Date: Tuesday March 25

Time: 6:30pm-8:30pm

Location: The Green Door restaurant & bakery at 198 Main St

Themes: Executive Functioning / Productivity / Motivation / etc and, entirely separately, should our focus change in these changing times?

For context, we usually don’t stick to the topic(s) for the entire meetup and any resources / reading this week is totally optional. I’m not sure how much there is to discuss on either topic.

Topic 1: I was trying to think of a topic for this month’s meetup and one thing that came to mind is why I’m posting the event on March 11th instead of March 4th. I’m unemployed! What was I doing for the past week? Why didn’t I have time to edit down this event description? I’m not really driven by fiery motivation and I’m not confident that I’m prioritizing well. I’m curious how anyone gets anything done. This whole topic around functioning / productivity / motivation or related is interesting to me. Maybe we could share tips or resources.

I’m not sure if any of these are valuable resources per se. They are more things I have stumbled upon.

1. series of posts on executive functioning (I haven’t actually read them yet) https://www.lesswrong.com/s/oTMuc9C3KKdZ6FcCB Apparently they are in talk form here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLRHSmySTQ8

2. this topic was partly inspired by the first 24 minutes of this Cal Newport podcast on a minimum viable productivity system. He includes the concept of workload management, which I don’t think I do so maybe that would be helpful https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWKSf03Z_uc

3. the motivation equation https://mindfulambition.net/motivation-equation/

4. the Getting Things Done system, though I’ve never fully implemented it and I wonder if writing everything down results in me spending a disproportionate amount of time on small and easy tasks instead of big tasks https://gettingthingsdone.com/what-is-gtd/

Topic 2: When I was looking for topics I came across this short post, on the EA Forum, about whether we should orient more towards systems-level change as opposed to more targeted interventions, given the rapidly changing world. I think I want to rephrase this to something like “has the world changed in a way that changes our thinking on how to do the most good?” The ongoing and rapid pace of change probably makes this difficult to consider. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MWomDeHBi2D33PzRx/in-a-time-of-rapid-change-we-should-re-examine-system-level

The Green Door is a vegetarian buffet that charges by weight. A partial menu is available here https://www.thegreendoor.ca/pages/buffet-menu

I'll wear a shirt that says 'GiveWell' to help identify us.

You're invited to join us even if we haven't met before or you aren't sure what this effective altruism thing is all about. We'd be happy to meet you!