I agree with ThrustVectoring that you’ll probably get more mileage out of implementing something like a GTD system (or at least that doing this will be cheaper and seems like it would complement any additional mileage you get out of nootropics). There are lots of easy behavioral / motivational hacks you can use before you start messing with your neurochemistry, e.g. rewarding your inner pigeon.
I’ve had some success recently with Beeminding my Pomodoros. It forces me to maintain a minimal level of work per unit time (e.g. recently I was at the MIRI workshop, and even though ordinarily I would have been able to justify not doing anything else during that week I still spent 25 minutes every day working on problem sets for grad school classes) which I’m about to increase.
Tried. Failed. Everything that requires me, in my current state, to police myself, fails miserably. It’s like my guardian demon keeps whispering in my ear, “hey… who’s to stop me from breaking the same rules that I have set for myself?”—cue yet another day wasted.
Eat candy every time I clear an item off my to-do list? Eat candy even when I don’t!
Pomodoros? Y-yeah, let’s stop this timer now, shall we—I’ve just got this sudden imperious urge to play a certain videogame, 10 minutes into my Pomodoro session...
… I don’t know, I’m just hopeless. Not just lazy, but… meta-lazy too? Sometimes I worry that I was born with exactly the wrong kind of brain for succeeding (in my weird definition of the word); like utter lack of conscientiousness is embedded inextricably into the very tissues of my brain. That’s why nootropics are kind of a last resort for me.
… I don’t know, I’m just hopeless. Not just lazy, but… meta-lazy too? Sometimes I worry that I was born with exactly the wrong kind of brain for succeeding (in my weird definition of the word); like utter lack of conscientiousness is embedded inextricably into the very tissues of my brain. That’s why nootropics are kind of a last resort for me.
I could have easily written this exact same post two years ago. I used to be incredibly akratic. For example, at one point in high school I concluded that I was simply incapable of doing any schoolwork at home. I started a sort of anti-system where I would do all the homework and studying I could during my free period the day it was due, and simply not do the rest. This was my “solution” to procrastination.
Starting in January, however, I made a very conscious effort to combat akrasia in my life. I made slow, frustrating progress until about a week and a half ago where something “clicked” and now I spend probably 80% of my free time working on personal projects (and enjoying it). I know, I know, this could very easily be a temporary peak, but I have very high hopes for continuing to improve.
So, keep your head up, I guess.
I think on LessWrong, quick simple “tricks” like Pomodoro / feeding yourself candy / working in the same room as someone else / disabling Chrome are way, way, over emphasized. (The only trick I use is writing down my impulses e.g. “check reddit” before indulging in them.) What actually helped/helps me is introspection. Try to figure out what is it about working that’s so unpleasant. Why does your brain resist it so much? Luke’s algorithm for beating procrastination is something along the lines of what I’m talking about. I think a lot of people have a “use willpower in order to fight through the pain” mentality, but I think what you really want to do is eliminate the pain. If work is torture for you, then I don’t really think you can ever be productive unless you change that fact.
From books that I’ve read and my own experience, it seems to me that one of the easiest traps to fall into (and one of the most fatal) is tying your productivity to your sense of self-worth, especially if you use use your self-worth to motivate yourself (“If I can complete this assignment, I’ll be like who my dad wanted me to be!”), especially if you use your self-worth to negatively motivate yourself (“If I don’t pass this test, I’ll basically be a failure in life”), especially if you actively foster this attitude in order to push yourself, and especially if you suffer or have recently suffered from depression or low self-esteem.
I can say more, but I don’t want to waste my time typing it all out if nobody’s going to read it, so just reply to this post if you want me to share more of my experiences. (That goes for anyone reading this, not just the OP).
To be honest, it’s really hard to say exactly what lead to my change in willpower/productivity. Now that I actually try to write down concrete things I do that I didn’t do two months ago, it’s hard, and my probability that my recent success is a fluke has gone up a little.
I feel like what happened is that after reading a few self-help books and thinking a lot about the problem, I ended up completely changing the way I think about working in a difficult-to-describe way. It’s kind of like how when I first found LessWrong, read through all the sequences, and did some musings on my own, I completely changed the way I form beliefs. Now I say to myself stuff like “How would the world look differently if x were true?” and “Of all the people who believe x will happen to them, how many are correct?”, even without consciously thinking about it. Perhaps more importantly, I also stopped thinking certain thoughts, like “all the evidence might point to x, but it’s morally right to believe y, so I believe y”, etc.
Similarly, now, I now have a bunch of mental habits related to getting myself to work harder and snap out of pessimistic mindstates, but since I wasn’t handed them all in one nicely arranged body of information like I was with LessWrong, and had to instead draw from this source and that source and make my own inferences, I find it really hard to think in concrete terms about my new mental habits. Writing down these habits and making them explicit is one of my goals, and if I end up doing that, I’ll probably post it somewhere here. But until then, what I can do is point you in the direction of what I read, and outline a few of what I think are the biggest things that helped me.
