To encourage yourself to do some massive, granular task:
Upon completion of each granule, give yourself a reward with some probability.
A reward is a small piece of food or a sip of a drink, etc.
Never eat or drink anything except as a reward for working on the task.
This really works extremely well for me; I have been doing this for about 2 months, at first only with anki reviews and more recently for several other things. The feeling is very similar to addictions like video games or entertaining websites; I often think “I should probably go do X, but let me instead do just one more anki card” and a half-hour later I realize I still haven’t done X.
More things:
Make the rewards unlikely and small so that you stay constantly hungry. Bonus: caloric restriction.
Create a timed reminder, say half-hourly, to do just a few granules of the task. This encourages episodes of the “just one more” effect.
Put reinforcers within arm’s reach, both temporally (make granules easy and quick, so that hunger feels like an urge to do the task rather than an urge to cheat the system) and spacially (so that you are constantly reminded of your hunger and tempted to do the task).
I repeat: this works extremely well for me and I strongly encourage other people to try it. More details here.
Here is a graph showing the number of Anki reviews I’ve done every month for the past year, as an example of the results this method can produce.
I have tried several variants of this process. As expected, the largest road-block has been part 3 - the self-control not to consume the reward despite lack of completion.
I will mention that on the few occasions I have gotten this to work, my excitement and enjoyment was much higher than average. The desire and excitement for food seemed to translate into the task at hand.
Right, maybe it would be best to let yourself have unlimited amounts of plain water. Or you could e.g. let yourself have as much water as you want for the first hour you’re at work, to encourage yourself to go there earlier while still avoiding serious dehydration. Or have an optional sip of water with every non-water reward you take.
This seems very interesting, and it’s really cool that you’ve already been working on it. To clarify, you said you don’t eat or drink anything unless it’s a reward. Does this mean halting all meals?
How do you manage to eat healthily if all food has to stay within arm’s reach? I suppose some fruits could stay out, but what about cooked meats or vegetables?
What do you do for recreation times: hanging out with others, visiting relatives, or just going to the beach or something, etc?
Yes, stop all meals. You can get something a bit like a meal if you do a very high-value highly-rewarded task. Also, I let myself eat whatever I want for a few hours after doing something sufficiently awesome (such as accumulating sufficiently many CoZE points, or when I spent 3 hours coding up a system to implement another lifehack thing).
My eating habits are a lot less healthy than they used to be—chips, fruit juice, candy, chocolate-chip cookies, etc., but also healthier things like nuts, popcorn, sandwiches and meat. If you do a high-value, highly-rewarded task, you can finish things quite quickly. At the moment I feel like health isn’t as important as good reinforcement, but I’m planning to research that more.
I don’t do much social interaction (I don’t value it highly terminally, and most of it is instrumentally useless) but have broken the system twice to eat lunch with people, and put it on hold for 3 days while away at a college’s admit weekend.
I also have a thing that periodically asks whether I’m in a correct posture, and standing instead of sitting, and not procrastinating sleep. If I’m in the right state, those give additional medium-sized rewards. I implemented this only 2 days ago, so I don’t know if it works yet.
Any results from this part now? Also, what other things have you used this with?
Still using this for posture, and my posture is improving (though it’s confounded by the posture brace I bought a while back, which seems to actually work). Not using this for standing/sitting; instead I now stand most of the time, and only sit while doing the highest-value thing I could be doing (which is usually ugh-fielded and unpleasant). I’ve given up on regulating my sleep schedule.
Other things I currently use the food-reinforcements for:
CoZE. For those who haven’t been to workshops: this is an awesome CFAR invention; rejection therapy is a subset of it. I walk around with a bag of chocolates while doing this and reward actions. After accumulating a certain number of CoZE points, I allow myself to eat whatever I want for the next couple hours.
Reality checks for inducing lucid dreams.
I have an hourly mental ritual that involves a bunch of visualizations that feel like they should increase agency and do other things.
