Goal factoring

I have been following the Less Wrong Training Regime for a few days now. It is very interesting with some useful techniques around becoming more rational in general. Today I read about Goal Factoring. This is where you look at the actions you are taking on some sort of regular basis. Like going to the gym and figure out what goals they contribute to. Stronger joints might be an example here. Also things they detract from: going to the gym takes time.

There are a set of steps that you go through to really tidy up your goals and habits. It is a different way of approaching this for me. I often find that goals and habits become stale over time, so weeking out like this is good.

To help this process along and get a better understanding I decided to ask chat gpt to help me rafactor my learning Spanish goal. I have been working on this for up to an hour a day for most of this year and feel that my progress has stagnated a bit lately. The full conversation is here. Overall I really like this sort of input/guidance. It is easy to get into a rut with things like learning long lists of vocabulary. It is time consuming and ultimately can be an almost pointless video game of scoring points. Developing habits that you just do automatically is good, but they need to be checked and changed every now and again.

I started taking the advice today and really dug into the first paragraph of my Harry Potter book. It is a few months since I read that part and I found it much easier to understand, but there was still plenty to clarify. I have taken notes and will continue at this spot tomorrow. It will be great if this works, because learning spanish has been taking me a long time and I would like to use that time for something else, but not throw away all of the work I have done.