So I spent today getting work done. The majority of 11 hours, at least. As a rough estimate, it’s probably closer to 8, once you take out the breaks and the eating and such.
I had no idea why, and my models of how to fight Akrasia feel a bit weaker...
But I realized something peculiar about the day before that I hadn’t really considered potentially positive: I had done a little more than I had been lately (I threw together a song and recorded a few others with better instruments), but most of my progress for the day was halted when I decided to look at a forum that I’d been avoiding for several months—since October 2012, in fact. I wouldn’t call it an incredible mood-lift, or anything; I wound up trying to speed through a 75-page thread (20 posts per page); I only got 26 or so pages in before I bailed and watched a 30 minute video on Youtube.
What I didn’t realize until halfway through writing this is that my productivity took a nosedive after October 2012, and it’s been very difficult to get it back up to something vaguely resembling passable—I had a random burst of enthusiasm for a spontaneous project one week in February, and managed maybe a month of modest output after I read the Motivation Hacker, but it feels considerably weaker compared to the same time period in previous years.
The observation “Spends a lot of time and mental energy on forum on day X” → “Spends most of day X+1 working” does not intuitively seem to imply a causal relationship. My observations about my mental state by the end of yesterday did not make me feel all that confident that today would turn out productive. Yet, I’m now wondering what the graph of time spent on this forum vs work done looks like. (Well, how the two graphs would compare, rather.) I don’t know how possible it is to actually gather said data (I could check the frequency of my posts and search for references from IM conversations to said forum, for what it’s worth?).
The perplexing part is more that, if it turns out that there is a strong enough correlation between time spent foruming and work done, then I’ll need to seriously rethink my model of how I’m motivated; avoiding it felt more like removing a source of mental energy drain/procrastination/distraction opportunity, without any significant happiness or idea cost. I have taken that same forum into consideration when trying to figure out how to combat Akrasia in the past, but mostly I came up with “I do better when happier, and occasionally something pleasant enough comes of this that it helps”. But I’m starting to question the happiness part.
Tentative hypothesis: You were in a low energy state since October, and reading the forum was an indication that you were beginning an upswing rather than specifically a cause of more energy.
If I’m right, then it makes sense to look back a little farther to see what might have started the upswing.
So I spent today getting work done. The majority of 11 hours, at least. As a rough estimate, it’s probably closer to 8, once you take out the breaks and the eating and such.
I had no idea why, and my models of how to fight Akrasia feel a bit weaker...
But I realized something peculiar about the day before that I hadn’t really considered potentially positive: I had done a little more than I had been lately (I threw together a song and recorded a few others with better instruments), but most of my progress for the day was halted when I decided to look at a forum that I’d been avoiding for several months—since October 2012, in fact. I wouldn’t call it an incredible mood-lift, or anything; I wound up trying to speed through a 75-page thread (20 posts per page); I only got 26 or so pages in before I bailed and watched a 30 minute video on Youtube.
What I didn’t realize until halfway through writing this is that my productivity took a nosedive after October 2012, and it’s been very difficult to get it back up to something vaguely resembling passable—I had a random burst of enthusiasm for a spontaneous project one week in February, and managed maybe a month of modest output after I read the Motivation Hacker, but it feels considerably weaker compared to the same time period in previous years.
The observation “Spends a lot of time and mental energy on forum on day X” → “Spends most of day X+1 working” does not intuitively seem to imply a causal relationship. My observations about my mental state by the end of yesterday did not make me feel all that confident that today would turn out productive. Yet, I’m now wondering what the graph of time spent on this forum vs work done looks like. (Well, how the two graphs would compare, rather.) I don’t know how possible it is to actually gather said data (I could check the frequency of my posts and search for references from IM conversations to said forum, for what it’s worth?).
The perplexing part is more that, if it turns out that there is a strong enough correlation between time spent foruming and work done, then I’ll need to seriously rethink my model of how I’m motivated; avoiding it felt more like removing a source of mental energy drain/procrastination/distraction opportunity, without any significant happiness or idea cost. I have taken that same forum into consideration when trying to figure out how to combat Akrasia in the past, but mostly I came up with “I do better when happier, and occasionally something pleasant enough comes of this that it helps”. But I’m starting to question the happiness part.
Tentative hypothesis: You were in a low energy state since October, and reading the forum was an indication that you were beginning an upswing rather than specifically a cause of more energy.
If I’m right, then it makes sense to look back a little farther to see what might have started the upswing.