Critch mentioned that when he was working for focusing for long periods of time on math, one thing that helped him was tying the pursuit of math to as many terminal values and deep needs as he could (he had a list of those needs from a theory of human motivation, but the general idea should work without the list). I’ve since had varying levels of success with that technique, the key being really having my system 1 get how this particular activity is tied to what it wants.
The theory being that often distractions are to meet a need that’s not being met, and if you’re already getting (or realize you will get) that need met from your current activity, there’s no reason to switch tasks.
I think the old “urge propagation” CFAR technique was doing something like this.
Some feature on https://www.clearerthinking.org helped me a lot with that, by basically asking me to think of a large number of viscerally desirable things that will come as a result of finishing the thing I am doing now (crap like “head pats from peers”, and “get an office”). I guess I’d lost sight of a lot of it. The reasons I was giving myself to continue weren’t really the kinds of things that directly motivate humans.
I don’t know if that feature is still there. I felt like I stumbled into it, like I was just having a conversation with the site and that’s where we ended up.
Critch mentioned that when he was working for focusing for long periods of time on math, one thing that helped him was tying the pursuit of math to as many terminal values and deep needs as he could (he had a list of those needs from a theory of human motivation, but the general idea should work without the list). I’ve since had varying levels of success with that technique, the key being really having my system 1 get how this particular activity is tied to what it wants.
The theory being that often distractions are to meet a need that’s not being met, and if you’re already getting (or realize you will get) that need met from your current activity, there’s no reason to switch tasks.
I think the old “urge propagation” CFAR technique was doing something like this.
Some feature on https://www.clearerthinking.org helped me a lot with that, by basically asking me to think of a large number of viscerally desirable things that will come as a result of finishing the thing I am doing now (crap like “head pats from peers”, and “get an office”). I guess I’d lost sight of a lot of it. The reasons I was giving myself to continue weren’t really the kinds of things that directly motivate humans.
I don’t know if that feature is still there. I felt like I stumbled into it, like I was just having a conversation with the site and that’s where we ended up.