Noticing Wasted Motion
This post is about a practical skill you need to effectively minimize wasted motion—noticing. Noticing is a key skill for changing behavior in general, because it allows you to respond deliberately instead of automatically. Yet in my experience, it is one of the more difficult skills to learn. Hopefully the following will give you a toehold.
This piece is cross-posted on my blog here.
In my last post, I talked about the cost of wasted motion—the lost opportunity to go straight for the goal and make the world a bit better. If you’re staring into the dark world of the cost of wasted motion, don’t despair. Minimizing wasted motion is a skill and you can train that skill.
But before you can do that, you need to learn to notice wasted motion. This is hard. First, it’s hard to remember to pay attention, especially if you’re already doing something else. Second, it’s hard because—deep down—you might not want to.
It feels ughy to start working, because that project is big and hard. The immediate pain of starting work looms large in the hyperbolic-discounting agents we call brains. Maybe you’re anxious that you’ll look bad if you try and fail. So you just...let your mind slip away to easier tasks. You may not even notice you’re doing it.
But, if you’re paying attention, there’s a little catch there, in your mind. When you stop and think, you know you’re procrastinating a little bit. You know you’re wasting motion toward your goal. You want to complete your goal, but you also want to avoid dealing with those bad feelings. And that internal conflict makes you feel guilty or frustrated or anxious.
But that little catch is small and easily ignored. If you haven’t thought about it before, you may not even have realized it’s there. Maybe that guilt is so small you never really notice it. And maybe it’s grown so large that you feel overwhelmed and ashamed (link to measuring progress).
Learn to notice that bit of frustration at how you’re doing the task, that ugh feeling around a certain plan.
If you’re not sure where to start, it might help to read more about noticing. A therapy-style before-after record can also be helpful for identifying emotions, what issues trigger that emotion, and reliable ways to respond.
Personally, I started learning how to notice by reflecting after something went wrong, and seeing what emotions I felt earlier that could have warned me. Once I had those emotions in mind, I started to pause and check in whenever I noticed that emotion. This led to successfully correcting course, which caused a virtuous cycle by reinforcing noticing that emotion.
For example, one time I got caught up in errands and realized I was supposed to meet a friend for dinner in 5 minutes. The only catch was that the friend was three miles away, and I was on bike. Now for those of you who don’t know me in person, I’m not exactly the paragon of physical endurance. There was no way on earth I was getting there in 5 minutes. But I felt this tunnel vision pressure to bike as fast as I could and not think about the fact I was probably late.
I finally showed up, quite winded, about half an hour late. It turned out my friend had been pretty worried. I felt really bad, but it was useful for recognizing that the feeling of “I can’t stop to reflect, I just have to press forward as fast as I can”. That tunnel vision feeling reliably signals that I’m feeling time pressure to keep going, but also think I may be doing the wrong thing. Since then, I’ve gotten better at slowing down and checking my plan whenever I notice that feeling.
I experience emotional responses that tell me a poor choice is happening. Other people sometimes describe noticing physical sensations or directly noticing a poor choice, so feel free to try those instead.
You can try deliberately practicing noticing. If you already know of something that triggers the feeling, then you can deliberately cause that emotion and practice responding the way you want to. Or you can try making an intention to notice. Borrowed from psychology, these intentions are usually formatted as if/then sentences—if I notice X feeling, then I will do Y. There is high variance to how well these intentions work in practice, but they are extremely useful when successful.
It might take you a bit to identify what you’re trying to notice. Some people describe looking for what their thoughts slide away from, rather than going straight for the negative feeling. If you’re really struggling, deliberately plan not to fix the problem when you notice you’re wasting motion. This piece of advice might seem super weird. After all, the end goal is to save motion. But if you have to change something if you notice it, you might subconsciously stop yourself from ever noticing it.
As you start to pay attention to those cues, they can be confusing. It’s hard to tell if you’re feeling frustrated because your plan is bad or just because the task is hard. Try doing a brain dump when you feel that frustration. Let your thoughts spill onto the page, and see if there’s a different action you could take that would accomplish your goal better and make that feeling go away. If you’re not certain about this plan, try it for a week. Then reevaluate whether it’s useful for you.
As you practice, the feelings become clearer and more useful. You’ll get fewer false alarms.
But for now, notice when you feel that catch in your emotions. Pay attention to why you feel frustrated or trapped or unhappy. See if those emotions are saying, “Here, do it this way instead. That way won’t work, you’ll just waste time” or “You know it would be better if you did the other thing instead. Why don’t you go and do that?” Use those cues to become aware of when you’re wasting motion.
