It’s true, my parents kind of forced me into it...
You are right, I should try to free up more time while taking the conventional and safer route.
Brendon_Wong
Karma: 100
My problem is that the akrasia seems to be partially caused by staying in a highly structured environment. I don’t have much trouble doing things I believe are beneficial towards my goals.
I currently believe if I pursued option 2 I could get into a top college just like I would have done if I stayed in high school but more useful things would get done.
If this belief is false, then my akrasia would be slightly reduced.
Yes, but with all those activities I listed above I have minimal free time during the school year. I do have much more time during the summer though.
I believe the pomodoro technique had me accomplishing many tasks for one day, then it failed. It failed because I failed to start using the pomodoro method itself, I just procrastinated on starting it. I also got distracted while working. I either stopped working and never got on track again, or I forgot about the rules about distraction (record it, apply the 3 steps) and wasted a lot of time. Over time I just forgot about it. Thanks for reminding me, I’ll give it another go because it was so close to working and I can try different motivational techniques to get started.
I believe an “energy pill” (Elebra) also helped me get things done for several days before I succumbed to procrastination. I should try that again as well...
Unfortunately, Akrasia still strikes in the morning and I don’t always have the motivation or energy to finish everything. But that’s only with minimal sleep due to procrastination the night before.
I have to see if I can get my parents to agree...
So I leave high school… and then what comes next on the path to world optimization? :)
Huh. Ask Eliezer about that :)
I think that’s the best guaranteed way to improve the world. There is almost no uncertainty. But I’d rather not subject myself to decades of monotonous work, especially since there are so many other organizations and individuals who could create an impact thousands or even millions of times more than mine.
I was thinking more along the lines of actually working at a nonprofit, starting businesses to raise money, something at least a little higher impact then earn several hundred thousand and donate it.
With those updated plans, which of my three options (or neither of them) are the best?
Thanks for your helpful replies!
I’ve actially spend years trying to fix this problem, with little success. I’ve tried multiple books, read about every productivity system ever invented, tried thousands of articles over hundreds of websites… No luck.
Recently, I’ve been looking into Akrasia on Less Wrong because I thought the suggestions might finally have an impact. I memorized The Motivation Hacker (along with all the techniques shared in the Procrastination Equation). I’ve also tried PJ Eby’s materials. I found that unfortunately it had no impact on my akrasia at all :(
Do you have any recommendations? Am I doing something wrong? It certainly feels like it!
Thanks for your suggestions, I’ll give them a try and see how it goes.
Heh. I wake up at 7:00 AM, attend a full 7 periods with all the Advanced Standing classes I can, and leave at 3:15 PM. From there, I go to cross country, taking my time until 6:00 PM at the earliest. Then I eat dinner, shower… Then it’s 8:00 PM already and all my homework is there waiting. Then there are family activities, chores, distractions, and other projects I need to do thrown in. Did I mention I have a serious akrasia problem? Then I sleep at like 12:00 AM… Not that much time if you ask me.
College does sounds pretty useful, so I guess the question is whether I should leave high school, unschool for 3 years, then reapply to college. If that does not significantly reduce my college admissions potential it would seem like it is the most strategic thing to do.
Carefully putting off assignments sounds like a potential solution, but usually assignments are assigned one day and due the very next. I have around 4 hours to get an average of 2 hours of homework done on school nights. But I fail to shift into homework mode which caused me to write this article at 10:00 PM last night, get 5 hours of sleep, then wake up early to finish studying because it seems easier in the morning.
Thanks for the clarification.
I’ll focus on resources rather than topics, and collect crowd opinion on resources.
I’d call it success. Really, I am more afraid of the opposite situation: too few people caring enough to comment; because then I wouldn’t know what to do. If there are too many comments, you could for example collect the resources and make a poll. Or just start another discussion a month later, where the first comment would contain the poll about the resources recommended in the previous discussion. Or anything else. The big problem is IMHO if people generally endorse the idea, but the discussion is followed by… silence.
Remember Instrumental rationality/self help resources, and more recently Proposal: periodic repost of the Best Learning resources? I think the success of those discussions means the idea is already a success. I saw that the post asking for resources became hard to navigate because all the different life categories listed generated too many recommendations. To avoid that, should I start discussions with different life categories every time? Other people have already tested the idea and it is popular, making an effective instrumental rationality resource collection program is the hard part.
How come you suggested a poll to overcome too any comments, and then reposting the discussion? I don’t think a poll would solve the too many comments problem because there are simply too many useful things to recommend improving. Many things would be useful. Look at all of lukeprog’s social skill resouces! Ask just for social skill resources, dump that in, then throw in another 20 recommendations and even more low impact suggestion and the discussion would be swamped. A poll with so many different resources will just exacerbate the problem.
