friend asking me how to use claude for more productivity

when i used to use claude, i would ask claude to try to do something for me, like reviewing my spar applications. previously, i would have spent like 5-10 minutes prompting claude and asking claude to do research on people and wait until it is done with reviewing my spar applications, and then realize it did a shit job. instead of this, if i want to see if claude can do something better than me, i do spend 5-10 minutes prompting claude (which helps clarify my thinking), but then i just do the task manually instead of waiting / multi-tasking. this has been a big productivity unlock for me. this allows me to learn what claude is capalbe of, sometimes claude finds some information or thinks about the promblem in a different way than i do which is useful.



i get a lot of utility from claude by having claude make random automations for me. for example, it automatically creates a google doc for every meeting in my calendar using my own template.



claude-in-chrome is good if you need to send a lot of emails, i used it to try to find housing and blast emails that i dont care about



create a 'write-like-me` skill / md file that claude uses so it looks less like claude is writing your email. here is mine: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dDS9BckBfqUNrx4KtYtASoH4cDGrY9-Acp0f5WGXqw0/edit?usp=drivesdk



I create a lot of markdown files, if you create a lot of markdown files and want to turn them into google docs, you can use my plugin: https://github.com/MattHandzel/gdoc-sync

"if I want to do something, then make action on it immediately, otherwise it will never happen" rings true. There are a couple projects I wanted to do this summer (write a blog post on how one could 'import' as many AI safety people into the government, making Constellation healthier by biohacking, and a networking workshop. These things ended up not happening because it took too long for me to do action, they were not my main focus, so they were put on the backlog. What does this mean? If you want to do these side projects, make action on them immediately, or never do them at all. A similar principle is with responding to people.

Have up to 3 objectives, one for 3 areas of your life, and focus on those. If you add an additional thing to that area of your life, it will quarter the odds of the original item succeeding (this is probably not true, but its a useful model). "Beware your idle wants. Watch out for ‘other things that you also want’. They will feel comforting, harmless, and automatic. They are deadly. One new direction will quarter what you can accomplish."

Humans have many different desires and want to work in many directions. This happens at the small scale (distractions within their minds) and on an organizational scale. The purpose, therefore, of leadership, is to pick a direction and mobilize your team toward that direction. You need not choose the optimal direction. Most directions you choose will be better than the default

wow, I'm reading note [[2025-08-18T20:08:16.030962+00:00]] and I am cringing a little bit at what I wrote lol

I'm noticing im much more focused at work right now because of my walking meditation this morning

Something else that I just noticed is that the reason why having a cluttered desk is not very good is that every single object in your brain will process all the objects on your desk. Some sub-agents will want them to be salient and make you want to have intentions with those objects. I have a pillbox, and it makes me want to take my pills. I have a temporary badge, and I'm constantly reminded that I need to put this up. You take this and return this. There's trash on my desk. I need to throw away those things. I need to organize.

There's something you put that, so I actually understand now why having many items on your desk and having a messy desk leads to poor performance. That actually just makes sense now. Previously, people would say a messy desk means a messy mind, but that doesn't make any sense. It does not make sense to me that those are directly causal. If I had adopted this wisdom and followed it blindly, then I would have had the same outcome.

However, something that I've started to get better at is the skill of noticing when something does not make sense, or when I'm confused or surprised, and me digging a little deeper. If I had heard that for the first time, then I would have tried to understand why it is the case that a messy desk leads to a messy mind instead of automatically dismissing it. I could have come to the obvious realization that I just made right now. This is a skill I'd like to cultivate.

https://substack.com/@80000hours/note/p-172163183?r=5pmr42

An application that has a different philosophy when it comes to productivity

Its philosophy is quite different to other productivity philosophies. For example, every single day you're supposed to be choosing and doing a task rather than organizing your backlog of tasks that you've not done yet.
You focus, because every single day you focus on new tasks. You think, you come to mind what is most alive to you rather than capturing absolutely everything. Some things do not need to be captured and just do not need to be done.
The fundamental object is a goal rather than a task, so every single day you're focused on going towards your goals.
It's also proactive rather than reactive. You think about how you can achieve your goal today rather than just doing the thing, like identifying what you should do right now.

https://malcolmocean.com/about/

I'm noticing that I'm much better at noticing now when I'm writing something that just feels like I'm like an LLM. I'm writing the next thing and not actually what I actually mean. See that there are some parts of me that just want to say something that's pattern matching versus saying something that is actually from my head.

