Just a personal observation that for me there seem to be two classes of akrasia.
1) Inertial akrasia: I should be doing task X, I could do task X well if I just got going, I just can’t seem to make myself do task X.
2) Exhaustive akrasia: I want to do task X but I’ve exhausted my willpower reserve. It’s hard to start task X and even when I start I generally drift off-task as I’ve expunged my willpower reserves.
Type 1) akrasia consists of things like getting out of bed and procrastinating, type 2) is more zoning out midday or being unproductive after getting home from work.
They have similar symptoms and a fair amount of overlap but different treatments. Type 1 seems to generally be tricks to get you started, ie counting to 10, setting deadlines, etc. For type 2 treatments are more removing distractions (don’t challenge your depleted willpower reserves) and taking a real break to replenish (ie watch a movie or work every other day).
Personally I think a lot of my troubles come when I try treating type 2 as type 1 or vice versa.
For instance often in the morning I’ll often take a while to get working despite the fact my willpower reserves should be near full. Instead of taking a break I should have a trick to start working. Conversely at the end of the day I’ll sometimes spend the last half hour reading websites and intermittently poking at a project, unwilling to admit that I’ve run out of willpower and thinking I just need a trick to get going.
I suspect that my failure to correctly identify which kind of akrasia I’m experiencing so I can treat it accordingly is partially a form of akrasia itself.
For instance often in the morning I’ll often take a while to get working
despite the fact my willpower reserves should be near full.
If you do a lot of work during the day you may end up getting exhausted and having little willpower left. But that in itself doesn’t mean that you start off with a full tank in the morning and it gets slowly depleted as time goes on or as you do more work.
I suspect that you probably start off with a bit less willpower in the morning, and that it can go up and down in range throughout the day in response to what happens. For example, if you have a lot of frustration, that may make it go down, whereas if you have some wins that might make it go up. I’m not denying that eventually the work will start draining your willpower, though.
I also think that getting things done is less a matter of having sufficient willpower, and more one of structuring tasks so as to remove, as much as possible, the need for willpower.
I think that our bodies/brains are designed to take on smaller, more concrete tasks that are familiar to us, and of a sort that work towards the sorts of goals our brains are wired (by evolution) to work towards. The more a task (or our perception of a task, actually) grates with this, the more willpower is required to undertake it.
So the trick is to structure things so that they’re more like what our brains are suited to.
Just a personal observation that for me there seem to be two classes of akrasia.
1) Inertial akrasia: I should be doing task X, I could do task X well if I just got going, I just can’t seem to make myself do task X.
2) Exhaustive akrasia: I want to do task X but I’ve exhausted my willpower reserve. It’s hard to start task X and even when I start I generally drift off-task as I’ve expunged my willpower reserves.
Type 1) akrasia consists of things like getting out of bed and procrastinating, type 2) is more zoning out midday or being unproductive after getting home from work.
They have similar symptoms and a fair amount of overlap but different treatments. Type 1 seems to generally be tricks to get you started, ie counting to 10, setting deadlines, etc. For type 2 treatments are more removing distractions (don’t challenge your depleted willpower reserves) and taking a real break to replenish (ie watch a movie or work every other day).
Personally I think a lot of my troubles come when I try treating type 2 as type 1 or vice versa.
For instance often in the morning I’ll often take a while to get working despite the fact my willpower reserves should be near full. Instead of taking a break I should have a trick to start working. Conversely at the end of the day I’ll sometimes spend the last half hour reading websites and intermittently poking at a project, unwilling to admit that I’ve run out of willpower and thinking I just need a trick to get going.
I suspect that my failure to correctly identify which kind of akrasia I’m experiencing so I can treat it accordingly is partially a form of akrasia itself.
Does anyone else have similar experiences?
If you do a lot of work during the day you may end up getting exhausted and having little willpower left. But that in itself doesn’t mean that you start off with a full tank in the morning and it gets slowly depleted as time goes on or as you do more work.
I suspect that you probably start off with a bit less willpower in the morning, and that it can go up and down in range throughout the day in response to what happens. For example, if you have a lot of frustration, that may make it go down, whereas if you have some wins that might make it go up. I’m not denying that eventually the work will start draining your willpower, though.
I also think that getting things done is less a matter of having sufficient willpower, and more one of structuring tasks so as to remove, as much as possible, the need for willpower.
I think that our bodies/brains are designed to take on smaller, more concrete tasks that are familiar to us, and of a sort that work towards the sorts of goals our brains are wired (by evolution) to work towards. The more a task (or our perception of a task, actually) grates with this, the more willpower is required to undertake it.
So the trick is to structure things so that they’re more like what our brains are suited to.
This may sound strange, but often closing my eyes and visualising random images helps in overcoming type 2 akrasia.
This may sound strange, but often closing my eyes and visualising random images helps ME in overcoming type 2 akrasia.