The material I read was
various LessWrong writings
PJ Eby’s Thinking Things Done
Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals by Heidi Halvorson
Switch: How to Change When Change Is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath
Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David D. Burns
The Procrastination Equation by Piers Steel
Getting Things Done by David Allen
Out of all of these, I most recommend Succeed and Switch. PJ Eby is a weird example because he is One Of Us, but he has no credentials, the book is actually unfinished, and he now admits on his website that writing it was one of the worst periods in his life and he was procrastinating every day. So it makes sense to be very skeptical. However, I actually really enjoyed Thinking Things Done and I think that it’s probably the best book out of all of these to get you into the “mind hacking” mindset that I attributed my success to, even if its contents aren’t literally true. So you can make your own decision on that. Feeling Good isn’t a productivity book at all, but I found it really helpful in dealing with akrasia for reasons that I’ll sort of explain later. I wouldn’t bother to read the Procrastination Equation because there’s a summary by lukeprog on this site that basically says everything the book says. And Getting Things Done just describes an organizational system that seems tailored for very busy white collar professionals, so if that doesn’t describe you I don’t think it’s worth it.
Obviously if your akrasia extends to reading these books then this isn’t very helpful, but perhaps you could make it your goal to read just one of them (I recommend Succeed) over a period of two months or so. I think this would go a long way.
And then here are the things that most helped me, and can actually be written down at this time. I have the impression that there isn’t a singular “key to success”—instead, success requires a whole bunch of attributes to all be in place, and most people have many but not all. So the insights that you need might be very different than the ones I needed, but perhaps not.
1: Not tying my self-worth to my success
The thesis of PJ Eby’s Thinking Things Done is that the main reason why people are unsuccessful is that they use negative motivation (“if I don’t do x, some negative y will happen”) as opposed to positive motivation (“if i do x, some positive y will happen”). He has the following evo-psych explanation for this: in the ancestral environment, personal failure meant that you could possibly be kicked out of your tribe, which would be fatal, and animals have a freezing response to imminent death, so if you are fearing failure you will freeze up.
In Succeed, Heidi Halverson portrays positive motivation and negative motivation as having pros and cons, but has her own dichotomy of unhealthy motivation and healthy motivation: “Be good” motivation, which is tied to identity and status and focuses on proving oneself and high levels of performance, and “get better” motivation, which is what it sounds like. According to her and several empirical studies, “get better” is better than “be good” in almost every way.
In Feeling Good, David Burns describes a tendency of behavior he calls “do-nothingism” where depressed people will lie in bed all day, then feel terrible for doing so, leading them to keep lying in bed, leading them to feel even worse, etc. etc.
It seems like a pretty intuitive for a depressed, lazy person to motivate themselves by saying “Okay, self, gotta stop being lazy. Do you want to be a worthless, lazy failure in life? No you don’t. So get moving!” But it seems like synthesizing these three pieces of information informs us that this is basically the worst thing you can possibly do. I definitely fell into this trap, and climbing out of it was probably one of the biggest things that helped me.
2: Being realistic
I feel like something a lot of people tend to do is tell themselves “From this day now on, I’ll be perfect!” and then try to spend six hours a day working on personal projects, along with doing 100 push ups and meditating. This is obviously stupid, but for some reason at least for me was a really hard trap to get out of.
For example, I’ve always been a person who is really easily inspired i.e. if I read a good book, I’ll want to write a book, if I listen to a good rap album, I’ll want to become a rapper. Due to this tendency, I’ve done a fair bit of exploration in visual art, music, and video game programming. When I initially attempted my akrasia intervention, I tried to get myself to work on all three of these areas and achieve meaningful results in all of them. I held onto the naive belief that this was possible for far too long, and eventually had a mini-crisis of faith where I decided that I would cut my losses and from then on exclusively work on video game programming. Since then, things have been going much better.
This also goes with the get better mindset from the last point. If you are the worst procrastinator you know, your initial goal should be to be a merely below average procrastinator, then to be an average procrastinator, and on and on until you cure akrasia.
3: Realistic optimism
All the studies show that optimists are more successful in almost every domain. So how is that compatible with my “being realistic” point? The key is that the best, most healthy kind of optimism is the belief that you can eventually succeed in your goals (and will if you are persistent), but that it will take a lot of effort and setbacks along the way to do so. This is usually a valid belief, and combines the motivation of optimism and the cautiousness of pessimism. (This is straight from Succeed, by the way.)
4: Elephant / Rider analogy
I’m not going to go into detail about this because this post is getting long as fuck, but if this idea is unfamiliar to you, search for it on Google and LessWrong, it’s been written about extensively and is a very very useful (and liberating)metaphor for how your brain works.
5: Willpower is like a muscle
Willpower is like a muscle and if you give it regular workouts it gets stronger. People who quit smoking often also start exercising or stop drinking, depressed people who are given a pet to care for often become much happier because the responsibility encourages them to enact changes in their own life, etc.
This implies that once you start changing a little, it will be easier to change more and more. But you can also artificially jump start this process by exercising your willpower. Probably the best willpower exercises are physical exercise and meditation (and they both of course have numerous other benefits), but if you lack the energy/time/desire to do either of those, you could always do something very simple and gradually build. If you have a bad habit like biting your nails, that could be a good starting point.
So yeah, this post is long as fuck, didn’t really mean to write that much. Hope it helped, though. Maybe I’ll revise this and turn it into a discussion post.
Some people in a similar position recruit other people to police us when our ability to police ourselves is exhausted/inadequate. Of course, this requires some kind of policing mechanism… e.g., whereby the coach can unilaterally withhold rewards/invoke punishments/apply costs in case of noncompliance.
I have made many incremental steps towards modifying some behaviours in a desired direction, yes, but they don’t tend to be consciously directed. When they are, I abandon them soon; no habit formation occurs of these attempts. I am making progress, but it seems to be largely outside of my control.
Have you tried Beeminder? That’s less self-policing and more Beeminder policing you, as long as you haven’t sunk so low as to lie to Beeminder. Alternatively, there are probably things you can do to cultivate self-control in general, although I’m not sure what those would be (I’ve been practicing with denying myself various things for awhile now).
