How do you prevent or stop the creation of an “ugh field”?
Context
There’s a game I play which uses real money—Entropia Universe. In this game, I am a trader—though most of my activity is reselling resources (stackable items). I buy large stacks of various resources, and then split these up into smaller stacks which are more affordable for the regular buyer. I then list these smaller stacks on the in-game auction.
There is an app for this game. Using this app, I can see which stacks have sold and how much I have left of each item. The app also also me to place bids on auction items (such as large stacks with which I resupply my stock), and the app allows me to list stacks on auction.
The only thing I can’t do in the app is split a larger stack into smaller stacks. Thus, I have to login to the game on my PC, go to my inventory, and perform the menial task of looking at what items I have and which items I need to split up. I have to do this about once every 20 days, give or take 5. I could put some effort into increasing my stockpile, increasing the time that goes between moments at which I have to login, but this is hard, since if there is a shortage, I can’t stockpile all resources equally high and I have to make a tradeoff between restocking as soon I’m out of 1 resource or restocking once I’m out of multiple resources (decreasing my earnings in between due to selling less). So 20 days plusminus 5 is about the best I can do there.
I find that logging into the app is a bit of a bother, since it is boring work, but it pays reasonably well (5 minutes a day of time which I can plop down in any segment—such as during lunch break or when waiting for something). And if I don’t do it, well, I can do it the next day.
But logging into the game on my PC is turning into a hassle for me. I keep postponing it, since there is no actual need to login and split stacks until I am running out of stacks to sell of a certain resource. When I do login, there is naturally lots of work to do—it can take up to 45 minutes to do all the things I have to do (take stock of inventory, make a list of stuff I need to buy, announce buy offer in trade chat, split stacks off the stuff I already have, make trades with the people who are willing to sell me the stuff I need, buy stacks off auction if nobody is willing to sell to me, make stacks out of the stuff people sold me, check if I did everything properly—then, log out of the game on the PC, login on the mobile app, and clear the notification list there so I don’t double list something).
And I’m starting to notice that I find the IDEA of having to do this work more annoying than the actual work itself. The actual work itself is quite simple, there’s no heavy lifting involved, just some clicking. I put on some music during that work, and it’s quite pleasant. But the idea of “ugh, I have to remember to login tonight because I’m almost running out of X” frustrates me. It also doesn’t help that I sometimes forget and have to make the choice to do it now (where now means stop watching the series you’re watching right now, log in, do the work, log out, go to bed because it’s bedtime) or postpone it until tomorrow.
TL;DR
I spend 5 minutes a day making money via a phone app. After about 2 to 4 weeks, I have to do a task which takes 45 minutes on my PC at home to enable the ability to make money via the phone app. The phone app task feels easy, but the idea of having to do the 45-minute task at home is a burden. The actual work in the 45 minute task is pretty light.
Question
How do I prevent a task which I have to do on a irregular basis in my leisure time from becoming an ugh field?
I’d like to keep doing the actual tasks—I earn about 2 to 3 euro in those 5 minutes a day. The 45 minute task itself doesn’t earn me anything directly, but good performance (such as paying attention to the trade chat and spotting a deal) does improve how much I can get with the 5 minute daily work on my phone. Suggesting I drop the whole thing together IS an idea, but I feel I’m making an adequate trade of time for money with these tasks.
I also can’t automate the task, mostly because modding the game is not allowed and because there’s quite a bit of thinking involved which makes the whole thing non-trivial. Plus the game has to communicate with the servers before it will let you make another change (such as creating a new stack of x units and reducing another stack by x units), so even if the clicking was automated I’d still have to sit there.
Yes, I could convert it into a daily 5 minute task, or a weekly 30 minute task. This leads to some overhead, though. Most of the work is identifying how much I need of what—making 2 stacks instead of 8 just means I have to click a bit less.
… So I had an idea just now, there’s the ability to get a html table of all my items—I could probably parse this with some tool, which could help me with doing the work. I’d still have to do all the clicking, but some of the stock taking could be automated like that, and this could help me with structuring and organizing the task as such that it’s less uncertain.