To encourage yourself to do some massive, granular task:
Upon completion of each granule, give yourself a reward with some probability.
A reward is a small piece of food or a sip of a drink, etc.
Never eat or drink anything except as a reward for working on the task.
This really works extremely well for me; I have been doing this for about 2 months, at first only with anki reviews and more recently for several other things. The feeling is very similar to addictions like video games or entertaining websites; I often think “I should probably go do X, but let me instead do just one more anki card” and a half-hour later I realize I still haven’t done X.
More things:
Make the rewards unlikely and small so that you stay constantly hungry. Bonus: caloric restriction.
Create a timed reminder, say half-hourly, to do just a few granules of the task. This encourages episodes of the “just one more” effect.
Put reinforcers within arm’s reach, both temporally (make granules easy and quick, so that hunger feels like an urge to do the task rather than an urge to cheat the system) and spacially (so that you are constantly reminded of your hunger and tempted to do the task).
I repeat: this works extremely well for me and I strongly encourage other people to try it. More details here.
Here is a graph showing the number of Anki reviews I’ve done every month for the past year, as an example of the results this method can produce.
I have tried several variants of this process. As expected, the largest road-block has been part 3 - the self-control not to consume the reward despite lack of completion.
I will mention that on the few occasions I have gotten this to work, my excitement and enjoyment was much higher than average. The desire and excitement for food seemed to translate into the task at hand.
This seems like a recipe for letting yourself get dehydrated. Am I missing something?
Right, maybe it would be best to let yourself have unlimited amounts of plain water. Or you could e.g. let yourself have as much water as you want for the first hour you’re at work, to encourage yourself to go there earlier while still avoiding serious dehydration. Or have an optional sip of water with every non-water reward you take.
This is transformative. Thank you.
This seems very interesting, and it’s really cool that you’ve already been working on it. To clarify, you said you don’t eat or drink anything unless it’s a reward. Does this mean halting all meals?
How do you manage to eat healthily if all food has to stay within arm’s reach? I suppose some fruits could stay out, but what about cooked meats or vegetables?
What do you do for recreation times: hanging out with others, visiting relatives, or just going to the beach or something, etc?
Yes, stop all meals. You can get something a bit like a meal if you do a very high-value highly-rewarded task. Also, I let myself eat whatever I want for a few hours after doing something sufficiently awesome (such as accumulating sufficiently many CoZE points, or when I spent 3 hours coding up a system to implement another lifehack thing).
My eating habits are a lot less healthy than they used to be—chips, fruit juice, candy, chocolate-chip cookies, etc., but also healthier things like nuts, popcorn, sandwiches and meat. If you do a high-value, highly-rewarded task, you can finish things quite quickly. At the moment I feel like health isn’t as important as good reinforcement, but I’m planning to research that more.
I don’t do much social interaction (I don’t value it highly terminally, and most of it is instrumentally useless) but have broken the system twice to eat lunch with people, and put it on hold for 3 days while away at a college’s admit weekend.
You traded HP for XP.
Alternately, he abused Toughness, trained Willpower, gained a piety boost and moved his alignment a few beads towards L+.
From the comment you link to:
Any results from this part now? Also, what other things have you used this with?
Still using this for posture, and my posture is improving (though it’s confounded by the posture brace I bought a while back, which seems to actually work). Not using this for standing/sitting; instead I now stand most of the time, and only sit while doing the highest-value thing I could be doing (which is usually ugh-fielded and unpleasant). I’ve given up on regulating my sleep schedule.
Other things I currently use the food-reinforcements for:
CoZE. For those who haven’t been to workshops: this is an awesome CFAR invention; rejection therapy is a subset of it. I walk around with a bag of chocolates while doing this and reward actions. After accumulating a certain number of CoZE points, I allow myself to eat whatever I want for the next couple hours.
Reality checks for inducing lucid dreams.
I have an hourly mental ritual that involves a bunch of visualizations that feel like they should increase agency and do other things.
Coming up with useful new ideas.
Taking supplements.