No way, it’s the stupidest thing I could do with my already very very limited financial resources. That sort of way of motivating yourself is really sort of a luxury, at least when viewed from my position. Lower middle class folks in relatively poor countries can’t afford to gamble their meagre savings on a fickle motivation; any benefit I could derive from it is easily outweighted by the very good chance of digging myself into a financial hole… so, I can’t take that risk.
I can think of much stupider things. Doesn’t the fact that you have limited finances make this an even better tool to use (in that you’ll be more motivated not to lose money)? The smallest pledge is $5 and if you stay on track (it helps to set small goals at first) you never have to pay anything. I think you’re miscalibrated about how risky this is.
And how were you planning on obtaining nootropics if your finances are so limited?
Doesn’t the fact that you have limited finances make this an even better tool to use (in that you’ll be more motivated not to lose money)?
… No. It doesn’t work like that at all. That’s the definition of digging myself into a hole. Will I be struggling to get out of it all the more so? Yes, I will, but at a cost greater than what I was initially setting out to accomplish. I’d rather be unmotivated than afraid of going broke.
I think you’re miscalibrated about how risky this is.
Possibly. The thing is, around here, even $5 is… Well, not much by any measure, but it doesn’t feel negligible, you know what I’m saying? Someone of median income couldn’t really say it’s no big deal if they come to realize the equivalent of $5 is missing from their pockets. It probably doesn’t feel like that to an American, so I understand why you may think I’m mistaken.
And how were you planning on obtaining nootropics if your finances are so limited?
I can afford to spend a few bucks on a physical product with almost guaranteed benefits. I can’t afford to bet money on me doing things I have a tendency to do very rarely. In one case I can expect to get definite value from the money I spend, in the other I’m basically buying myself some worries. (I should, perhaps, add that the things I want to motivate myself to do don’t have a chance of earning me income any time soon.)
I can think of much stupider things.
Of course; it wasn’t meant to be understood literally.
--
The bottom line is, they’re not getting my money. I’m really confident that it’s a good decision, and have really good reasons to be suspicious of any attempts to get me to pay for something, and there are really many things out there that are obviously useful enough that I don’t need to be persuaded into buying them. So… I appreciate that you mean to help, it’s more than one can ask from strangers, but I strongly prefer alternatives that are either free, guaranteed, or ideally both.
A habit I’m working on developing is to ask a mental model of a Manager what I -should- be doing right now. As long as I don’t co-opt the Manager, and as long as there’s a clearly preferable outcome, it seems to work pretty well.
Even when there isn’t a clearly preferable outcome, the mental conversation helps me sort out the issue. (And having undertaken this, I’ve discovered I used to have mental conversations with myself all the time, and at some point lost and forgot the habit.)
I’ve tried similar approaches. From that opening line and with sane priors, you can probably get a pretty good idea of what the results were.
For me, and I suspect many others for whom all self-help and motivational techniques and hacks just “inexplicably” fail and which “they must be doing wrong”, the problem is almost entirely within one single, simple assumption that seems to work naturally for the authors, but which is for me a massive amount of cognitive workload that is continuously taxing on my mental energy.
And said assumption that I refer to is precisely here:
A habit I’m working on developing is to ask a mental model of a Manager what I -should- be doing right now.
The question I shall ask, to illustrate my point, is: If you were programming a computer to do this (e.g. open a chat window with someone posing as a Manager for the appropriate discussion), how would you go about it?
More importantly, how does the program know when to open the window?
Suppose the program has access to your brain and can read what you’re thinking, and also has access to a clock.
Well, there are three most obvious, simple answers, in order of code complexity:
Keep the chat window open all the time. This is obviously costly attention-wise (but not for the program), and the window is always in the way, and chances are that after a while you’ll stop noticing that window and never click on it anymore, and it will lose all usefulness. It then becomes a flat tax on your mind that is rendered useless.
Open the chat window at specific intervals. This brings another question: how often? If it’s too often, it gets annoying, and it opens too many times when not needed, and eventually that’ll cause the same problems as solution 1. If it’s not often enough, then you won’t get much benefit from it whenever you would need it. And even if it is a good interval, you’ll still sometimes open it when not needed, or not open it when it was needed more often that day or in the middle of an interval. We can do better.
Look for the kind of situations in which the Manager will help you, by reading what you’re thinking about, and then whenever certain conditions are met (procrastinating, not doing any work, spending too much time reading wikipedia articles, etc.), bring up the chat window. However, this is a large endeavor, because the program has to be constantly running and reading every thought that passes by, and then using (read: computing, running) heuristics to tell whether the conditions are met (read: run a complex function with the current thoughts as arguments/parameters, for every single given thought).
See, while I was writing this, I had forgotten about a specific work-related thing I was supposed to do at a certain condition. It’s only when I wrote point 3 above that my brain actually connected this to “checking for events”, which led to “I have events to check for!” which led to “Oh, right, that person got back, I should go ask them X”.
The key point being that the very thought of even checking for conditions upon which to act is something that does not occur naturally or on its own for me—it has to come about by being linked to from another thought and brought to my conscious attention. Any technique that relies on consciously doing X inevitably stumbles on this key factor for me.
Running computations on every single thought all the time is extremely tiring and mentally exhausting. It’s much more daunting than any task I would usually need “motivation” for. It means I stop after every few thoughts and think of the thing I have to remember to do. And then remember to think that I have to think about this again in a few more thoughts. And then try to resume whatever other thoughts I had. It’s pretty much impossible to focus and concentrate on anything while doing this.