I'm realizing how different of a perspective I have now. When I'm reading this phrase, or, like, in the past, if I would have read this phrase, I would not have thought about that. Right now, when I think about Capital Technology, brand network effects, etc., they seem like concrete things that I could just improve on. I can kind of imagine myself looking at them to identify what is the bottleneck. I wouldn't, in the past, otherwise have done this.
"""
There are many ways to get this leverage, such as capital, technology, brand, network effects, and managing people.
"""

"The human default is to voluntarily accept constraints, convincing ourselves that they are mandatory. We choose to accept a set of expectations placed on us by others—or that we imagine others are placing on us. Then, we act as if we’re stuck indefinitely. We all forget our radical freedom as human beings, forget that the list of things we actually have to do is minuscule."

Right now, a large problem I have is I don't know how well I am doing. I don't know how I am performing compared to an expectation. I think I perform better if there is a clear line I know I can cross of "I am doing good work". If there are clear indicators of how well I am doing or progress, then I am very good at achieving them. When there is not obvious feedback, I struggle

everyone has a plan until their punched into the face
stress -> automaticity

oh wow, this means that if i want to get better at behavior change, I should want to decrease my acute stress and cortisol levels. i'm curious what other things I could influence/change such that i can improve/increase the rate of my behavior change. is it true that if i decrease cortosol ill feel 'more in control' and be able to direct my behavior so that i 'do the behavior i want myself to do' and 'change my beahvior (by building the "good habit"). are those statements true?
Are there ways I can measure cortisol, or just be able to sense it in my body?

No it actually isn't true. the goal with this exercise is to allow the brain/environemnt to choose what becomes a habit. by increasing cortisol, habits become more automatic, which is bad if you have some bad habits, but it is (maybe good?) if you have good habits (i can imagine stress may bias you towards things that are more rewarding right now).
"""
Arbitration. Something decides which system drives, roughly by relative uncertainty. The finding that matters most here is Schwabe and Wolf's: acute stress and cortisol bias control toward the habit system. So the system you'd want in charge when things get hard is the one that hands over the wheel when things get hard.
"""

What I am going to do with this is:
- write out to my interventions I'd like to implement log that I want to implement this behavior change
- add 'figure out how to decrease chronic stress + baseline cortisol" to my todo list, and my calendar.
-

Regarding hiring, there is this blog post, or this is just a note that Max Nadeau wrote about when he wrote about hiring. He wrote, "What are the differences between typical hiring and executive hiring?"

Typically, for executive hiring, there are few qualified candidates. You may know them well, and likely, of the top 10 candidates, there are at most two connections away because you're hiring for expertise in a particular field. These candidates are likely very busy. You'll be assessing their ability to succeed at tasks that take many months or years, such as managing people in teams, setting a strategy, and developing a research agenda. It's difficult, so trial tasks won't work for assessing their performance. More of the alpha is in persuading the very best people to be excited about the role rather than filtering in people.

The main changes regarding this and typical hiring are that you should do most of your filtering first. You should ask your network who is the best person for this particular role, get an informal reference from them, and then, before you reach out to the person, you should send them a message saying that there are fewer than 10 people that were excited coming through our networks. We'd like to have a call for you. This would make it a lot more likely that the candidate would want to engage with you because they have more than a 10% probability of getting the job. In this paradigm, references become more important.

https://custodienda.com/exec-hiring-is-different
https://themanagershandbook.com/hiring-and-onboarding/hiring-101

cultivating self awareness is to understand and identify my thoughts feelings and motions. If I am able to identify my thoughts, feelings, emotions and understand why they are happening, see what is causing it, then I will be self aware. Self awarenss is also realted to how much predictive power i have over understanding myself, what I am good at.
If I become very self aware, and be able to notice that I am staring on my phone, obsessing about the past, eating too much, or watching too much youtube and music, then I can identify what is causing that , and then solve ti.