The only solution I can think of is having many different discussions, each on a separate area of life or even separate categories in one area of life. Whether or not to space it out or just post ~7 discussions at once is the question.
Thanks for suggesting concrete actions, I’ll go ahead and post it ASAP.
Questions before I start (thanks in advance)!
What’s better, recommending a resource to improve something or recommending a specific topic to improve with resource suggestions as reply’s? Ex. Watch The Blueprint Decoded to learn PUA vs improve PUA and add resources as replies.
What do you mean by collecting data? Do you mean collecting the self-improvement resource suggestions themselves, or opinions/ratings/votes on the suggestions?
What if there are too many comments on the discussion for people to navigate through it? Should I have separate discussions on separate areas of life? Ex. Health, Mind, Finance...
Just to verify, in the comments area of the first discussion asking for self-improvement recommendations, write a comment polling people where to put the data, right?
It seems like people find discussions more rewarding than posting to a wiki. There could be weekly discussions on the many aspects of self improvement, and then those ideas could be posted on a wiki for organization and further updates.
Do you think using a separate wiki is a good idea? It seems like the LW wiki is not being used for collecting self-improvement articles, and a new wiki with a separate purpose, community, and article format might be better. After all, the current wiki is organized only for rationality articles, and changing the layout and article format might cause some conflict and confusion.
What do you think about a wiki dedicated to self-improvement? That would be a better way to organize the knowledge than 500 comments.
Should I have titled the post Instrumental Rationality Wiki that also has a Page on Rationality? Perhaps the name “Effective Rationality Training Online” does not lead people to think about self-improvement, just making good decisions type rationality.
The problem with CFAR is that there is just so much knowledge out there it cannot be shared in several days. It’s an excellent starting point, but there is just so much more material out there and so many individual circumstances that it would be impossible to provide consistent high impact knowledge without a community knowledge base like the one I am proposing. The training could be in person though. Also, CFAR costs thousands of dollars and is hard to access if you do not have the time or are not living close to a workshop.
Regarding reading old posts, some of them are organized in sequences, but most of the articles out there would be very hard to find and use in daily life. I’m sure there are many bits of knowledge that would be useful to me right now, but I cannot find them because they are not organized.
It does not seem like the wiki is currently being used for organizing self-improvement articles. Should I make an announcement telling everyone to do that, or just make a separate wiki? It seems like a separate site with its own purpose, community, rules, organization, and article format would be better than using the LW wiki.
Thanks for your feedback, leaving the wiki open seems like the best choice.
It’s true, people do arrive at past posts, but if I wanted to find really high impact knowledge for improving myself shared on Less Wrong I could not do it. I don’t know what I would find before I arrived there.
I think the most difficult part is sorting and collecting the texts. Even if you choose a wrong software—if you make a good choice of the material, you can switch to another software later.
Generally, I would recommend using MediaWiki, the software used by Wikipedia. You don’t get other software tested by so many users. I have repeated experience with people suggesting using other kinds of wiki, because they have this or that additional feature, only to find out that the main feature—editing pages—is full of bugs. I prefer if the software does one thing and does it well. -- I don’t know what those “social networking features” are specifically, but I would guess they don’t really add much value to the project. The wiki has talk pages, and you can always install a forum or chat as a separate software.
As a first iteration I would probably do a main page with a list of topics, a page per topic (such as “programming”), and a separate page for each significant material where the main ideas could be summarized.
The difficult part will be collecting the material, describing the material, and protecting the site against vandals or mindkilled people (as self-improvement is often dangerously close to self-delusion).
I may be missing something, how come you did not oppose the idea of a separate website in Instrumental rationality/self help resources?
That LW discussion was basically exactly what you were just suggesting except nothing was posted on the wiki.
I think the issue with those discussions is that there is too much knowledge out there. That discussion had 99 comments, and that was not even a drop in the bucket. Also, there are articles and comments written everyday on self-improvement, and those will all slowly be lost and outdated.
It does not look like the wiki is being used for organizing self-improvement articles. Should I make an announcement telling everyone to do that, or just make a separate wiki? It seems like a separate site with its own purpose, community, rules, organization, and article format would be better than using the LW wiki.
Thank you, I meant the process for acquiring skills. Post edited.
If I unschooled, I would be engaged in many other activities with social support like internships, classes, and possibly even school extracurricular activities.
Historically, I have had no problem getting things done with no social support.