Which means whenever the set of conditions for talking to the Manager are met, I will not automatically open the chat window. It just won’t detect the conditions. The conditions won’t, on their own, open the chat window—the conditions themselves (I’m tabsploding on wikipedia) were not designed such that they always open the chat window with the Manager each time they happen.
So the tabsploding process happens, without ever calling on the remote parts of my brain that have little bits of code to open chat windows when tabsplosions happen, and so those remote parts of my brain keep on sleeping, and so chat windows do not open, and so tabsplosions go on merrily uninterrupted for hours until I read an article about business management, and the word management triggers me to remember the Manager process, and then I suddenly realize that I’ve been procrastinating all this time and need to get back to work (Note: I get back to work without even needing said Manager chat window, by this point, so the problem is clearly not “motivation” in this case).
And all that is the hidden assumption, the obvious thing that no one mentions in “making a habit of doing X” or “using GTD” or “using pomodoro”. It’s the single most brain-computationally-intensive process I can think of that people have ever actually seriously implied I should use. My subconscious, unfortunately, doesn’t do it for me. It seems like most other people have it easier. Well, good for them. I’m still stuck here unable to realize that I need to do the dishes, and so I keep on reading forums, and my forum-reading thoughts don’t have any bits dedicated to remembering whether or not dishes need to be done, so the forum-reading begets more forum-reading and tabsploding, and my mind never brings up the issue of having something to do.
And yes, this applies to meta concerns. So training myself to be more mindful and conscientious of these things fails because I fail to think of applying techniques to make myself more mindful and conscientious. Everything I’ve tried has failed to produce the amazing results others report.
I have no idea of how common this problem is, or whether nootropics might be a solution.
However, sometimes it gets much more complex. It can very well happen that I insert a trigger to “must go do dishes once X is done”, but then I think “Hmm, maybe I should go do dishes” at some point in the future when I’m in-between activities, and X happens to be done, but (and this is the gut-kicking bastard):
Thinking that I should do the dishes is not properly linked to checking whether X is done, and thus I don’t see the process that tells me that X is done so I should do the dishes!
And therefore what happens afterwards, instead of realizing that X is done me getting up to do dishes, is me thinking “yeah I should, but meh, this is more interesting”. And X has never crossed my mind during this entire internal exchange. And now I’m back to tabsploding / foruming / gaming. And then three hours later I realize that all of this happened when I finally think of X. Oops.
So yes. “Trying to remember” is an active-only process for me. Something must trigger it. The thoughts and triggers do not happen easily and automatically at the right and proper times. Once the whole process is there and [Insert favorite motivational hack] is actually in my steam-of-consciousness, then this whole “motivation” thing becomes completely different and much easier to solve.
Unfortunately, I do not yet have access to technology of sufficient sophistication to externalize and fully automate this process. I’ve dreamed of it for years though.
Have you tried designing solutions for this problem? Pomodoro and the like are designed to combat akrasia; they’re designed to supplement or retrain willpower. They’re solutions for the wrong problem; your willpower isn’t entering into it. Hypothesis: Pomodoro kind-of sort-of worked for you for a short period of time before inexplicably failing. You might not have even consciously noticed it going off.
If I’m reading you correctly, that hypothesis is entirely correct. Pomodoro is also not the only thing where this has happened. In most cases, I don’t consciously realize what happens until later, usually days or weeks after the fact.
I’ve tried coming up with some solutions to the problem, yes, but so far there’s only three avenues that I’ve tried that had promising results:
Use mental imagination techniques to train habits: imagine arriving in situation or getting feelings X, anchor that situation or feeling to action Y. This works exceptionally well and easily for me, but… Yep. Doing the training is itself something that suffers from this problem. I would need to use it to train using it. Which I can’t, ’caus I’m not good enough at it (I tried). Some bootstrapping would be required for this to be a reliable method, but it’s also in itself a rather expensive and time-consuming exercise (not the same order of magnitude as constant mindfulness, though), so I’d prefer better alternatives.
Spam post-its or other forms of fixed visual / auditory reminders in the appropriate contexts, places and times. Problem is, this becomes like the permanent or fixed-timed chat windows in the programmed Manager example—my brain learns to phase them out or ignore them, something which is made exponentially worse when trying to scale things up to more things.
Externalize and automate using machines and devices. Setting programmatic reminders on my phone using tasker is the best-working variant I’ve found so far, but the app is difficult to handle and crashes often—and every single time it crashes, I lose everything (all presets, all settings, all events, everything—as if I had reinstalled the app completely). I gave up on that after about the fourth time I spent hours configuring it and then lost everything from a single unrelated crash.
I actually suffer from exactly the same issue. (I opted to try to run the Manager app full-time, although I’m not having a lot of luck training myself to actually do it. I figure any wasted brain cycles probably weren’t being used anyways on account that I couldn’t remember to do things that required using them.)
Thus far the only real “hack” I’ve worked out is to constantly change reminder mechanisms. I’m actually fine with highly disruptive alerts—my favorite alarm is also the most annoying—but the people around me tend to hate them.
Hacks aside, routine has been the only thing I’ve found that helps, and helps long-term. And given my work schedule, which can vary from “Trying to find something to do” to “Working eighteen hours days for two weeks straight” with just about everything in the middle, routine has been very hard to establish.
