spreadsheets
- Some of these have explicit templates, others are like "copy & make it happen yourself"
- Most of them take the form of being essentially "a way to track things, with the idea that tracking things in this unique way will shift your behavior in helpful ways"
- Duration Calibration - template
- a spreadsheet for executing the following workflow:
- pick a task
- estimate how long it will take (lower & upper bound)
- start a stopwatch
- start working on it
- when you finish working on it...
- log how long it actually took
- reflect on what factors made your estimate accurate or inaccurate
- Marks - template
- I made this sheet to optimize my grades in university based on exactly what was worth what in the syllabus.
- Initially this was to get as high grades as possible but eventually I realized Don't Pay For Options You Don't Want and that I didn't actually want anything that good grades would buy me, so after that I used it to strategically do the bare minimum and still pass.
- Led to this remarkable email exchange with my cognitive ergonomics prof:
- Prof: I do not see your term project submission online. Is there any problem? If you can, email me your file ASAP (penalty will be applied).
- Me: I have a lot on my plate at the moment and in ruthless prioritization it ended up getting cut, after I made sure that I would still be able to pass the course without it. I enjoyed learning about the various concepts in this course and expect that I will apply many of them when making design decisions for my tech startup. My product (Complice) is a productivity app, so the sections on attention and multitasking will probably be particularly relevant. It just made more sense for me to focus on actually improving my product than to write this paper, given that I have no intentions to go to grad school. I appreciate your understanding.
- Prof: I see. I understand. Best luck to your startup!
- (This made sense in my case because I was trying to spend as little time as possible on my studies so I could focus on building Intend ... but I think the spreadsheet is potentially useful for any student who wants to consciously orient to strategic gradeseeking.)
- honestly 5y after graduation I don't really see a reason not to make my entire sheet public, so here it is
- for the last 2-3 terms, you can generally assume that if I got more than 70% in a given course it was because I found it interesting (eg SYDE 332 or PHIL 371) or because it was a group-project-based course where underperforming would have been a dick move to my teammates (eg GENE 404)
- the final term actually included a few additional columns where I was not only tracking my grades but also how much or how little effort I spent on each task
- but that didn't work very well tbh
- Visual Budget - template
- concept: money is amounts. amounts take up space.
- having $1000 is the same size as owing $1000, but a different color
- visually you can see how your debts compare to your assets and your cashflow
- this template doesn't update everything as automagically as I would like, but that's limitations of google sheets only faking being a programming language
- in particular, conditional formatting color scales are WEAK
- they only allow a 3-color gradient
- they can't be selectively applied based on some other value
- and in order to use a variable for the endpoints, you have to intentionally include cells that have those variables in the range that you're formatting
- IDK why the values couldn't just themselves be expressions (which could reference cell values) rather than numbers, but here we are
- if you're a friend or twitter-mutual of mine and you'd like help setting this up, I'd probably find that interesting and worthwhile, so hmu
- my impression is that pocketsmith might be the closest thing that exists as an actual app, and it has lots of cool stuff that my spreadsheet doesn't have
- Lights - template
- original concept by Sebastian Marshall
- I made my own template for stylistic reasons, so I figured I'd include it here
- Bookantt Chart - template - my public sheet
- a chart of what I've been reading over time
- Others' spreadsheets:
3 linked references
May 30th, 2020
- decided to make a page to collect the various spreadsheets I've made