First off lemme address all the ways this fails.  It requires so much.  It requires that your work is programming.  It requires that someone you’re cowroking with has similar programming experience to you.  It requires you trust this someone enough to know all the tiny details of your project.

If you haven’t pair programmed before check out wikipedia for all the benefits of pair programming.  Basically the idea is that you put two programmers onto one computer and come out with more productivity than the two working alone.  So how would this work for co-working?

The Idea
Find a programmer you are coworking with and make an agreement with them that every day or every two days or every week you will switch off between pair programming on both of your projects.  That’s it!  In theory both projects will end up getting done faster.

What do you think?  I know it’s insane but it might actually work.  For a slightly less crackpot coworking idea read The Coworking Pact

So of course pair programming only works for programming and only works if two people have the same programming goal.  How can we generalize this?  Let’s start by sitting as closely as possible to someone else, so that you are able to see their screen without turning your head much.  This would probably help a little because you know the other person can easily verify whether you’re procrastinating or not.  But I want to take things even further.

The Coworking Pact

• What should you be working on today and what does this generally consist of?
• What are activities you should be doing NONE of? (IM, reading hacker news, youtube, etc)
• What are activities you might need to do but should be minimized? (Email, things like that, maybe provide set times for when you will be doing them)

Both coworkers should go through this list at the beginning of the day and make an agreement that they will hold eachother to what they answered.  They should then shake on it so that the agreement holds more cognitive weight.  Now throughout the day if one coworker catches the other doing something they shouldn’t be doing they should kindly remind them about the agreement.

So that’s it, just my little attempt at a solution for procrastination.  An additional thought is you might be able to achieve the same thing with two remote people using VNC or something similar (maybe even using an extra monitor just for their screen).

What do you think?  Any thoughts on additions to the pact?

There are lots of people who don’t know this.  If they want a favor from you they may first engage you in a pointless conversation about how your life has been since you last talked.   Or worse they may try to make you feel like you owe them something by casually mentioning some past thing they did for you or how you had a great time together in the past etc.  After which they will hit you with the favor.

This strategy is stupid and runs the asker the risk of sounding like a user.  Basically any nice conversation or good feelings which occurred pre-ask might now potentially be nullified.  After the asker makes his request you will probably think, “Wait, was all the stuff before this just bullshit so I would say yes?”  The thing is, it doesn’t matter if it wasn’t bullshit.  Even if it was genuine reminiscing of the good old days the recipient of the favor request may suspect it wasn’t.  It basically cancels out everything before it.

What’s annoying is that some genuine people seem to believe this is actually the “correct” way to ask for favors.  So even though they have good intentions they come off sounding bad.

So ask first.  That’s right, pick up the phone or open the email/IM window and ask for the favor.  State the importance of it and how grateful you would be if they accepted.  Assuming you are asking for something within reason and you have a legitimate relationship with the person you’re asking they will probably say yes.  If they say no tell them to fuck off.  So after they say yes, it’s time to proceed with reminiscing about the good old days, or ask how their life has been, and if it sucks, to commiserate with them.  And of course before finishing the interaction thank them multiple times for granting you the favor.

If done properly you should come out way ahead.  The person will feel good about the interaction even though they are going to be putting themselves out somewhat to grant you the favor.  It will feel genuine.  The reason is they know you stuck around without actually having to.  They said yes to the favor, you could have just said “great thanks bye.”  But instead you stuck around and acted like a real friend, as you should.

Now this isn’t a universal strategy for favor asking.  It’s a long term relationship based strategy.  It will end you up with more people willing to do favors for you over a long period of time.  This would likely beat out any super manipulative short term strategy which might get you a short term win but will leave the favorer with a bad taste in their mouth and unlikely to ever favor with you again…  unless you manipulate for a living.

One thing I think we can agree on is that your personality is affected by others.  If everyone treats you like a king you’ll end up acting different than if everyone treats you like shit.  Also, I think we all know that people make immediate judgments based on looks.  Usually the better looking someone is the better the judgement of them.  We attribute good innate values to attractive people, there are psychological studies which show this.  Of course there is some point at where it switches and works in the opposite direction, damn haters.

Anyway, so we can conclude that our personalities are affected indirectly by our looks through how people treat us based on them.  Now this phenomenon has been around since the beginning of time.  Because we could always take a look at someone and judge them and treat them accordingly.

But mirrors fucked it all up.  I really think people underestimate the affect that the mirror had on society.  Mirrors allow and actually FORCE us to judge ourselves based on our looks.  The brain didn’t evolve with mirrors around so when it sees that person in the mirror it’s going to use the same judgement heuristic it used when you look at someone else.

Good or bad?  Obviously that depends on how you look.  I think what mirrors have basically done is magnified the issue.  If you look good you can look in the mirror 10x a day and enhance your ego.  If you look like shit every time you get up in the morning and look at yourself your brain is going to make a bad judgement about you.

So I guess what I think mirrors have done is locked people more into their aesthetic stereotypes.  Aesthetic stereotype being “looks hot”, “looks like an idiot”, “looks like a criminal”, “looks fugly”, etc.  Before mirrors we have: looks -> people judge -> people act accordingly -> you are affected.  With mirrors we have: looks -> you judge yourself.  The effect is immediate.

Of course maybe I’m wrong and the effect of other peoples’ actions based on their judgement based on our looks is much much greater than our own judgement of ourselves.  But I would bet that the mirror factor is definitely NOT negligible.  Which sucks because it means we have less of a chance to break out of our aesthetics and live more freely.

There’s some other stuff I wanna say about this but I’m not really too solid on it yet.  So I’ll leave it for later.

So a few years ago I first wondered how maybe some people, consciously and on purpose, trick themselves into believing in a supernatural based religion.  People who would normally be too “smart” or rational to believe in one.  Maybe you could even call it brainwashing oneself.

I understand the benefits that come from believing in a god or a heaven.  And I’m sure there are plenty of smart atheist people out there who understand them too.  So my question is, when the lives of people like this get so fucked up do some of them make the conscious decision to believe in god?  I mean I know most people would say yea that’s just called “accepting Christ” or whatever.  But I’m talking about someone going from full hardcore athiest to full on hardcore god exists.

The thing is, the more you believe in something like god and heaven, the bigger the psychological benefits.  If you hardcore believe you are going to heaven and all your dead friends and family are there waiting for you, you’re not gonna care about getting old and dieing too much.

On the other hand, if you believe this, but you accept that everyone has their own religious views which should be respected, and religion should be confined to churches and separate from the state, etc, etc, etc, there’s going to be some part of your brain which isn’t fully immersed and hasn’t fully accepted this god/heaven reality.  And therefore you aren’t going to get the full benefits.

So I guess what I really wonder is how many of the religious crazies out there used to be normal people with sucky lives who one day made a decision to become a religious crazy because they realized it would make them really happy?

This seems to bring up an interesting phenomenon.  That they have to forget that the way they arrived at being a religious crazy was through conscious choice.  They have to reject everything they believed before.  And the most interesting part is, when they are trying to convince you to believe in their religion they can’t entice you with the real reason they believed in it.