However, I have considerably better luck limiting my routine; waking up at 6 AM every day, and dedicating this time strictly to “Stuff that needs doing”, has worked for me in the past. (Well, up until a marathon work period.)
I agree with ThrustVectoring that you’ll probably get more mileage out of implementing something like a GTD system (or at least that doing this will be cheaper and seems like it would complement any additional mileage you get out of nootropics). There are lots of easy behavioral / motivational hacks you can use before you start messing with your neurochemistry, e.g. rewarding your inner pigeon.
I’ve had some success recently with Beeminding my Pomodoros. It forces me to maintain a minimal level of work per unit time (e.g. recently I was at the MIRI workshop, and even though ordinarily I would have been able to justify not doing anything else during that week I still spent 25 minutes every day working on problem sets for grad school classes) which I’m about to increase.
Tried. Failed. Everything that requires me, in my current state, to police myself, fails miserably. It’s like my guardian demon keeps whispering in my ear, “hey… who’s to stop me from breaking the same rules that I have set for myself?”—cue yet another day wasted.
Eat candy every time I clear an item off my to-do list? Eat candy even when I don’t!
Pomodoros? Y-yeah, let’s stop this timer now, shall we—I’ve just got this sudden imperious urge to play a certain videogame, 10 minutes into my Pomodoro session...
Schedule says “do 7 physics problems”? Strike that, write underneath “browse 4chan for 7 hours”!
… I don’t know, I’m just hopeless. Not just lazy, but… meta-lazy too? Sometimes I worry that I was born with exactly the wrong kind of brain for succeeding (in my weird definition of the word); like utter lack of conscientiousness is embedded inextricably into the very tissues of my brain. That’s why nootropics are kind of a last resort for me.
I could have easily written this exact same post two years ago. I used to be incredibly akratic. For example, at one point in high school I concluded that I was simply incapable of doing any schoolwork at home. I started a sort of anti-system where I would do all the homework and studying I could during my free period the day it was due, and simply not do the rest. This was my “solution” to procrastination.
Starting in January, however, I made a very conscious effort to combat akrasia in my life. I made slow, frustrating progress until about a week and a half ago where something “clicked” and now I spend probably 80% of my free time working on personal projects (and enjoying it). I know, I know, this could very easily be a temporary peak, but I have very high hopes for continuing to improve.
So, keep your head up, I guess.
I think on LessWrong, quick simple “tricks” like Pomodoro / feeding yourself candy / working in the same room as someone else / disabling Chrome are way, way, over emphasized. (The only trick I use is writing down my impulses e.g. “check reddit” before indulging in them.) What actually helped/helps me is introspection. Try to figure out what is it about working that’s so unpleasant. Why does your brain resist it so much? Luke’s algorithm for beating procrastination is something along the lines of what I’m talking about. I think a lot of people have a “use willpower in order to fight through the pain” mentality, but I think what you really want to do is eliminate the pain. If work is torture for you, then I don’t really think you can ever be productive unless you change that fact.
From books that I’ve read and my own experience, it seems to me that one of the easiest traps to fall into (and one of the most fatal) is tying your productivity to your sense of self-worth, especially if you use use your self-worth to motivate yourself (“If I can complete this assignment, I’ll be like who my dad wanted me to be!”), especially if you use your self-worth to negatively motivate yourself (“If I don’t pass this test, I’ll basically be a failure in life”), especially if you actively foster this attitude in order to push yourself, and especially if you suffer or have recently suffered from depression or low self-esteem.
I can say more, but I don’t want to waste my time typing it all out if nobody’s going to read it, so just reply to this post if you want me to share more of my experiences. (That goes for anyone reading this, not just the OP).
Please do go on; I’d be very much interested in what you have to say.
Okay.
To be honest, it’s really hard to say exactly what lead to my change in willpower/productivity. Now that I actually try to write down concrete things I do that I didn’t do two months ago, it’s hard, and my probability that my recent success is a fluke has gone up a little.
I feel like what happened is that after reading a few self-help books and thinking a lot about the problem, I ended up completely changing the way I think about working in a difficult-to-describe way. It’s kind of like how when I first found LessWrong, read through all the sequences, and did some musings on my own, I completely changed the way I form beliefs. Now I say to myself stuff like “How would the world look differently if x were true?” and “Of all the people who believe x will happen to them, how many are correct?”, even without consciously thinking about it. Perhaps more importantly, I also stopped thinking certain thoughts, like “all the evidence might point to x, but it’s morally right to believe y, so I believe y”, etc.
Similarly, now, I now have a bunch of mental habits related to getting myself to work harder and snap out of pessimistic mindstates, but since I wasn’t handed them all in one nicely arranged body of information like I was with LessWrong, and had to instead draw from this source and that source and make my own inferences, I find it really hard to think in concrete terms about my new mental habits. Writing down these habits and making them explicit is one of my goals, and if I end up doing that, I’ll probably post it somewhere here. But until then, what I can do is point you in the direction of what I read, and outline a few of what I think are the biggest things that helped me.
The material I read was
various LessWrong writings
PJ Eby’s Thinking Things Done
Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals by Heidi Halvorson
Switch: How to Change When Change Is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath
Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David D. Burns
The Procrastination Equation by Piers Steel
Getting Things Done by David Allen
Out of all of these, I most recommend Succeed and Switch. PJ Eby is a weird example because he is One Of Us, but he has no credentials, the book is actually unfinished, and he now admits on his website that writing it was one of the worst periods in his life and he was procrastinating every day. So it makes sense to be very skeptical. However, I actually really enjoyed Thinking Things Done and I think that it’s probably the best book out of all of these to get you into the “mind hacking” mindset that I attributed my success to, even if its contents aren’t literally true. So you can make your own decision on that. Feeling Good isn’t a productivity book at all, but I found it really helpful in dealing with akrasia for reasons that I’ll sort of explain later. I wouldn’t bother to read the Procrastination Equation because there’s a summary by lukeprog on this site that basically says everything the book says. And Getting Things Done just describes an organizational system that seems tailored for very busy white collar professionals, so if that doesn’t describe you I don’t think it’s worth it.
