Hmm, my intuition leans strongly towards preserving willpower over practicing, but that’s mostly an intuition formed from personal experience, rather than based in anything robust.
One of the reasons I find thinking in systems super useful is that my willpower is highly variable with time (as a function of mental health, general stress levels, sleep, health, etc). So if I don’t have systems then at those times a lot of things in my life break, and I lack the willpower to fix them. So systems don’t matter too much during high-willpower times when I could mostly do the right thing anyway, but are basically a way to smooth out that curve, and make low-willpower times much better. And I would be very surprised if practicing using willpower removed those low-willpower periods.
I imagine the case is less obvious if you don’t have periods of relatively low willpower?
Hmm, my intuition leans strongly towards preserving willpower over practicing, but that’s mostly an intuition formed from personal experience, rather than based in anything robust.
One of the reasons I find thinking in systems super useful is that my willpower is highly variable with time (as a function of mental health, general stress levels, sleep, health, etc). So if I don’t have systems then at those times a lot of things in my life break, and I lack the willpower to fix them. So systems don’t matter too much during high-willpower times when I could mostly do the right thing anyway, but are basically a way to smooth out that curve, and make low-willpower times much better. And I would be very surprised if practicing using willpower removed those low-willpower periods.
I imagine the case is less obvious if you don’t have periods of relatively low willpower?