Once you’re aware, then you can stop wasting motion.
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I assign a low probability that it took you 35 minutes to bike 3 miles when you were pressured to the task. That’s 5.14 mph, which is quite easy to jog. There was more going on than aerobic deficiency.
I understand this isn’t what your point was, but your example shouldn’t be hyperbolic.
Either explain the other factors, or use a different example.
Have I overestimated your aerobic condition, despite your insistence?
I actually have a heart condition that severely limits my ability to exercise. Walking three miles is beyond what I’m capable of on an average day, let alone jogging anywhere.
This is an surprisingly harsh critique of a minor detail. In the future, I would strongly recommend a more polite, truth-seeking inquiry.
Thank you for the clarification. I am content. I congratulate you for running your errands on a bike with your condition; that’s actually quite impressive. I do apologize sincerely for that unnecessarily harsh critique of a minor detail. I concede to your recommendation.
I think I have some explaining to do.
I am 19, and am relatively new to rationality. I have been exposed to it for about two years, but have attained only hints of scattered progress. I am ashamed of this, but also realize how difficult it is to change the underlying dispositional features of oneself; how difficult it is to get past a local optimum that the self uses for most of its stability. I quickly acknowledge how little I know, and have spent two years descending this macro-mount stupid. In the first 6 months, it got so bad that I disassociated from the normal sources of social stability. Family, friends, school, religion—all of it. I had a few things that kept me alive, but life was mostly cold, confusing, and lonely.
After the strict perfectionism settled down and the emotional stability started to come back, pragmaticism (localized perfectionism) has started to face me as the true optimum. To this day, I’m trying to figure out what to do about my current limited state. I now just want to be less wrong and less dysfunctional, because that’s the only improvement I could ever attain.
But the harsh season left a stain on my cognition—absolute perfectionism is a powerful tool, but crippling when facing concrete challenges (where concrete progress is born). My abstraction engine became strong, but now the polarized forms of abstraction are… polarized still. I need to find a more systematic way to weigh them properly. I presume concrete challenges with feedback from others is the next step in the right direction.
On LessWrong, I almost never comment on a post. I almost never join conversations. I’ve been left to my own analysis, and a static and vague window into others’ lines of thought. I never thought I should even try those things because it would just be wrong or dysfunctional, or worst of all, that I would make the future worse (by doing things like wasting more intelligent peoples’ time, or stimulating negative emotions). People on LessWrong aren’t obviously wrong most of the time, so it makes it difficult for me to meaningfully contribute. It’s in the subtlety where improvements can be made—the subtlety I have not yet learned. It’s hard wanting to belong with a group from outside the window.
What I’ve come to is that it would be better if I just said or did something I was convinced of, even if it was disproportionate and radical, mislead, wasted motion, or in this case, rude. But that I could figure out what went wrong after I made those mistakes and do my best to repair the damage.
(P.S. I accept lower karma in exchange for a chance to mess up and learn.)
Reflection from this particular experimental position:
> Why was it possible for me to assume an offensive tone? What features contribute to an offensive tone, and how can I avoid that? I think HPMoR gave me the wrong idea about bringing awareness to something, and probably a lot more social behavior.
- Conceptually speaking, my map correctly indicated to me that something more was left implicit for this example to be non-hyperbolic.
- I had more than enough information to scratch off the possibility of it being hyperbolic, but I didn’t even try looking.
1. You have been on LessWrong for 4 years, have quite a bit of karma, have made over 20 posts on LessWrong, with many comments. I didn’t even have to click your name for most of that info.
> These metrics aren’t pointless; are very useful. I will figure out how to determine what they mean for experiences on LessWrong.
2. You made a post called, “Being Productive With Chronic Health Conditions”, where the mystery could have been dispelled. Though I got to this post from a search, the mentioned post is listed right next to this one in your profile.
> I should strive to always ask the right questions to see people in a broader, more accurate light. People are not stupid, and hardly ever without any reason. So why was it not the first-nature reaction to seek existing information to satisfy my curiosity?
(P.S. I want to try again on another one of your posts. Based on my skim, I think you have quite a bit of value to offer.)
Makes sense! Becoming more rational is a continual journey, and there’s no need to feel ashamed that you’re still learning. I expect you’ll find the process faster and smoother if you approach it as though you’re collaborating with other posters, instead of trying to score points :)