Obviously if your akrasia extends to reading these books then this isn’t very helpful, but perhaps you could make it your goal to read just one of them (I recommend Succeed) over a period of two months or so. I think this would go a long way.
And then here are the things that most helped me, and can actually be written down at this time. I have the impression that there isn’t a singular “key to success”—instead, success requires a whole bunch of attributes to all be in place, and most people have many but not all. So the insights that you need might be very different than the ones I needed, but perhaps not.
1: Not tying my self-worth to my success
The thesis of PJ Eby’s Thinking Things Done is that the main reason why people are unsuccessful is that they use negative motivation (“if I don’t do x, some negative y will happen”) as opposed to positive motivation (“if i do x, some positive y will happen”). He has the following evo-psych explanation for this: in the ancestral environment, personal failure meant that you could possibly be kicked out of your tribe, which would be fatal, and animals have a freezing response to imminent death, so if you are fearing failure you will freeze up.
In Succeed, Heidi Halverson portrays positive motivation and negative motivation as having pros and cons, but has her own dichotomy of unhealthy motivation and healthy motivation: “Be good” motivation, which is tied to identity and status and focuses on proving oneself and high levels of performance, and “get better” motivation, which is what it sounds like. According to her and several empirical studies, “get better” is better than “be good” in almost every way.
In Feeling Good, David Burns describes a tendency of behavior he calls “do-nothingism” where depressed people will lie in bed all day, then feel terrible for doing so, leading them to keep lying in bed, leading them to feel even worse, etc. etc.
It seems like a pretty intuitive for a depressed, lazy person to motivate themselves by saying “Okay, self, gotta stop being lazy. Do you want to be a worthless, lazy failure in life? No you don’t. So get moving!” But it seems like synthesizing these three pieces of information informs us that this is basically the worst thing you can possibly do. I definitely fell into this trap, and climbing out of it was probably one of the biggest things that helped me.
2: Being realistic
I feel like something a lot of people tend to do is tell themselves “From this day now on, I’ll be perfect!” and then try to spend six hours a day working on personal projects, along with doing 100 push ups and meditating. This is obviously stupid, but for some reason at least for me was a really hard trap to get out of.
For example, I’ve always been a person who is really easily inspired i.e. if I read a good book, I’ll want to write a book, if I listen to a good rap album, I’ll want to become a rapper. Due to this tendency, I’ve done a fair bit of exploration in visual art, music, and video game programming. When I initially attempted my akrasia intervention, I tried to get myself to work on all three of these areas and achieve meaningful results in all of them. I held onto the naive belief that this was possible for far too long, and eventually had a mini-crisis of faith where I decided that I would cut my losses and from then on exclusively work on video game programming. Since then, things have been going much better.
This also goes with the get better mindset from the last point. If you are the worst procrastinator you know, your initial goal should be to be a merely below average procrastinator, then to be an average procrastinator, and on and on until you cure akrasia.
3: Realistic optimism
All the studies show that optimists are more successful in almost every domain. So how is that compatible with my “being realistic” point? The key is that the best, most healthy kind of optimism is the belief that you can eventually succeed in your goals (and will if you are persistent), but that it will take a lot of effort and setbacks along the way to do so. This is usually a valid belief, and combines the motivation of optimism and the cautiousness of pessimism. (This is straight from Succeed, by the way.)
4: Elephant / Rider analogy
I’m not going to go into detail about this because this post is getting long as fuck, but if this idea is unfamiliar to you, search for it on Google and LessWrong, it’s been written about extensively and is a very very useful (and liberating)metaphor for how your brain works.
5: Willpower is like a muscle
Willpower is like a muscle and if you give it regular workouts it gets stronger. People who quit smoking often also start exercising or stop drinking, depressed people who are given a pet to care for often become much happier because the responsibility encourages them to enact changes in their own life, etc.
This implies that once you start changing a little, it will be easier to change more and more. But you can also artificially jump start this process by exercising your willpower. Probably the best willpower exercises are physical exercise and meditation (and they both of course have numerous other benefits), but if you lack the energy/time/desire to do either of those, you could always do something very simple and gradually build. If you have a bad habit like biting your nails, that could be a good starting point.
So yeah, this post is long as fuck, didn’t really mean to write that much. Hope it helped, though. Maybe I’ll revise this and turn it into a discussion post.
Some people in a similar position recruit other people to police us when our ability to police ourselves is exhausted/inadequate. Of course, this requires some kind of policing mechanism… e.g., whereby the coach can unilaterally withhold rewards/invoke punishments/apply costs in case of noncompliance.
Have you tried setting very small and easy goals and seeing if you can meet those?
I have made many incremental steps towards modifying some behaviours in a desired direction, yes, but they don’t tend to be consciously directed. When they are, I abandon them soon; no habit formation occurs of these attempts. I am making progress, but it seems to be largely outside of my control.