It feels like there might be more benefit (if it’s possible) in separating the task into genuinely different subtasks rather than just “smaller” ones. It depends on whether the task is ugh-ish (1) just because there’s too much of it to feel (in anticipation) like fun or (2) because it produces that “aargh, I don’t even know where to start with this damn thing” feeling. If #1, just splitting it into smaller bits might suffice. If #2, it needs splitting into simpler bits.
(Yes, splitting it will probably make it less efficient. But it may be better to have something inefficient that you will actually do than something efficient that you won’t.)
But if you can automate part of it so that there’s just less to do, as your second paragraph suggests, that sounds really promising.
The task itself is annoying because everything takes too long. Because it’s a game, you have to walk over to storage and you have to walk over to auction and basically when you see something for cheap in the auction, answering the question “how much of that do I have already” takes 30 seconds. Then to get back to the auction and the listing you were looking at takes probably another 15 seconds. This makes the whole process feel like bleh because, well, it’s...
Here’s a link to a youtube video which explains how to use the auction—I don’t know of its quality, but point of interest is the gold/black list of stuff and the blue grid on the right. The gold/black list is the auction interface, the blue grid is your inventory. There’s another box somewhere else in that room he’s standing in, that’s your storage. It contains another blue-grid style inventory.
The sizes of items in the grid layout can change with updates (sometimes intended, sometimes unintended). The icons for items in the grid can change with updates (most of them unintended and thus undocumented). And lastly, I’m not sure bots are allowed. I know external information tools are allowed, like things that read game chat and filter it for you or read the game’s message log to display a map of waypoints, but I don’t think the actual input is allowed to be done by botting.
Yes, and I can probably include that in the automation. I already have a list of my own records, but updating it is a pain and as a result I tend to just head over to storage. Reducing the workload to keep the list updated should resolve some of those troubles as well.
Because automating the clicking is pretty hard and subject to needing maintenance every time the game updates (which is about every 2 months or so)… and automating the “what do I need” part is easy and can probably be done in 2-3 hours.
Can you shedule it to a fixed date every two weeks? Maybe it’s easier if it happens at a fixed shedule than if you have to decide whether or not to do it every evening.
I think I could try this. I had thought of this solution myself, but … I don’t know why I dismissed it. Maybe because I hadn’t done the proper thinking in regards to how much time there is being having to restock, so there was no period to schedule it for (so the objection was “It’s unschedulable” which is no longer true).
Some more standard advice would be to make some kind of public commitment to it, so there’s somebody else to hold you accountable. This could be kind of difficult when it’s something as unimportant as a video game, as that might make you look pretty weird (depending on your friends and your relationships with them), but you could do it very casually; even just mentioning the task in passing in a conversation would probably help.
I also find that making a “public” commitment helps even when it’s not actually public; just consciously focusing on the subject and committing to hold yourself accountable for doing it at a certain time can be surprisingly effective (I like to say it out loud, as this seems to help, but I talk to myself a lot anyway so it might just be a personal thing). I can’t really vouch for this method’s effectiveness, though; I’ve never really tried to permanently solve a recurring problem like the one you describe with it, I’ve only used it as a band-aid to get past the “ugh field” a few times. It may lose its effectiveness with repetition, if it even ever works at all for you.
A last possibility in this category, depending on how serious you are about this, would be to try something like Beeminder that would ideally give you the motivation to push past the “ugh field” and get used to doing what you need to do. Since I don’t yet know how to embed links in words, here it is: https://www.beeminder.com/
For something more fun, if probably less practical, you could try to drug yourself into forming a habit. You’ve probably heard of people trying to use reinforcement learning on themselves, basically—allowing themselves to eat candy (or some other kind of reward) when they do the target activity. I’m really doubtful that this is actually useful for most people (though I haven’t looked much into it—I just have a vague, bad feeling about it; it’s probably worth investigating). Luckily, though, you can try something better: using nicotine to turbo-boost your habit formation.