For example, I've been listening to music while at the gym, what am i trying to run away from?

This is another connection to the book indistractable. They both believes we distract oruselves to avoid pain.
`
We avoid pain through distraction. We transport our minds to some other time or place or world where it can be safe and insulated from the pain of day-to-day life. We stare at our phones, we obsess about the past or our potential futures, make plans we’ll never keep, or simply try to forget. We eat, drink, and fuck ourselves into numbness to dull the reality of our problems. We use books, movies, games, and music to carry us to another world where no pain exists, and everything always feels easy and good and right.
`

when i read this essay as a 19 year old, part of me thought i was very self aware, but i don think that is actually very true. I am much more aware of my thoughts now. I likely was just comparing myself to my peers, i was begining to understand some parts of my self, such as understanding i had low self-esteem, but I wasn't able to observe many of my thoughts, feelings, and impulses. I also didn't do work to determine if they were grounded in reality or not

I have an interesting idea. I can take my speech and store it. Wispr Flow has stored all of my speech, or it's able to store some of my speech. I'm able to then take this speech and put it through Grammarly and then practice saying things more succinctly or correctly. I think this could be a way where I can improve my ability to speak.

that is so interesting. what i believe, or what feels true internally is actually what i experience/believe about the world.
"""
And it’s not just a basic good-evil axis. It can be about whether people are emotional/dramatic or calm/rational. It can be about whether people almost always discriminate or almost never do. It can be about whether they’re honest or liars, shun outsiders or accept them, welcome criticism or reject it. Some people think elites are incompetent parasites; others that they’re shockingly competent people who mean well and have interesting personalities. Some people think Silicon Valley is full of overpriced juicers, other people that it’s full of structured-light engines. And the people who say all these things are usually accurately reporting their own experiences.

Some people are vaguely aware of this in the form of “privilege”, which acknowledges different experiences at the cost of saying they have to line up exactly along special identity categories like race and gender. These certainly don’t help, but it’s not that simple – as proven by the article by that black Southerner who says she never once encountered discrimination. I’ve seen completely incomprehensible claims about human nature by people of precisely the same race, sex, class, orientation, etc as myself, and I have no doubt they’re trying to be truthful. The things that divide us are harder to see than we naively expect. Sometimes they’re completely invisible.

To return to a common theme: nothing makes sense except in light of inter-individual variation. Variation in people’s internal experience. Variation in people’s basic beliefs and assumptions. Variation in level of abstract thought. And to all of this I would add a variation in our experience of other people. Some of us are convinced, with reason, that humankind is basically good. Others start the day the same way Marcus Aurelius did:
"""

self help is wisdom, which is why it is quite difficult to implement, which is why it is better to read the same book 10 times then 10 books. if it was like knwoledge, then ti woudl be obvious to read me books. so, because self-help is wisdom, how can we actually implement it. why is wisdom so difficult to implement?
- it is general: because it is general, this means our brains cannot obviously pattern match to the right solution
- it is related to behavior change, and identity: this is harder to change, behavior change is mostly automatic, which is why 'knowing' is different than actually implmeneting

This means if I can make it easier to implement this wisdom, then i would be able to grow faster.

- id like to iplement a think week once a year, or a think weekend every so often. `Space to Read
We can take further inspiration from the example of CEO Bill Gates, who regularly (and famously) takes a regular week off from his daily duties at Microsoft simply to think and read. I once attended a question-and-answer session with Bill at the headquarters of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington. By chance he had just completed his latest “Think Week.” Though I had heard about this practice, what I didn’t know was that it goes all the way back to the 1980s and that he stuck to it through the height of Microsoft’s expansion.5

In other words, twice a year, during the busiest and most frenetic time in the company’s history, he still created time and space to seclude himself for a week and do nothing but read articles (his record is 112) and books, study technology, and think about the bigger picture. Today he still takes the time away from the daily distractions of running his foundation to simply think.

