EA - Four productivity techniques if you love working with others but work alone by eirine

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Four productivity techniques if you love working with others but work alone, published by eirine on September 15, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.I've heard that if you've said something twice, you should write it down. The past few years I've had multiple career advice calls, mentoring calls, and one-on-ones at EA Globals about operations and management in EA. I've set up a substack called 'Said Twice' to practice writing (feedback is very welcome!!) and to have a place where I can write down things I've said at least twice. The Career conversations week on the forum gave me the final push to actually finish some drafts and publish them here and on my substack.I love working with other people. I'm the most focused and have my best ideas when talking out loud, and I often rely on others to hold myself accountable. However, I work on a small team where we have each our own separate responsibilities, and so most of the time I work alone. The past five years I've found some workarounds that I thought I'd share. I use them daily at my job to cover parts of what I enjoy about working with others: talking through difficult issues out loud with someone else, building on each other's ideas through brainwriting, delegating tasks that I find hard to do myself, and being held accountable by others.1. Have meetings with myself (ideally walking)Whenever I get stuck on something, or notice I'm struggling to wrap my head around a difficult issue, I schedule a meeting with myself. Most often, this means I go on a walk with my over-ear headphones and talk out loud, pretending I'm on a meeting call with someone else. If you worry less about what others think of you, you can of course do it without the headphones.I start the walking meeting by stating the purpose: "Why are me and myself meeting?", "What are we hoping to get out of it?". Sometimes it's not clear what the purpose of the walk is, and in those cases I start with the questions: "What's on my mind at the moment?" and "What's holding me back from making more progress on the projects I'm working on?".I then talk around the chosen topic(s), while I summarise the progress I make throughout the walk. I end the meeting by stating what we've decided and any next steps, which I write down as soon as I come back from the walk.I prefer using a familiar route for these meeting walks, so that I'm not distracted by having to find the way or look at new things. The walks last between 10-45 minutes, depending on how much me and myself have to talk about. I sometimes just talk to myself in the office or at my desk when I'm working from home, but I find that I'm more easily distracted inside - especially if I have my computer in front of me.A very similar concept is rubber duck debugging, which you might be familiar with. This is more common for people working in tech where e.g. someone developing a program will go through their code line by line to figure out where the bug is, talking out loud to a rubber duck sitting on their desk. I personally have a crocheted turtle that my sister gave me that I use for this purpose:2. Brainstorm (or -write) with myselfIf I want to brainstorm ideas or options, and don't have anyone to do it with, I brainwrite. I do this for all kinds of tasks, and of different sizes. I'll sometimes use it when I feel stuck with how to respond to an email. I've also used it for identifying possible goals and metrics for my work or our team. I mostly do it on paper or use my reMarkable, but you can also do it in Word or Google Docs.Here's how I brainwrite with myself:Identify the exact topic I want more ideas on or options for.Create a mind map with the chosen topic in the middle.Set a timer for 2-5 minutes, and write down as many ideas as I can.Take a short break, e.g. get something to drink, walk arou...