This is probably wildly irresponsible, and I don’t really recommend it, but it’s worth hearing about, at least. Of course, you’ll need to take into account the extra cost of getting nicotine gum (or patches—just don’t smoke, that’s definitely not worth it), as well as whatever psychological costs the chance of getting addicted to the drug might entail. I’m not going to go into specifics, but instead just show you to the source of the idea (which I just discovered fairly recently, which is probably a large part of the reason I’m bringing up nicotine at all):
http://www.gwern.net/Nicotine#habit-formation
I am NOT going to drug myself into forming a habit. This is a ~25 euro/hour, 1 hour per week side hobby, which I could miss without any problems. … Maybe that’s the wrong counterargument but I feel it’s too dangerous for the rewards involved. (I wouldn’t try smoking if you gave me money because I hear from people that it’s hard to quit.)
The public commitment thing is something I use myself from time to time, and I can make use of it—I will make use of it a bit more (I even used this post as a sort of public commitment) but the whole idea of a “real money game” is already pretty weird to my co-workers (They’re more comfortable with the explanation “It’s a casino styled like an mmo and I make money via arbitrage over the chips”) so it’s kind of hard to weave into the conversation. But I can talk about it with family or someone—not like I have to discuss it in detail with them, more like a casual mention. Worth trying, at least.
Can you multitask it? Just do it while you watch whatever series. Presumably most of the clicking is mindless. When there is a part where you have to think, just pause the stream and spend a few seconds pondering, then kick it back off.
I have tried this. I find that neither task (the watching of the series AND the work) gets done properly. I miss half the jokes or only get them half and end up half-smiling rather than laughing… and I’m constantly busy with switching contexts. Listening to music on the other hand works fine, which is what I’m doing now. The music turns the boring task into something okay-ish (I’d rather be doing a full-time fun activity like playing some game, though once I started I don’t mind because I’m enjoying the music).
How do you prevent or stop the creation of an “ugh field”?
Context
There’s a game I play which uses real money—Entropia Universe. In this game, I am a trader—though most of my activity is reselling resources (stackable items). I buy large stacks of various resources, and then split these up into smaller stacks which are more affordable for the regular buyer. I then list these smaller stacks on the in-game auction.
There is an app for this game. Using this app, I can see which stacks have sold and how much I have left of each item. The app also also me to place bids on auction items (such as large stacks with which I resupply my stock), and the app allows me to list stacks on auction.
The only thing I can’t do in the app is split a larger stack into smaller stacks. Thus, I have to login to the game on my PC, go to my inventory, and perform the menial task of looking at what items I have and which items I need to split up. I have to do this about once every 20 days, give or take 5. I could put some effort into increasing my stockpile, increasing the time that goes between moments at which I have to login, but this is hard, since if there is a shortage, I can’t stockpile all resources equally high and I have to make a tradeoff between restocking as soon I’m out of 1 resource or restocking once I’m out of multiple resources (decreasing my earnings in between due to selling less). So 20 days plusminus 5 is about the best I can do there.
I find that logging into the app is a bit of a bother, since it is boring work, but it pays reasonably well (5 minutes a day of time which I can plop down in any segment—such as during lunch break or when waiting for something). And if I don’t do it, well, I can do it the next day.
But logging into the game on my PC is turning into a hassle for me. I keep postponing it, since there is no actual need to login and split stacks until I am running out of stacks to sell of a certain resource. When I do login, there is naturally lots of work to do—it can take up to 45 minutes to do all the things I have to do (take stock of inventory, make a list of stuff I need to buy, announce buy offer in trade chat, split stacks off the stuff I already have, make trades with the people who are willing to sell me the stuff I need, buy stacks off auction if nobody is willing to sell to me, make stacks out of the stuff people sold me, check if I did everything properly—then, log out of the game on the PC, login on the mobile app, and clear the notification list there so I don’t double list something).
And I’m starting to notice that I find the IDEA of having to do this work more annoying than the actual work itself. The actual work itself is quite simple, there’s no heavy lifting involved, just some clicking. I put on some music during that work, and it’s quite pleasant. But the idea of “ugh, I have to remember to login tonight because I’m almost running out of X” frustrates me. It also doesn’t help that I sometimes forget and have to make the choice to do it now (where now means stop watching the series you’re watching right now, log in, do the work, log out, go to bed because it’s bedtime) or postpone it until tomorrow.