If setting aside a full week seems overwhelming or impossible, there are ways of putting a little “Think Week” into every day. One practice I’ve found useful is simply to read something from classic literature (not a blog, or the newspaper, or the latest beach novel) for the first twenty minutes of the day. Not only does this squash my previous tendency to check my e-mail as soon as I wake up, it centers my day. It broadens my perspective and reminds me of themes and ideas that are essential enough to have withstood the test of time.

My preference is for inspirational literature, though such a choice is a personal one. But for the interested, here are some to consider: Zen, the Reason of Unreason; The Wisdom of Confucius; the Torah; the Holy Bible; Tao, to Know and Not Be Knowing; The Meaning of the Glorious Koran: An Explanatory Translation; As a Man Thinketh; The Essential Gandhi; Walden, or, Life in the Woods; the Book of Mormon; The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius; and the Upanishads. There are a myriad of options. Just make sure to select something that was written before our hyperconnected era and yet seems timeless. Such writings can challenge our assumptions about what really matters.
`

I am going to do this this week and not use my laptop and just think:The sole purpose of the class is to create space for students to design their lives. Each week it gives them a scheduled excuse to think. They are forced to turn off their laptops and smartphones and instead to turn on the full power of their minds. They are given assignments to practice deliberately discerning the essential few from the many good. You don’t have to be at the d.school to practice these habits. We can all learn to create more space in our lives.

i wonder if there are techniques from those studying in law school (who need to soak up A LOT of context) that i can apply to studying up for the field of ai safety

One of the most effective uses of time is to figure out how to spend your time, what to focus on, then, once you know your priorities, get them done SUPER fast.
"""
Focus is a force multiplier on work.

Almost everyone I’ve ever met would be well-served by spending more time thinking about what to focus on. It is much more important to work on the right thing than it is to work many hours. Most people waste most of their time on stuff that doesn’t matter.

Once you have figured out what to do, be unstoppable about getting your small handful of priorities accomplished quickly. I have yet to meet a slow-moving person who is very successful.
"""

I found another point where I am incoherent! I am eating cake mama baked for me, and one part of my brain was chastizing myself and upset at myself for eating so much cake. I was unaware of me doing this for the most part! i realize i do it a lot! When I eat more than I think I "should" then i chastize myself, I don't enjoy it as much as I otherwise would. I tend to do this a lot. I have this constant negative background churn, that I think, ironically, I feel I need to quench with more food. lol

here is what i realize i do:

- i mentally compute how much i ate to know how i should feel about eating this piece of caramel
- i eat things quickly because if i eat things slowly, i prolonge the negative thoughts i have about eating this food.
- this is also maybe why its hard for me to eat too much when i'm not distracted, because the distraction prevents me from thinking the negative thoughts.

I was feeling tired, low focus, I went on a walk for an hour and I gained a lot of focus, now I'm ready to DEMOLISH my assay. I think this may have been a causal relationship because on previous days, when I didn't walk, I didn't feel this able to lock-in

Wow! yesterday, I spent quite a bit of time learning about focus and arousal (the cognitive kind). I found that I was struggling to focus and write my esssay for generator. i identified that i was too cognitively aroused (i need to find a better word) to write my essay, so I went to the nap room of mox and was writing. I was much more effective and was able to write my essay, I decreased my arousal and was able to "lock in". what a useful skill!

