Breaking the chain of akrasia

I know exactly what works for me: having someone else depend on me doing my work on time. If I'm the only interested party, very little ever gets done, unless the consequences of doing nothing are pretty grave.

So who are the people who are hugely productive and what are they like? One guess I have is that they are less likely to hang around much on forums or in IRC. And we have forums and IRCs where there's this endless cycle of talking about akrasia and proposing fixes that never seem to stick. Maybe being on the forum to begin with is where things start going wrong. You get absorbed in procrastination, go read random forums and get to form a community with other folk who can't hack being productive for whatever reason and start picking up on their thought patterns and identifying with them. And then all of you wonder together on the forum why akrasia seems insurmountable.

This isn't just a "get to work instead of reading about productivity on the internet" joke. I really do want to know what seriously productive people are like. I don't get to know much about them since they are always being productive instead of wasting time writing in detail about what they are doing on blogs and forums.

In 2006, we finally got a decent psychological theory of procrastination,

Unfortunately, that's about as good a theory of procrastination as "you need fuel, air, ignition, and compression" is a theory of getting your car to start!

That is, it may be true, and an okay way to organize the elements involved in the problem, but it is utterly lacking in the details required to actually solve the problem in any given instance. You may need to know about spark plugs, fuel injectors, pumps, lines, filters, and so many other elements, along with the ways they can fail.

The first book on how to apply this new theory to daily life was published in late 2010.

I read that book, and found it to be mostly rubbish from a practical perspective. The equation presented consists mostly of fudge factors; at best, it's "air, fuel, compression, ignition", only not that specific. It overlooks really basic things about procrastination, if you have any experience at all in fixing it.

To put it another way, it's an outside-view equation, rather than an inside-view parts list and circuit diagram. I was hoping that it would provide a better organizing framework for my own practices, but really, plain old fashioned prospect theory is a better container. AFAICT, adding the fudge factor of "impulsivity" is just an "elan vital" or "dormative principle" thrown in to cover what the equation can't otherwise explain.

Prospect theory by itself is still just an explanation rather than a fix-it guide, but it constrains expectations better than the "procrastination equation". For example, plain old prospect theory predicts:

• task-switching inertia as a special case of status quo bias
• decreased motivation over the course of a project that was initially exciting due to an idealistic vision
• avoiding actions which you know you need to do to reach a goal, but which conflict with your ideals or expectations about what you "should" do or should have done already

Even prospect theory doesn't address where your baseline and future expectations come from, or how to change them. But at least it's focused on the right elements of the problem space. The vast majority of procrastination elimination in practice comes down to identifying and updating your System 1 expectations and predictions about the present, the future, and the actions in between.

(That statement's still close to the "air, fuel, compression, ignition" level of abstraction, but it's more suited to the needs of an actual mechanic.)

I find that my problem with anti-procrastination techniques is that when I read about them I tend to think, "Okay, maybe I'll try it later". And then I mentally register the irony of that. And then I go on procrastinating.

Luke, I want to thank you for writing the articles on procrastination and happines. Somehow you managed to write a text that appears both scientific and legible. And short enough. And actionable. This weekend I am going to make a short translated version in a more "to do"-like form, which I will print and periodically read to remind myself.

For me so far the best tool to overcome acrasia is the Beeminder. Most other strategies I have tried before failed after a week or sooner (the biggest exception was the exercise plan 5BX that I used for three months). Also some lessons from P.J.Eby that I found online helped me a lot. One important idea I found in his lessons is that our attention to external things is more persistent than our attention to things in our heads; so if there is an important idea, it helps to place it into the environment by writing it on paper. I guess it also helps that my Beeminder data exist somewhere outside my head, even outside my own computer.

Beeminder is very useful because it measures and records progress. Too bad I use it only since December 2011, so I don't have historical data to compare. I am ashamed to admit that my goals are very humble nowadays -- a small daily exercise, running once a week, writing one blog article per week, sleeping before midnight -- but even these goals were hardly attainable for me months ago, when my laziness fully exploded. And by the way reading LW helped me to set realistic goals. When setting a goal, I try to use outside view and ask myself what is the probability that I will actually do it, and what evidence exists. If I feel the probability is less than 80-90%, I don't set the goal, because I prefer smaller goals with higher probability than greater goals with less probability; I want reliable progress, not random success. (I can still try to reach more ambitious goals without writing them to Beeminder.)

So these days I am very certain that LW helps me to overcome my procrastination. (Without LW I wouldn't have found Beeminder nor P.J.Eby, so I include this to LW's value too.) And the only cost is time, which I would have spent on other web sites anyway. I am starting from almost level zero, so even if my progress means much to me, it is probably not impressive to anyone else (unless they are in a similar situation like I was half year ago). My point is -- Beeminder is useful not only to overcome acrasia, but also to measure your progress.

So if anyone wants to be sure that their "becoming stronger" is not just a placebo effect, here is a tool. It is not good for everything; it can measure how many articles I write on my blog, but not their quality, so optimizing too much could result in writing a lot of rubbish; also it can be used only on repeated activities... but it's better than nothing.

I have a hypothesis I'd like to test. I think the ability to formulate realistically long-term goals and act on them is derivative of certain types of social skills. Specifically the types of social skills that come from engaging in formal social activities where one works in a group of people towards a particular goal. Anecdotally, most of the people I've met who are very good planners have conservative and often religious backgrounds, which I think correlates strongly with participation in formal social activities, whereas most people I meet afflicted with poor motivational skills are also adverse to (at least) formal social activities.

The idea is just that planning is derivative of delegation. You can think of planning as delegation to future selves. Learning how to delegate tasks involves learning how to break tasks up, how to judge their difficulty, how to judge how long they'll take, how to fairly divide them, how to judge when they're complete, etc. All of these things are useful skills to have for planning alone but in the social context there is much greater feedback to use when developing them. Self-motivation is, in turn, derivative of group motivation; learning how to lead and motivate a group (or even observing others do so) is prior to learning how to motivate oneself over the long-term. Working in a group might, for example, give you a better idea of reward frequency, how long a person can go without a break, what sort of situations will reduce motivation, how much guidance is needed, etc, that you can then apply to planning your own activities. People without this kind of experience might tend to make unrealistic appraisals of their own abilities (I know this is a major part of my own procrastination; I get 3 months to do something but convince myself it can be done in a month, then when I have a month, I convince myself I can do it in a week, then when the week comes, I'm thinking in terms of days and, finally, I'm some sort of superhuman who can do 3 months work overnight).

I'd like to know if anyone has any contrary data points, thoughts, anecdotes, etc.

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I haven't heard of many LWers conquering akrasia.

FWIW, here's a data point for you: improved instrumental rationality / less akrasia is definitely the most tangible benefit I've gotten from reading LessWrong (though I feel I may be underestimating its effects on my epistemic rationality.)

I've been thinking of arranging "productivity" meetings with the Toronto LW group. The idea is that the face-to-face aspect should help us to use the social obligation trick, and we can try and put into practice whatever it is that LW knows about anti-akrasia and productivity.

Have any other local LW groups tried anything similar?

Why doesn't the “7” in the list of posts link to anywhere? :-/

(more: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12)

7 is not a link, and 8 and 9 are duplicates.