Yeah; if I don’t have enough willpower to start doing my homework, and your magical solution is “pomodoro”, what exactly makes you believe that I have enough willpower to start doing pomodoro? If I am capable of doing pomodoro, then I am also capable of doing my homework directly.
(Now that I think about it more, epistemically… Suppose that every Monday I have enough willpower to do anything: homework, pomodoro, you name it. But every Tuesday I simply can’t get out of my bed, or can’t stop browsing internet. If you tell me to use pomodoro and keep detailed logs, I will find out that on the days I used pomodoro I got some work done, but on the days I didn’t use pomodoro I didn’t get anything done. Sounds like clear evidence that pomodoro is the crucial ingredient, doesn’t it?)
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I think the rational action would be to taboo “akrasia” and look into details, how specifically you avoid doing the things you should do. It could be different things for different people or different situations. And then, different things would or wouldn’t work.
For example, if your problem is that it feels like “if I start working, it will mean that I will spend the entire day working and having no fun”, then precommitting to only work for 1 hour and then stop regardless of the outcome could make the feeling go away.
But if your problem is e.g. uncertainty whether you are doing the right thing, clever time schedule is not going to fix that. Talking about it with an aligned person might, though.
Or maybe you are not sure on what criteria your work will be evaluated, in which case it might help to get an early feedback.
Or you feel horrified of failure, in which case it might sense to think about a Plan B first, and then return to the original task knowing that the badness of the outcome is limited.
Or you may remove the thing that distracts you. And set up automatic reminders.
Yeah; if I don’t have enough willpower to start doing my homework, and your magical solution is “pomodoro”, what exactly makes you believe that I have enough willpower to start doing pomodoro? If I am capable of doing pomodoro, then I am also capable of doing my homework directly.
(Now that I think about it more, epistemically… Suppose that every Monday I have enough willpower to do anything: homework, pomodoro, you name it. But every Tuesday I simply can’t get out of my bed, or can’t stop browsing internet. If you tell me to use pomodoro and keep detailed logs, I will find out that on the days I used pomodoro I got some work done, but on the days I didn’t use pomodoro I didn’t get anything done. Sounds like clear evidence that pomodoro is the crucial ingredient, doesn’t it?)
*
I think the rational action would be to taboo “akrasia” and look into details, how specifically you avoid doing the things you should do. It could be different things for different people or different situations. And then, different things would or wouldn’t work.
For example, if your problem is that it feels like “if I start working, it will mean that I will spend the entire day working and having no fun”, then precommitting to only work for 1 hour and then stop regardless of the outcome could make the feeling go away.
But if your problem is e.g. uncertainty whether you are doing the right thing, clever time schedule is not going to fix that. Talking about it with an aligned person might, though.
Or maybe you are not sure on what criteria your work will be evaluated, in which case it might help to get an early feedback.
Or you feel horrified of failure, in which case it might sense to think about a Plan B first, and then return to the original task knowing that the badness of the outcome is limited.
Or you may remove the thing that distracts you. And set up automatic reminders.