London Meetup (04 August 2013) - Achieving Better Goals

[kerspoon]

LessWrong London are having another awesome meetup and we would love for you to come!

The plan is to meet at The Shakespeare Inn, 200m from Holborn Underground at 2pm on Sunday 4th August. We will officially finish at 4pm but honestly people tend to enjoy it so much they want to stay longer, and regularly do. We will have a sign with the LessWrong logo on it so you can find us easily.

This meetup is all about creating goals and turning them into actionable objectives. If you went to Rikk's Meetup then hopefully you already have a few goals in mind but don't worry if you didn't.

If you have any questions, or are thinking of coming, feel free to email me. Otherwise, just turn up!

Hope to see you there,

James

P.S err on the side of turning-up, we're friendly, and it's fun :)

"Through rationality we shall become awesome, and invent and test systematic methods for making

people awesome, and plot to optimize everything in sight, and have fun."

http://lesswrong.com/meetups/p1

https://www.facebook.com/events/619123764788137

[kerspoon]

Looking forward to seeing everyone at 2pm this Sunday. Here is a rough plan on what I plan to cover:

1. Finding goals for yourself.

2. Making them a better fit of what you actually want to do (rather than things that sound good).

3. Turning those goals into tasks you are actually likely to do.

[kerspoon]

Follow-up for the 4-August-2013 Meetup. 

Before I get to the body of it:

• We had a number of new people! I hope all of you enjoyed it.
• Sequences are really long. We could put it into an RSS/mailing list so you get given one to read at regular intervals to hide the enormity of the task.
• Someone (I'm sorry but I have forgotten your name), wanted to present his ideas for a book to us, it seemed highly relevant to our general interests so I'm happy for that to be a starting point for a meetup (20 min presentation then questions until they peter out then descend into a normal social meetup. Do people agree that this is good?
• Phil had kindly agreed to organise September and Paul will probably take on October. Plus I think we might have a new organiser for November - here's hoping.
• It was harder than I thought to present the session, but I thought it would be pretty easy. I think this was because I am used to public speaking but not where you are asking people to do stuff there and then. There were quite a few points where the majority had blank expressions due to a poor explanation by me. There is nothing I think I need to do about it, just an observation. 
• It seems like improving public speaking is becoming a common desire of our group. I propose having a meetup which we run TED talk style. Each person has X mins to talk on a subject of their choice. Any thoughts?
• The talk at the end was varied and I didn't end up taking notes. There was a fun discussion on information hazards, on acclimatisation or resetting a baseline of fear to an event - either by throwing yourself into something so bad that everything else is good by comparison or by gradually having good experiences with smaller levels of the scary thing. 
• I agreed to have a follow-up on this talk in a couple of months time. I probably want to do this before I go to the states. 
• The format of introducing people and getting everyone to say something that has been on their mind recently is a very good thing. It gets everyone saying something. I also liked the cultural-habits part where we say the things we are trying to foster.
• I think we are getting to a point where we could do more than one a fortnight. What do people think? 
• It was a huge plus to hear a couple of people come up to me afterwards and say thanks. Thank you :)

On to the talk itself. The format was:

1. I started at about 5 or 10 past. We did introductions and everyone says something that was on their mind recently. 
2. I talk about the sources for these ideas and introduced everything we would be doing. We all sat on one table and I told people what to write about at each stage.
1. 15 mins to write down prompts to help them make a list of goals. 
2. write down goals.
3. write the reason each goal is there until you get back to "it makes me happy"
4. etc. for each stage in the attached document.
3. It took less than 2 hours to do the entire thing. We then declared victory and descended into normal chatting. 

Attached is the document used.

The sources are from the list below (plus two year of small tweaks by myself):

• What Color is your parachute
  
• The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
• Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals by Heidi Grant Halvorson
• the procrastination eqn. -- http://procrastinus.com/
  
• http://gettingresults.com/wiki/How_To_-_Set_Goals_and_Achieve_Them
  

Questions:

1. Would you turn up to a mid week lesswrong meetup at someone house?
2. Would you like a meetup where a handful of people present a 10 min talk each? would you want to talk there?
3. What do you think about the sequences RSS/e-mail list. Get one article each few days -- for new people to the site.

Thanks for coming everyone. 

See you next time

James 'kerspoon' Brooks

[Rikk Hill]

Thanks for presenting this, James.  I found it really useful, and I'll be going through it in more depth on my own.

> It seems like improving public speaking is becoming a common desire of our group. I propose having a meetup which we run TED talk style. Each person has X mins to talk on a subject of their choice. Any thoughts?

I'd be very keen to do this.  On a related note, something Phil and I were talking about at a recent Reddit pub-visit was use of the Radio 4 game Just a Minute for training verbal fluency.  While I think the specific rules of Just a Minute are probably a bit harsh, some sort of variant (or other improv-style games) would probably be useful for this purpose, if people were interested.

> I think we are getting to a point where we could do more than one a fortnight. What do people think? 

I'd be keen on this. The general structure of "spend a set amount of time working on something structured, then descend into anarchy" seems to be working pretty well.  More frequent meetups would allow more specialisation / further exploration of those topics, and be useful for people whose weekends often get eaten up by other things.

If we're going to start having more meetups, we'll probably want to decide early on how we're going to publicise and keep track of them.  At the moment we manually put it on here, on Facebook and the LW site.  That's not going to upscale well.

> Questions:

>

> Would you turn up to a mid week lesswrong meetup at someone house?

Time permitting, yes.

> Would you like a meetup where a handful of people present a 10 min talk each? would you want to talk there?

Yes and yes.

> What do you think about the sequences RSS/e-mail list. Get one article each few days -- for new people to the site.

Sounds good.  Even for people who aren't new, I think there's benefit to be had from re-reading them at this sort of pace.

[James Brooks]

I have just messaged my friend who teaches improv. It might be useful to get her along to teach a workshop/games/fun things. 

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[Steve Todorov (Tenoke)]

>Would you turn up to a mid week lesswrong meetup at someone house?

Yes

Also if you run out of organizers I wouldn't mind doing it.

[Ramana Kumar]

On Mon, Aug 5, 2013 at 11:40 AM, kerspoon <kers...@gmail.com> wrote:

1. Would you turn up to a mid week lesswrong meetup at someone house?

Yes.

2. Would you like a meetup where a handful of people present a 10 min talk each? would you want to talk there?

Yes. Yes, depending on topic.

3. What do you think about the sequences RSS/e-mail list. Get one article each few days -- for new people to the site.

Good idea (even for not-new people).

[miles.d...@googlemail.com]

>Someone (I'm sorry but I have forgotten your name), wanted to present his ideas for a book to us, it seemed highly relevant to our general interests so I'm happy for that to be a starting point for a meetup (20 min presentation then questions until they peter out then descend into a normal social meetup. Do people agree that this is good?

Sure.

>I think we are getting to a point where we could do more than one a fortnight. What do people think?

Aye.

>Would you turn up to a mid week lesswrong meetup at someone house?

Yep.

>Would you like a meetup where a handful of people present a 10 min talk each?

Yes.

>would you want to talk there?

Not in the foreseeable future (though that might change if inspired by others' talks).

>What do you think about the sequences RSS/e-mail list. Get one article each few days -- for new people to the site.

If this could be done easily, it might be a good idea with peer engagement, e.g. if it were integrated into meetups (e.g. to have some meetups have posts associated with them, e-mailed over the preceding fortnight, which seed discussion at the meetup). If people were left to 'fend for themselves' with little peer interaction to reinforce/encourage reading, probably not worth setting up.

Thanks again, James. :)