Exobrain

A lot of my brain lives in the cloud. Here are some random observations on that.

e.g. a lot of my executive function is simply outsourced to Beeminder, with a variety of data sources feeding it so that it mostly passively integrates with my life.

Tagtime life:

• I have tagtime running on my android phone
• It pings me on average every half an hour
• I only use it to feed beeminder goals
• When I'm focused it's really not distracting at all - I just respond then go back to what I'm doing
• When I'm unfocused it's a nice nudge to get back into focus - "Hey, watcha doing?" "... procrastinating"

Tagtime is amusing. Sometimes it forces me to read for two hours to score the 0.4 stochastic hours I need to complete my goal. Sometimes (like right now) I get 1.2 stochastic hours on three different goals (business, email and todoist) for writing a ten minute email.

I'm in the process of shutting down the part of my exobrain that forces me to post here regularly. I will probably keep posting here irregularly, but it's currently of unclear benefit for me given my current normal-blogging rate.

Interesting exobrain thing I'm currently doing: A weird experiment for beeminding caffeine.

Historically complex experiments like this don't really work for me and I'm not entirely sure why. This one plays to a fairly established "streak" effect though so I've some degree of hope.

A surprising amount of my exobrain lives in email. It basically functions as my external memory for a lot of things.

Between that and calendar it's distressing how much of mind lives in Google.