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Who Are You Listening To?

Tomorrow I'm going to go check out some granite slabs so that I can replace my particle-board RV counters with granite. In preparation for the new counters I've ordered a new sink and faucet, and will be taking a look at a stove on Friday.

The faucet came in today. I got home at midnight, well after my usual computer off time (11pm), I set down my backpack, and started opening up the faucet box. You know, I thought, I may as well install it now just to see what it looks like.

Fifteen minutes later I was reading assembly instructions and poking around under my sink with a flashlight to see what sort of connections I had down there. I thought about how ridiculous it was to be installing a faucet that I would just have to remove and reinstall a week later. I thought about how crazy it was that somehow this totally useless faucet installation was taking priority over writing a post.

Protocols

The benefit of having your subconscious make decisions isn't so much that it's a better decision maker than your conscious mind (it's probably not), but that it can make decisions much much faster than your conscious mind. You don't have to spend your focus and energy making decisions that you already have heuristics for.

For example, when I play poker, many of the decisions are made by my subconscious. This allows me to make many good analyses per minute, rather than just a few, and to dedicate my conscious processing to the most important factors at hand. It's not that I couldn't do all of the processing consciously, it's just that I wouldn't have time.