEO to get it up the ranks in search engine pages. Ideally, I would like the site to be self-sustaining in that it should pay for hosting and domain fees out of its own ad revenue, but I don't anticipate being very successful in this regard. The Jobs spaces is pretty filled up with SEO optimized sites and the keywords are very crowded. Nonetheless, I shall try, and in doing so, I may learn something about SEO.

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