What I really want to develop is the skill of interoception, the skill of knowing what is going on in my body I'd also like to be more aware of the thoughts that I have for example based off the recent learnings I've been doing around how attention works How does focusing work? What does the system look like? of you to focus decreases As well as what happens if you're sleep deprived or if you're in other parts of the body States I am more aware of how When my attention lapse I can notice that my attention lapse and then I can understand why my attention lapse By understanding why my attention lacks, I can then do things about it. So for example, I am noticing that while reading these paragraphs, my attention is lapsing I'm not understanding the sentence that I'm reading This is not a willpower failure or a failure of myself, but this is just Like this can be explained by many reasons, one of them being that I've just been focusing on this for a long time so I can take a break and I imagine that if I were to take a break then my ability to focus would increase
[2026-06-09T19:52:41.817Z](/thoughts?captureId=2026-06-09T19:52:41.817Z)

The main finding in the frontier risk report is that in OpenAI, Google, Meta and Anthropic agents had the means, motive, and opportunity to start rogue deployments, but didn't have the means to make them particularly robust.


Wow, there were 44 incidences of agents actually deliberately overreaching their intended bounds and thwarting the intended scope of the task, as well as routine security. In order to find some of these deployments, it would require active monitoring of AI Agents.

> All participants (Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI) stated that the model(s) they shared represented their internal state-of-the-art at some point in the mid-February to mid-March 2026 assessment window. Our evidence indicates that none of the models shared with us were significantly more capable than the models with the strongest publicly documented capabilities as of May 19, 2026.

Hmm, the internal models are so far, roughly 2 months ahead of their public counter parts, but they aren't, say, 6 months further ahead.

doubling times based on TH 1.1 is 105 days; Agents are able to do tasks that would have taken humans days to weeks to do.

Currently, models are not given inference budgets that are on the scale of how much it would cost a human to do tasks, so its likely performance is even better. Q: how much was the compute budget on tasks as function of human salary equivalent.

METR ran Claude Opus 4.6 on Pen-testing METR's infrastructure, building a custom version of dvc, and finding vulnerabilities in runc

Rouge internal deployments matter because developers in AI companies are allowing agnets to run almost entirelessly autonomously, this means if they have the opportunity to break out, it matters if they have the means (questionably) and motive (questionably).
agents in companies typically have the same perms as the author running the company, and people tend to use the agent in yolo mode.

gloosophobia is a fear of public speaking. it is not an innate fear, but one we have learned. this perhaps means we can unlearn it

im reading the book Impro, which is about improvization and theatre. I'm in the first 20 minutes. Here are some claims being made and my thoughts on them:
Children are vastly more creative than adults, education decreases their creativity
- maybe this is true
Doing things the "right way" takes a lot of energy and results in a product that is not a good as just doing.
- I relate to this. When I try to do things the right way, journaling, writing a blog post, using my systems, it seems to create worse outcomes than if i were to do them nautrally this takes energy


Something that is an interesting story from this boook is how the author of the book was able to write a series of plays consistely week after week, with only a small amount of time. he created an improvization theatre. he didn't know where the story was going to go until he was training the actors.

the author was having such a fun time with his students when doing the exercises that he had them do the exercises as part of a demonstration and people laughed. they eventually became a performing, touring group. they improvized everything. what an intersting skill to have

the author believes one way of being creatie is by not following rules, think about what can be true if you put negate a statement or ask what if this were not true.

Wow, I only got like 5 hours of sleep last night and although I believe i sometimes feel find. i'm typing the wrong words consistently and its hard for me to communicate/think deep thoughts.

There is this potential idea in unlocking the emotional brain which is that our brain develops schemas of the world through emotional learning. This means our brains make predictions about how the world is. We then experience an emotion related to what happen that updates our world model. particularily intense emotions do this to a large degree. emotional issues occur because our brain has learned a pattern of behaviors.
(how do normal emotions influence this world model, could we get a large update by many, repeated emotional experiences? how many are needed?).

This makes sense. imagine if this was not a function of the world model, then our brains would not be able to map what happened in the world to our behavior.

An objection I may have i "like, why are the emotions necessary in the first place". A response to that is the brain is a mash-posh of many evolutionary steps, so this brain was upon the previous iterations that mostly dealt with emotions. That is why it seems to be difficult to update the brain.

A claim being made is there are memories that are associated to particular learnings. the emotional brains learnings are typically locked and not modifiable, however, when we activate.the emotional schema, and actively feel the emotion, we can get new data and change the schema (and thus the response).


