47 Nearly Effortless Ways to be a Better Human Being

SMALL ACTS FOR STRANGERS

• Don’t talk on the phone in small enclosed spaces (e.g., crowded elevators or small waiting rooms). If you’re on the phone and heading towards an elevator with lots of people in it, tell the person you will call them right back.

• Don’t use your phone during the process of ordering at a coffee shop or restaurant; it’s very annoying for staff to be half ignored during your order.

• If there is a temporary crowd (for instance, trying to get out of a train), wait for the crowd to start to clear, don’t try to push through it.

• If someone looks like they could really use your seat on a bus or train, ask them if they’d like it.

• If you see someone who obviously appears confused about where they are going, and you’re in a neighborhood you know well, ask if you can help with directions.

• If you notice that the person sitting next to you on the plane is separated from the person they entered with, and the person they entered with has a seat at least as good as your own, ask if they would prefer to have you switch with their friend.

• Thank the staff at restaurants, coffee shops, etc., when they give you something or do other helpful things.

• If you see someone with a heavy object about to go up a flight of stairs, offer to help carry it.

• If you see someone with a heavy bag struggling to put it into overhead storage on a plane or train, ask if you can help.

SMALL ACTS FOR SOCIETY

• If you haven’t given money to charity this year, do it now. If you don’t know where to give, check out this page of GiveWell’s recommended charities, pick one, and click “donate.” They’ve vetted these charities much more carefully for impact and effectiveness than a casual donator could do on their own: http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities. For instance, you could give money to AMF to distribute bed nets that are effective for preventing people from getting Malaria, or you could give money to GiveDirectly to make sure your money goes directly to people who are extremely poor in countries where that money can go a very long way (that money will very likely help the receiver and their family dramatically more than it could benefit you). If you’re worried about the counterfactual: “wouldn’t these charities eventually get this money I was going to give anyway (given by another donor) since GiveWell recommends them, especially since GiveWell now has a large amount of money behind it,” consider giving to one of their “standout” charities instead (at the bottom of the page) where those concerns are less strong (but on the other hand, GiveWell views the standout charities as not quite their top recommendations).

• If you are at a restaurant and see two dishes that you expect you’ll like about equally (and the price difference is not large enough to be meaningful to you), but one contains meat or eggs, and the other doesn’t, pick the one without meat/eggs (since it will be creating less incremental demand for these animal products, and therefore will likely be much better from both a suffering and environmental perspective). If you’re curious why I am singling out meat and eggs, as opposed to, say, milk, see Julia Galef’s interesting analysis related to the number of calories produced by different farm animals: http://bit.ly/2yA6qMP

• If you normally eat meat daily, go vegetarian (minus eggs) on Mondays, for the same reasons as in the point above.

• If you see a piece of paper on the ground and there is a trash can nearby, pick it up and throw it away.

• If you do online or app-based dating, don’t blast out the same or similar messages to a large number of people that you’ve barely looked at (and similarly don’t swipe “yes” to nearly everyone) because you’re spamming the system.

• Don’t slow down to look at accidents on the road when there is already traffic, as it perpetuates the traffic (unless, of course, slowing down is needed for safety).

• Leave the toilet seat down in shared bathrooms (e.g., at coffee shops).

• If you’re thinking of starting a startup and have a bunch of ideas for what to work on, eliminate the ones that would not be helpful for the world even if they succeed.

SMALL ACTS AT HOME

• If you have neighbors, don’t play music or movies loudly at night (use headphones or play the sound quietly).

• If you share a bathroom, then when you finish showering, dry off while still in the shower so that you don’t get the floor wet.

• If you live with someone, text them when you are on the way to the grocery store or pharmacy to see if you can pick up anything small up for them.

• If you live with someone and the trash can is full, try to find the time to take the trash out rather than jamming even more stuff into it.

SMALL ACTS IN COMMUNICATION

• If you notice in a conversation that you’ve been talking for a long time without the other person really saying anything, wrap up quickly and let them speak (or make it easy for them to exit the conversation if that’s what they prefer).

• If an email only requires one sentence and you know the recipient well, save the recipient 20 seconds by (a) actually keeping it to one sentence and (b) putting that sentence in the subject line instead of the body with the suffix “(eom)” which stands for “end of the message.”

• If an email does not need a reply, say “No need to reply” (or “NRN,” though this acronym is not that well known in my experience) to save the person a pointless reply.