Have you tried Beeminder? That’s less self-policing and more Beeminder policing you, as long as you haven’t sunk so low as to lie to Beeminder. Alternatively, there are probably things you can do to cultivate self-control in general, although I’m not sure what those would be (I’ve been practicing with denying myself various things for awhile now).
No way, it’s the stupidest thing I could do with my already very very limited financial resources. That sort of way of motivating yourself is really sort of a luxury, at least when viewed from my position. Lower middle class folks in relatively poor countries can’t afford to gamble their meagre savings on a fickle motivation; any benefit I could derive from it is easily outweighted by the very good chance of digging myself into a financial hole… so, I can’t take that risk.
I can think of much stupider things. Doesn’t the fact that you have limited finances make this an even better tool to use (in that you’ll be more motivated not to lose money)? The smallest pledge is $5 and if you stay on track (it helps to set small goals at first) you never have to pay anything. I think you’re miscalibrated about how risky this is.
And how were you planning on obtaining nootropics if your finances are so limited?
… No. It doesn’t work like that at all. That’s the definition of digging myself into a hole. Will I be struggling to get out of it all the more so? Yes, I will, but at a cost greater than what I was initially setting out to accomplish. I’d rather be unmotivated than afraid of going broke.
Possibly. The thing is, around here, even $5 is… Well, not much by any measure, but it doesn’t feel negligible, you know what I’m saying? Someone of median income couldn’t really say it’s no big deal if they come to realize the equivalent of $5 is missing from their pockets. It probably doesn’t feel like that to an American, so I understand why you may think I’m mistaken.
I can afford to spend a few bucks on a physical product with almost guaranteed benefits. I can’t afford to bet money on me doing things I have a tendency to do very rarely. In one case I can expect to get definite value from the money I spend, in the other I’m basically buying myself some worries. (I should, perhaps, add that the things I want to motivate myself to do don’t have a chance of earning me income any time soon.)
Of course; it wasn’t meant to be understood literally.
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The bottom line is, they’re not getting my money. I’m really confident that it’s a good decision, and have really good reasons to be suspicious of any attempts to get me to pay for something, and there are really many things out there that are obviously useful enough that I don’t need to be persuaded into buying them. So… I appreciate that you mean to help, it’s more than one can ask from strangers, but I strongly prefer alternatives that are either free, guaranteed, or ideally both.
You could try using Beeminder without giving them money.
A habit I’m working on developing is to ask a mental model of a Manager what I -should- be doing right now. As long as I don’t co-opt the Manager, and as long as there’s a clearly preferable outcome, it seems to work pretty well.
Even when there isn’t a clearly preferable outcome, the mental conversation helps me sort out the issue. (And having undertaken this, I’ve discovered I used to have mental conversations with myself all the time, and at some point lost and forgot the habit.)
I’ve tried similar approaches. From that opening line and with sane priors, you can probably get a pretty good idea of what the results were.
For me, and I suspect many others for whom all self-help and motivational techniques and hacks just “inexplicably” fail and which “they must be doing wrong”, the problem is almost entirely within one single, simple assumption that seems to work naturally for the authors, but which is for me a massive amount of cognitive workload that is continuously taxing on my mental energy.
And said assumption that I refer to is precisely here:
The question I shall ask, to illustrate my point, is: If you were programming a computer to do this (e.g. open a chat window with someone posing as a Manager for the appropriate discussion), how would you go about it?
More importantly, how does the program know when to open the window?
Suppose the program has access to your brain and can read what you’re thinking, and also has access to a clock.
Well, there are three most obvious, simple answers, in order of code complexity:
Keep the chat window open all the time. This is obviously costly attention-wise (but not for the program), and the window is always in the way, and chances are that after a while you’ll stop noticing that window and never click on it anymore, and it will lose all usefulness. It then becomes a flat tax on your mind that is rendered useless.
Open the chat window at specific intervals. This brings another question: how often? If it’s too often, it gets annoying, and it opens too many times when not needed, and eventually that’ll cause the same problems as solution 1. If it’s not often enough, then you won’t get much benefit from it whenever you would need it. And even if it is a good interval, you’ll still sometimes open it when not needed, or not open it when it was needed more often that day or in the middle of an interval. We can do better.
Look for the kind of situations in which the Manager will help you, by reading what you’re thinking about, and then whenever certain conditions are met (procrastinating, not doing any work, spending too much time reading wikipedia articles, etc.), bring up the chat window. However, this is a large endeavor, because the program has to be constantly running and reading every thought that passes by, and then using (read: computing, running) heuristics to tell whether the conditions are met (read: run a complex function with the current thoughts as arguments/parameters, for every single given thought).
See, while I was writing this, I had forgotten about a specific work-related thing I was supposed to do at a certain condition. It’s only when I wrote point 3 above that my brain actually connected this to “checking for events”, which led to “I have events to check for!” which led to “Oh, right, that person got back, I should go ask them X”.
The key point being that the very thought of even checking for conditions upon which to act is something that does not occur naturally or on its own for me—it has to come about by being linked to from another thought and brought to my conscious attention. Any technique that relies on consciously doing X inevitably stumbles on this key factor for me.
Running computations on every single thought all the time is extremely tiring and mentally exhausting. It’s much more daunting than any task I would usually need “motivation” for. It means I stop after every few thoughts and think of the thing I have to remember to do. And then remember to think that I have to think about this again in a few more thoughts. And then try to resume whatever other thoughts I had. It’s pretty much impossible to focus and concentrate on anything while doing this.