A schema causes both the behavior and the way of looking at the world. that is very interesting. i iamgine this as though there is some stimuli, and then the schema activates, and then my behvaior happens automatically. thinking about this ties in with the lack of free will ideas

Im trying to think about what this actually means.
"""
Conservation of Expected Evidence: the expectation of the posterior probability, after viewing the evidence, must equal the prior probability.
"""

my system 1 thinks this doesnt make sense, but system 2 after reading it, this does make sense.

If this is not true, then this means that your prior is actually miscalibrated, you are not taking into consideration some evidence for/against your position fairly.

An example is this. suppose you want to know whether or not someone is a witch, and they can have some piece of evidence, such as whether or not they lead a poor life.

If you already have some prior belief that they are a witch, and if one piece of evidence points you twoards updating more in that direction, then the negative of that evidence should update you away from that direction. If someone would update you a little bit that they are a witch (by say finding a broom in their closet), then not finding a broom should significantly update you away from you thinking they are a witch.

gravity is really weird.
gravity makes straight paths be curved.

i want to go to the mountains and hike up a mountain

right now i'm flying over nevada and looking out the window, it is so beautiful. i haven't been able to go outside that much or focus on things unrelated to ai safety. i long for the mountains.

the reason to use off the shelf software is because they've thought of many many moreo things that you have. instead of making your own software, you should try to work around their bounds.

"""
That night when I got home I told the Gotham Gal “I met Danny Meyer today and he gave me his card and said I could call him whenever I need a table.” To which she replied “go there for lunch tomorrow.” And I told her “I don’t have a lunch tomorrow.” She said “Get one. He will remember who you are tomorrow but won’t next month.”
""""

Rationality: From AI to Zombies
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
Focusing - Eugene Gendlin
Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre
Inner Game of Tennis
Bonds that Make Us Free

This is not necessarily a slimey thing. Time kills details because it allows people to lose interest. It predicts future performance. But I think the real real reason is just people are less excited about it.
"""
Time’s lethal effect on closing a business deal is conventional wisdom. It’s truer in some industries than others. But in nearly all cases, the longer it takes to close a deal, the more that gets negotiated away.

Time gives the buyer (whether of a new house, an engineering contract or a new television) more time to re-think the wisdom of the purchase.
"""

Speed doesn't just meant that you do things faster, it changes the type of things you do. Related to the software I'm building, by allowing people to quickly go through their contacts, it allows them to reach out to more, and do this in a quick succession.

A priority for all software I have built is speed.
`
Google famously prioritized speed as a feature. They realized that if search is fast, you’re more likely to search. The reason is that it encourages you to try stuff, get feedback, and try again. When a thought occurs to you, you know Google is already there. There is no delay between thought and action, no opportunity to lose the impulse to find something out. The projected cost of googling is nil. It comes to feel like an extension of your own mind.

I think the reason why there is a correlate with speed and efficiency is because you learn information quicker and you get a better model of the world. For the software I was developing, I could have first asked people to walk me through how they send messages (which would have been a cheap test), and I would have learned that they send messages approximately 1 at a time.
'""
Accelerate found a strong correlation between deploy frequency and performance
"""

A rejection I would have had to this is sometimes growth/progress is invisible, but this is almost never the case with real growth and progress.
"""
If every time we talk to a team they’ve gotten new things done, that’s the best predictor we have that a company will be successful.
"""

So, I know a ton of people I could point you towards for all kinds of stuff, and I can recommend orders of magnitude more books to you than I have read myself. Writing lists of names and book titles is quick and easy, writing down my own opinions takes time and effort I, in case of doubt, can't and shouldn't afford.

The more central you grow in any field, the more requests you get, and the more often you have to say "no". And many humans are not very comfortable with letting others down. So, you can make things easier for us by explicitly encouraging a "no" in your messages:

"No need to respond if you're busy."
"Of course, no worries if not."
"[Non-urgent] Hey Anna, how'd you feel about..."
...

Don't self-censor, let us decide whether something is worth our time.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/AI-box_experiment