Getting Help: Part 4 of The Three Hard Problems of Deliberate Lifestyle Design

The Hard Problem of Knowing What You Want, the Hard Problem of Getting Help, and the Scoping Problem

Getting Help

In the last three blog posts, we broke down what it means to live a deliberate life, and practical methods to define and quantify your life so that you can achieve your goals. This blog post is the last of the Deliberate Lifestyle Design series, and will go into the third problem with deliberate lifestyle design: Getting help.

It’s hard to get help. This is often interpreted as a hiring problem. But it’s actually an activation problem. Here’s an illustration: imagine a future where you can buy a Tesla Humanoid Household Helper robot. Itificently capable and exists only to help you. But it doesn’t know anything about you or your life. How much time and effort would it take to get the robot up to speed about what you like and what you need; the important details and considerations that go into your ways of doing things; and what aspects of your life have been carefully constructed just so vs just happen to be that way? Once the robot got to know these things, how much time and effort would it take to empower the robot with access, credentials, and further context to get things done without you? This is the hard problem of getting help. It starts with achieving observability and it ends with great things happening for you without your direct involvement.

Broadly, to grow your effective capability, the sequence to pursue looks like this, for every goal (see above), project, and area of responsibility in your life : Observable ➝ Computable ➝ Controllable ➝ Automatable

The set of questions below are a breakdown of understanding the hard part about getting help. It helps you understand the way in which you do things now, so you can take steps to delegate aspects of your life to another or to a machine that can read your data and understand the context of your life. You can print your own copy here to fill out.

Procedural Questions

1. Do you have observability? Observability is how well you can observe and measure each aspect of your life.

         1.1. What is important to you, and what are the important pieces of your life to measure? Are you measuring what matters?

                   a. Quantitatively?

                   b. If qualitatively, can you schematize?

                           - Have you?

                           - Does someone else have a schema you can use?

         1.2. Are you measuring/monitoring passively/automatically, with no manual effort?

         1.3. If actively, do you have to do the measurement or monitoring yourself? (This is a job)

         1.4. If actively, is someone else doing the measurement or monitoring for you? (This is someone you have to manage)

2. Do you have share-ability?

         2.1. Can another person without your tacit knowledge understand what you want and how the measurements/observations are relevant? (If so, it’s computable by another human, therefore possibly delegatable)

         2.2. Can a machine? (If so, it’s computable by a machine, therefore possibly automatable)

3. Controllability

         3.1. Do you care about how this goal or work is achieved? (If so, it’s another thing you need observability over)

         3.2. Is this workflow illustrated/documented?

         3.3. Can you combine the workflow illustration with a status board (for instance, the columns of a kanban board illustrate the stages of a workflow while the contents of the columns show the status of the effort), so you get observability and documentation?

         3.4. Can you tie all your passive telemetry / automated observability to your workflow illustration?

                a. Can you automate with rules + software?

                b. Can you automate with rules + task orders / text messages sent to a person or service company?

         3.5. Can this be done remotely?

         3.6. Can anyone else do this besides you?

         3.7. Functional recomposition:

                a. Can you outsource or automate parts of the process if you standardize or genericize them?

                b. Can you make important parts of the process doable remotely to minimize or speed up the in-person part?

         3.8. What credentials do you need to share for actions to be taken on your behalf? Is that sharing narrowly fit for purpose?

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Broadly, there are two “last meter” challenges to automation:

1. Computable situational awareness: you have automated observability, and the relevance of the data to your goals is documented and computable

2. Connected control: your control signal can reach an effective actuator

Using the information you’ve learned over the series of the last 4 blog posts, you can now understand where to collect data from about areas of your life that matter. Adding these data sources to your personal data store and using this data in a notebook or program to help you with your life is one step further in living a more deliberate life.

We hope you found this useful.