I don’t quite understand what goal you’re going for here. As you say, if the goal is “enjoyably waste time”, some activities are set up to encourage the next step automatically. If you do in fact have the goal “enjoyably waste time for an hour” or something, this seems like useful behaviour? Or is it the case that your actual goal is “perform this particular enjoyable waste of time that I have selected and then stop”? It seems like this would be the reason you might want to do this anti-listing thing, but at no point do you describe something other than “enjoyably waste time” as your goal. What did I miss?
I’m talking about akrasia, not about literally possessing the explicit goal “enjoyably waste time”. This is unlikely to be a goal anyone needs help achieving, and yet there exist a wide variety of lists to help people achieve it nonetheless.
What I’m getting at is that lists facilitate getting things done. If that thing is an explicit goal we have, the goal is more likely to be achieved. In these cases, where no lists (or poor lists) exist, we want to create or improve them.
Some things which aren’t our explicit goals automatically produce their own lists which don’t work in our best interests. In these cases, we want to disrupt those lists.
Makes sense. So the goal is something else entirely, you end up on the self-list-producing activity by mistake, and then it’s hard to escape from. The anti-listing idea is a way of escaping from the mistake.
I don’t quite understand what goal you’re going for here. As you say, if the goal is “enjoyably waste time”, some activities are set up to encourage the next step automatically. If you do in fact have the goal “enjoyably waste time for an hour” or something, this seems like useful behaviour? Or is it the case that your actual goal is “perform this particular enjoyable waste of time that I have selected and then stop”? It seems like this would be the reason you might want to do this anti-listing thing, but at no point do you describe something other than “enjoyably waste time” as your goal. What did I miss?
I’m talking about akrasia, not about literally possessing the explicit goal “enjoyably waste time”. This is unlikely to be a goal anyone needs help achieving, and yet there exist a wide variety of lists to help people achieve it nonetheless.
What I’m getting at is that lists facilitate getting things done. If that thing is an explicit goal we have, the goal is more likely to be achieved. In these cases, where no lists (or poor lists) exist, we want to create or improve them.
Some things which aren’t our explicit goals automatically produce their own lists which don’t work in our best interests. In these cases, we want to disrupt those lists.
Makes sense. So the goal is something else entirely, you end up on the self-list-producing activity by mistake, and then it’s hard to escape from. The anti-listing idea is a way of escaping from the mistake.