I am currently 35% the way through of all my Hinge matches, planning on proposing to the next girl I grab drinks with.

When dealing with particularly toxic people I find the exponential backoff to be an excellent strategy.

In my case, I hate cutting people off because I know people can change. What I do to manage relationships is run a forgiving version of exponential backoff. Start off friendly and forgiving. If someone becomes transgressive, increase the latency between interactions. If the transgressions continue, double the latency. If bad interactions persist, the time latency can go on to months or even years which means you'll probably never interact with that person again. Conversely, if an interaction goes well, reduce the delay for when you're willing to meet again. E.g. say an irritating individual causes the latency to go to once a month. If you have an interaction that goes well then the latency drops to 2 weeks. If interactions continue to go well they drop further to say no latency, i.e. you're willing to meet this person whenever. Obviously it's not perfect but it suites my needs quite well.

I also found his chapter on "overfitting" excellent. I like to think of it as "smart person disease." Big idea is that having more data can actually hamper decision making instead of enhance it because you winde up solving the wrong problem.

I read the book a while back and realized I do the caching one automatically. I have a pretty messy work bench where I build rockets and play around with microcontrollers. I purposely didn’t try to organize it because, over time, it organizes itself. All the stuff that has my attention gradually drifts to arms reach where the stuff I don’t currently need gradually drifts to the back of the workbench.

Edit: the stopping and explore/exploit chapters mirror my career too

I read the book around 3-4 years ago and regularly returning to the exploit vs explore and randomness concepts. 37% rule is something I regularly talk about as well, but mostly to help other people make sense of the dilemmas "should I continue looking or stop now" (like searching for a flat, for example).

I often make estimations based on the heuristic that if we don’t know much about how long something will remain, then we’re most likely half way currently. For example, McDonalds was founded 82 years ago and if we have to guess how long it will still exist then probably around 82 years (until 2104).

This also works great, for example, to answer whether you should make plans for Christmas 2023 with the girl you have been seeing for two months now: probably not yet.

I apply some things from the explore/exploit chapter when travelling. If for the first half of the trip I try as many places to eat as I can. For the second half I’m fine with revisiting the best ones.

After reading the book, I use the exponential backoff approach to relationships that seem one-sided.

I’ve read years ago, and became my comfortable keeping my inbox or my files become messier, relying more on the search. I wish Google Desktop would still exist, however.

I used the optimal stopping guidelines to help people I mentor stop applying for jobs and change their resumes/approach. It worked pretty well for them.