Which means whenever the set of conditions for talking to the Manager are met, I will not automatically open the chat window. It just won’t detect the conditions. The conditions won’t, on their own, open the chat window—the conditions themselves (I’m tabsploding on wikipedia) were not designed such that they always open the chat window with the Manager each time they happen.
So the tabsploding process happens, without ever calling on the remote parts of my brain that have little bits of code to open chat windows when tabsplosions happen, and so those remote parts of my brain keep on sleeping, and so chat windows do not open, and so tabsplosions go on merrily uninterrupted for hours until I read an article about business management, and the word management triggers me to remember the Manager process, and then I suddenly realize that I’ve been procrastinating all this time and need to get back to work (Note: I get back to work without even needing said Manager chat window, by this point, so the problem is clearly not “motivation” in this case).
And all that is the hidden assumption, the obvious thing that no one mentions in “making a habit of doing X” or “using GTD” or “using pomodoro”. It’s the single most brain-computationally-intensive process I can think of that people have ever actually seriously implied I should use. My subconscious, unfortunately, doesn’t do it for me. It seems like most other people have it easier. Well, good for them. I’m still stuck here unable to realize that I need to do the dishes, and so I keep on reading forums, and my forum-reading thoughts don’t have any bits dedicated to remembering whether or not dishes need to be done, so the forum-reading begets more forum-reading and tabsploding, and my mind never brings up the issue of having something to do.
And yes, this applies to meta concerns. So training myself to be more mindful and conscientious of these things fails because I fail to think of applying techniques to make myself more mindful and conscientious. Everything I’ve tried has failed to produce the amazing results others report.
I have no idea of how common this problem is, or whether nootropics might be a solution.
Am I correct in ascertaining that your issue is less making the right decisions, and more trying to remember to consciously make decisions at all?
In some sense, yes.
However, sometimes it gets much more complex. It can very well happen that I insert a trigger to “must go do dishes once X is done”, but then I think “Hmm, maybe I should go do dishes” at some point in the future when I’m in-between activities, and X happens to be done, but (and this is the gut-kicking bastard):
Thinking that I should do the dishes is not properly linked to checking whether X is done, and thus I don’t see the process that tells me that X is done so I should do the dishes!
And therefore what happens afterwards, instead of realizing that X is done me getting up to do dishes, is me thinking “yeah I should, but meh, this is more interesting”. And X has never crossed my mind during this entire internal exchange. And now I’m back to tabsploding / foruming / gaming. And then three hours later I realize that all of this happened when I finally think of X. Oops.
So yes. “Trying to remember” is an active-only process for me. Something must trigger it. The thoughts and triggers do not happen easily and automatically at the right and proper times. Once the whole process is there and [Insert favorite motivational hack] is actually in my steam-of-consciousness, then this whole “motivation” thing becomes completely different and much easier to solve.
Unfortunately, I do not yet have access to technology of sufficient sophistication to externalize and fully automate this process. I’ve dreamed of it for years though.
This may be a stupid question, but I have to ask:
Have you tried designing solutions for this problem? Pomodoro and the like are designed to combat akrasia; they’re designed to supplement or retrain willpower. They’re solutions for the wrong problem; your willpower isn’t entering into it. Hypothesis: Pomodoro kind-of sort-of worked for you for a short period of time before inexplicably failing. You might not have even consciously noticed it going off.
If I’m reading you correctly, that hypothesis is entirely correct. Pomodoro is also not the only thing where this has happened. In most cases, I don’t consciously realize what happens until later, usually days or weeks after the fact.
I’ve tried coming up with some solutions to the problem, yes, but so far there’s only three avenues that I’ve tried that had promising results:
Use mental imagination techniques to train habits: imagine arriving in situation or getting feelings X, anchor that situation or feeling to action Y. This works exceptionally well and easily for me, but… Yep. Doing the training is itself something that suffers from this problem. I would need to use it to train using it. Which I can’t, ’caus I’m not good enough at it (I tried). Some bootstrapping would be required for this to be a reliable method, but it’s also in itself a rather expensive and time-consuming exercise (not the same order of magnitude as constant mindfulness, though), so I’d prefer better alternatives.
Spam post-its or other forms of fixed visual / auditory reminders in the appropriate contexts, places and times. Problem is, this becomes like the permanent or fixed-timed chat windows in the programmed Manager example—my brain learns to phase them out or ignore them, something which is made exponentially worse when trying to scale things up to more things.
Externalize and automate using machines and devices. Setting programmatic reminders on my phone using tasker is the best-working variant I’ve found so far, but the app is difficult to handle and crashes often—and every single time it crashes, I lose everything (all presets, all settings, all events, everything—as if I had reinstalled the app completely). I gave up on that after about the fourth time I spent hours configuring it and then lost everything from a single unrelated crash.
I actually suffer from exactly the same issue. (I opted to try to run the Manager app full-time, although I’m not having a lot of luck training myself to actually do it. I figure any wasted brain cycles probably weren’t being used anyways on account that I couldn’t remember to do things that required using them.)
Thus far the only real “hack” I’ve worked out is to constantly change reminder mechanisms. I’m actually fine with highly disruptive alerts—my favorite alarm is also the most annoying—but the people around me tend to hate them.
Hacks aside, routine has been the only thing I’ve found that helps, and helps long-term. And given my work schedule, which can vary from “Trying to find something to do” to “Working eighteen hours days for two weeks straight” with just about everything in the middle, routine has been very hard to establish.
However, I have considerably better luck limiting my routine; waking up at 6 AM every day, and dedicating this time strictly to “Stuff that needs doing”, has worked for me in the past. (Well, up until a marathon work period.)