TL;DR
I spend 5 minutes a day making money via a phone app. After about 2 to 4 weeks, I have to do a task which takes 45 minutes on my PC at home to enable the ability to make money via the phone app. The phone app task feels easy, but the idea of having to do the 45-minute task at home is a burden. The actual work in the 45 minute task is pretty light.
Question
How do I prevent a task which I have to do on a irregular basis in my leisure time from becoming an ugh field?
I’d like to keep doing the actual tasks—I earn about 2 to 3 euro in those 5 minutes a day. The 45 minute task itself doesn’t earn me anything directly, but good performance (such as paying attention to the trade chat and spotting a deal) does improve how much I can get with the 5 minute daily work on my phone. Suggesting I drop the whole thing together IS an idea, but I feel I’m making an adequate trade of time for money with these tasks.
I also can’t automate the task, mostly because modding the game is not allowed and because there’s quite a bit of thinking involved which makes the whole thing non-trivial. Plus the game has to communicate with the servers before it will let you make another change (such as creating a new stack of x units and reducing another stack by x units), so even if the clicking was automated I’d still have to sit there.
Can you turn the 45-minute task into a larger number of smaller less intimidating tasks?
Yes, I could convert it into a daily 5 minute task, or a weekly 30 minute task. This leads to some overhead, though. Most of the work is identifying how much I need of what—making 2 stacks instead of 8 just means I have to click a bit less.
… So I had an idea just now, there’s the ability to get a html table of all my items—I could probably parse this with some tool, which could help me with doing the work. I’d still have to do all the clicking, but some of the stock taking could be automated like that, and this could help me with structuring and organizing the task as such that it’s less uncertain.
It feels like there might be more benefit (if it’s possible) in separating the task into genuinely different subtasks rather than just “smaller” ones. It depends on whether the task is ugh-ish (1) just because there’s too much of it to feel (in anticipation) like fun or (2) because it produces that “aargh, I don’t even know where to start with this damn thing” feeling. If #1, just splitting it into smaller bits might suffice. If #2, it needs splitting into simpler bits.
(Yes, splitting it will probably make it less efficient. But it may be better to have something inefficient that you will actually do than something efficient that you won’t.)
But if you can automate part of it so that there’s just less to do, as your second paragraph suggests, that sounds really promising.
The task itself is annoying because everything takes too long. Because it’s a game, you have to walk over to storage and you have to walk over to auction and basically when you see something for cheap in the auction, answering the question “how much of that do I have already” takes 30 seconds. Then to get back to the auction and the listing you were looking at takes probably another 15 seconds. This makes the whole process feel like bleh because, well, it’s...
It’s like using a slow and unresponsive website.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtbYPITWiMg
Here’s a link to a youtube video which explains how to use the auction—I don’t know of its quality, but point of interest is the gold/black list of stuff and the blue grid on the right. The gold/black list is the auction interface, the blue grid is your inventory. There’s another box somewhere else in that room he’s standing in, that’s your storage. It contains another blue-grid style inventory.
The sizes of items in the grid layout can change with updates (sometimes intended, sometimes unintended). The icons for items in the grid can change with updates (most of them unintended and thus undocumented). And lastly, I’m not sure bots are allowed. I know external information tools are allowed, like things that read game chat and filter it for you or read the game’s message log to display a map of waypoints, but I don’t think the actual input is allowed to be done by botting.
Is there a way you can keep your own records of what stuff you have so that you don’t need to keep walking over to storage in-game to check?
Yes, and I can probably include that in the automation. I already have a list of my own records, but updating it is a pain and as a result I tend to just head over to storage. Reducing the workload to keep the list updated should resolve some of those troubles as well.
Why not automate the clicking as well? Replace yourself by a script, then go find another arbitrage to exploit.