• In general, try to keep your emails as short as you can so as not to create a burden for the reader (unless you have reason to believe the person prefers more length/detail).

• If you’re not sure how much detail someone wants in an email, put a summary at the top and extra content below the signature line and explain that you’ve included details at the bottom of the email to read-only if they think it would be helpful.

• Begin emails in a friendly way, especially if they are short (otherwise, they can come off as cold or curt).

• If you’re sending text messages to someone where you plan to send multiple in a row, stick them in the same message (until you run out of space) instead of sending them one at a time. That way, the person isn’t distracted over and over as each new message arrives (e.g., having your phone ding or vibrate seven times in a span of 5 minutes can be highly distracting).

• Don’t add people to large WhatsApp or Facebook message chat groups without asking them (unless you’re confident they’ll want to be part of them), since the person will subsequently be inundated with notifications (without it necessarily being obvious how to mute them), and it can be awkward to leave large group conversations immediately after someone you know added you.

SMALL ACTS AT WORK

• If you have downtime at work where you really don’t have anything useful to do, ask a colleague who seems overloaded and stressed if you can take something off their plate.

• If you have multiple questions to ask someone or multiple things to say to them in person, batch them together and say them all in one conversation, rather than interrupting the person every few minutes to say something else.

• Keep meetings as short as you can without impairing their value.

• If you’re writing someone a work email with tons of unrelated to-dos, break it up into a few emails instead; grouping the to-dos in some sensible structured way.

• Use a subject line that makes it clear what your email is related to so that the person doesn’t have to scroll through a hundred of your emails later to find the one about such and such.

• If you think a colleague did something awesome (e.g., in a meeting or on a project), tell them that.

• If you manage employees, tell them that part of your job is making sure they are happy and that if they are frustrated or unhappy or stuck or blocked in their work, they should let you know so that you can help them solve the problem.

• If you can quickly look something up, don’t email to ask your colleague for that information just to save yourself 3 minutes (even if that person works for you) because it shows you don’t respect the value of their time. A personal or executive assistant (who explicitly understands that a major part of their job is TO save you time) could be an exception.

• If you manage a team, don’t make them stay at the office when there is no real work to do (or, if it’s getting late and there is still work to do, let people finish it from home where they can at least do it in pajamas with a cup of tea).

• If you can preempt that your boss would want you to do a certain thing, and you have extra time at work, do the thing, so your boss doesn’t have to ask, then let her or him know it’s done.

SMALL ACTS ON SOCIAL MEDIA

• If you learn about something that you think many others would really benefit from, post about it on Facebook, explaining what it is and why it’s valuable. Even better would be to give a quick summary of the most important aspects (citing the original source) to share its value efficiently, but still provide the link in case they want to learn more.

• If you want to share someone’s Facebook content on Facebook, use the built-in share features that the platform provides (don’t copy and paste the content into a new post of your own). By using the built-in sharing, the other person will automatically know the sharing occurred, can still make corrections (for instance, if they discover a typo or want to clarify something), and can still control privacy settings on their content. If you copy and post, the creator loses the ability to track and control their content.

• Don’t carry out one on one private conversions within comment threads (e.g.,” What are you doing this weekend? We should hang!”), just send a private message instead, unless the poster made it clear that’s what the purpose of the post was (e.g., “Hey! Does anyone want to hang out this weekend?”)

• If you want to repost what someone posted on one social media platform on a different platform, ask them for permission, or see if they want to do a post on that other platform that you can then share.

• If you’re about to post something to social media that no one is likely to want to see (and you think no one is likely to benefit from it either), consider not posting it.

SMALL ACTS FOR FRIENDS

• If you’re going to someone’s house for a meal, let them know if you have important dietary restrictions in advance so they don’t end up making or getting something you can’t eat.

• If one of your good friends is single and you think they would like to find a partner, take at least 5 minutes to think about your other friends (or scroll through your Facebook friends) and try to think of someone who would be a truly good match. If you can think of someone, ask if they’d like a setup (or just invite them to the same event and make sure to introduce them). Only make a match, though, if you think both people are great and think they are of the well-above-average likelihood of being compatible (a setup with someone you don’t think is great is not really a favor).

• If you know a friend is having a tough time with something, send a text or email or give them a call and see if they want to hang out or just chat.

For many more suggestions, see this earlier post on ways you can be a better friend:

http://bit.ly/2ylWG85