Third in a series of short rationality prompts.

My opening rationality move is often "What's my goal?".

It is closely followed by: "Why is this hard? And, what can I do about that?".

If you're busting out deliberate "rationality" tools (instead of running on intuition or copying your neighbors), something about your situation is probably difficult.

It's often useful to explicitly enumerate "What's hard about this?", and list the difficulties accurately, and comprehensively^[1], such that if you were to successfully deal with each hard thing, it'd be easy.

Then, you have new subgoals of "figure out how to deal with each of those hard-things." And you can brainstorm solutions^[2].

Sometimes, those subgoals will also be hard. Then, the thing to do is ask "okay, what's hard about this subgoal, and how to do I deal with that?"

Examples

I'll do one example that's sort of "simple" (most of what I need to do is "try at all"), and one that's more complex (I'll need to do some fairly creative thinking to make progress).

Example 1: Bureaucracy while tired

I'm trying to fill out some paperwork. It requires some information I don't know how to get. (Later, it might turn out that the information requires navigating an opaque, badly designed website, and then I have to do some kind of annoying math operation on it)

Also, I didn't get enough sleep and am tired. My eyes are sliding off.

Default outcome: "ugh, this sucks", bouncing off, intermittently trying to work at it and then screw around on Facebook, neither successfully having fun nor completing the form.

What's hard about this? Well:

I'm tired, so I have less focus
I don't know where the information is.

Trying to deal with both of those at once feels overwhelming. But, now it's more obvious I could split them up and deal with each separately.

#1. I'm tired

Let's start with this, since it'll be a force multiplier on the other one. How might I deal with it? Well, I do some Babbling / Metastrategic Brainstorming, and I come up with:

Drink some water
Do a couple jumping jacks and jiggling my face around.
Take a nap.
If none of that works, find a friend to sit with me and help me focus.

I try drinking some water. I'm still tired. I try doing a couple jumping jacks. I'm still tired.

Recursion: Turns out taking a nap is Hard.

Take a nap? Ugh, that'll take awhile and I'm kinda shit at napping and I just drank 2 red bulls. I don'...

Step by Step Metacognition