Because automating the clicking is pretty hard and subject to needing maintenance every time the game updates (which is about every 2 months or so)… and automating the “what do I need” part is easy and can probably be done in 2-3 hours.
Can you shedule it to a fixed date every two weeks? Maybe it’s easier if it happens at a fixed shedule than if you have to decide whether or not to do it every evening.
I think I could try this. I had thought of this solution myself, but … I don’t know why I dismissed it. Maybe because I hadn’t done the proper thinking in regards to how much time there is being having to restock, so there was no period to schedule it for (so the objection was “It’s unschedulable” which is no longer true).
Some more standard advice would be to make some kind of public commitment to it, so there’s somebody else to hold you accountable. This could be kind of difficult when it’s something as unimportant as a video game, as that might make you look pretty weird (depending on your friends and your relationships with them), but you could do it very casually; even just mentioning the task in passing in a conversation would probably help. I also find that making a “public” commitment helps even when it’s not actually public; just consciously focusing on the subject and committing to hold yourself accountable for doing it at a certain time can be surprisingly effective (I like to say it out loud, as this seems to help, but I talk to myself a lot anyway so it might just be a personal thing). I can’t really vouch for this method’s effectiveness, though; I’ve never really tried to permanently solve a recurring problem like the one you describe with it, I’ve only used it as a band-aid to get past the “ugh field” a few times. It may lose its effectiveness with repetition, if it even ever works at all for you. A last possibility in this category, depending on how serious you are about this, would be to try something like Beeminder that would ideally give you the motivation to push past the “ugh field” and get used to doing what you need to do. Since I don’t yet know how to embed links in words, here it is: https://www.beeminder.com/
For something more fun, if probably less practical, you could try to drug yourself into forming a habit. You’ve probably heard of people trying to use reinforcement learning on themselves, basically—allowing themselves to eat candy (or some other kind of reward) when they do the target activity. I’m really doubtful that this is actually useful for most people (though I haven’t looked much into it—I just have a vague, bad feeling about it; it’s probably worth investigating). Luckily, though, you can try something better: using nicotine to turbo-boost your habit formation. This is probably wildly irresponsible, and I don’t really recommend it, but it’s worth hearing about, at least. Of course, you’ll need to take into account the extra cost of getting nicotine gum (or patches—just don’t smoke, that’s definitely not worth it), as well as whatever psychological costs the chance of getting addicted to the drug might entail. I’m not going to go into specifics, but instead just show you to the source of the idea (which I just discovered fairly recently, which is probably a large part of the reason I’m bringing up nicotine at all): http://www.gwern.net/Nicotine#habit-formation
I am NOT going to drug myself into forming a habit. This is a ~25 euro/hour, 1 hour per week side hobby, which I could miss without any problems. … Maybe that’s the wrong counterargument but I feel it’s too dangerous for the rewards involved. (I wouldn’t try smoking if you gave me money because I hear from people that it’s hard to quit.)
The public commitment thing is something I use myself from time to time, and I can make use of it—I will make use of it a bit more (I even used this post as a sort of public commitment) but the whole idea of a “real money game” is already pretty weird to my co-workers (They’re more comfortable with the explanation “It’s a casino styled like an mmo and I make money via arbitrage over the chips”) so it’s kind of hard to weave into the conversation. But I can talk about it with family or someone—not like I have to discuss it in detail with them, more like a casual mention. Worth trying, at least.
Nicotine use and smoking are not at all the same thing. Did you read the link?
I did not read the link.
But I also think that drugging myself like that for this is not OK.
Can you multitask it? Just do it while you watch whatever series. Presumably most of the clicking is mindless. When there is a part where you have to think, just pause the stream and spend a few seconds pondering, then kick it back off.
I have tried this. I find that neither task (the watching of the series AND the work) gets done properly. I miss half the jokes or only get them half and end up half-smiling rather than laughing… and I’m constantly busy with switching contexts. Listening to music on the other hand works fine, which is what I’m doing now. The music turns the boring task into something okay-ish (I’d rather be doing a full-time fun activity like playing some game, though once I started I don’t mind because I’m enjoying the music).