by Ben Gose
The Chronicle of Philanthropy, November 3, 2013
Sam Bankman-Fried, who will graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the spring, recently aced an internship at a finance company, and he thinks he could make a nice salary putting his math skills to work on stock-trading strategies.
But Mr. Bankman-Fried is even more keen on making the world a better place, and he’s passionate about animal rights. He has considered pursuing work at the Humane League, a charity that focuses on reducing cruelty to farm animals.
The main problem in learning a new skill is maintaining the required motivation and discipline, especially in the early stages. Gamification deals with this problem better than any of the other approaches I’m familiar with. Over the past few months, I’ve managed to study maths, languages, coding, Chinese characters, and more on a daily basis, with barely any interruptions. I accomplished this by simply taking advantage of the many gamified learning resources available online for free. Here are the sites I have tried and can recommend:
Am I missing anything? Please leave your suggestions in the comments section. Thanks!
This post summarizes chapters one to three of The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything… Fast, by Josh Kaufman. These chapters introduce a number of general principles of rapid skill acquisition and effective learning. The remaining chapters, on yoga, programming, touch typing, go, ukelele and windsurfing, are meant to illustrate how the author applied those principles to learning each of these skills. As one reviewer has pointed out, however, there is “relatively little connection between what [the author] writes about (say) the history and practice of Yoga and the principles expounded in the first few chapters.” For this reason, these chapters are omitted in the summary below.
When I started this blog, I expected to post material–such as bibliographies or recommendations–which I thought people wouldn’t be interested in commenting on. Since then, I have posted some items which have inspired a few folks to contact me in private. So I’ve now decided to enable comments.
Over the past few months, I’ve spent quite some time transcribing talks and conversations by effective altruists, and have in the process gained some experience from which I think others might benefit. The instructions below were originally written for a friend.
You may transcribe the recording yourself, or you may pay other people to do the transcribing.
Though I’ve never calculated how long it takes me to transcribe a conversation of a given duration, it is generally estimated that it takes five hours of work to transcribe an hour of audio. With only a few exceptions, these days I only transcribe myself conversations that contain confidential information, since the costs of paying someone else are comparatively low (see below). Here’s how I do it:
“In some countries, there are people whose job it is to waste their own time for people who can afford to pay not to waste their own.” (Robert Levine, The Power of Persuasion, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2003, p. 74.)
Satvik Beri first drew my attention to Amazon Mechanical Turk, where one can hire workers to transcribe audio recordings for about USD 0.30 per minute. This blog post provides detailed instructions on how to do it. Alternatively, you can use specialized sites like Rev, which charge about USD 1 per minute. I have no experience with Rev, and strongly recommend trying mTurk before exploring other, more expensive options.
Of all the resources on productivity that I’m familiar with, these are the ones I’ve found most useful. If you think I’m missing something, please let me know.
The resources are listed in rough descending order of usefulness. I recommend going through these resources one at a time, starting from the first one, and proceeding to the next one only after you have succeeded in implementing at least the most valuable bits of advice.
I have created a public Anki deck [archived] including “cognitive distortions”, “ten ways to untwist your thinking”, and “ways to challenge automatic thoughts”, from David Burns’s The Feeling Good Handbook. I have also created a Google Form based on Burns’s “Daily Mood Log“. If you suffer from anxiety, depression or some related mood disorder, this may help.
Randy Pausch’s lecture on time management is, in my opinion, the best presentation on productivity techniques ever recorded. I have watched the talk at least half a dozen times, I learned something new and important on each occasion. The summary below leaves out the funny jokes and engaging stories, focusing exclusively on the actionable bits of advice.