Celebrate Trivial Impetuses

Does anyone have any other ideas for trivial impetuses that could be helpful in fighting small-scale akrasia (or large-scale)?

In my experience, all large-scale akratic dilemmas can be reduced to small-scale problems. Large-scale akrasia in not writing your novel is small-scale akrasia of not writing a chapter this week. Large-scale akrasia of losing weight is small-scale akrasia of not bothering to eat well today. Akrasia is the reduction of its parts, not the sum.

In Getting Things Done, after the first step of simply writing down each task you want to accomplish (can be of any level of difficult and time), and then you do a seperate processing step after that.

That is when you decide how long each task takes, and if it takes less than 5 minutes you do it now. When you get into the GTD system of life organization, trivial impetuses you put down in the initial collection phase, and when you get around to processing them, you have habits that say "do task now if takes less than 5 minutes". GTD is (apparently, I tried to get it working for me but to little success so far) a life changing thing.

First of all, congratulations for not writing about gender issues. Welcome back - we missed you :-P.

Second, the effect you are talking about is a well-known one in social psychology. Here is one example from moral cognition and psychology. (I can get the references but I'm at work and hey, I'm not procrastinating... My simulation is running: http://xkcd.com/303/)

In a study on moral behavior, there was a confederate old lady that needed help. In the normal condition, only 17% of the passers-by helped the old lady. In the manipulation condition, subjects were made to find a dime on the ground before coming across the old lady. In this condition, %80 helped the old lady.

Similar effects were observed for asking for change in front of a store with a pleasant smell (i.e. a bakery) versus one with neutral smell (i.e. a shoe store). There are more examples in a paper authored by Joshua Knobe on moral cognition and blameworthiness but I'm too lazy to get the reference. (Why don't you give ma slight impetus in that direction?)

Lastly, in an airport where men were missing the urinals and peeing to the ground, an image of a fly on the urinal substantially decreased this utterly utterly unhygienic and terrible behavior.

There is a book written about such 'nudge's to motivate rational behavior. I haven't read it but here is the reference: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Nudge-Improving-Decisions-Health-Happiness/dp/0300122233

And here is a NYT article about the same thing. This is the article from which I got the urinal example: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/business/08nudge.html

(I feel like what candy is to a little kid, social psychology is to me. 8-) ).

For instance, I often get my friends to instruct me to do things when I'm having trouble getting moving: sometimes all it takes to get me to stop dithering and start making the pasta salad I agreed to bring to a party is someone agreeing when I say, "I should make pasta salad now". Or "I should go to bed now", or "I should probably pay that bill now".

You can always take this sort of approach and automate it. Unless you really need it to be a live person telling you that, I guess.

Here's a related phenomenon I have noticed that sometimes helps me get things done.

On occasion, I get in trouble with my wife. I do something that makes her upset with me, and although it may not be the best habit, my instinct is to start working on various tasks I need to do until she is ready to talk (her usual action is to give me the silent treatment for a little while, then slowly open up to talking so we can have the fight/discussion about whatever it was that got me in trouble). I think my motivation is somewhere along the lines of trying to be hyper nice in order not to draw more negative attention to myself, but it certainly works for getting things done.

Too bad this is just an occasional way to make me do things that happens by accident since I have no plans for making my wife angry with me on purpose just so I can get a few things done. But I think this is a special case of a general phenomenon that we can each probably harness to help us get things done.

So you are after some tips? A google search for 'fight procrastination' will get you many.

Anyway, a simple one that works for me is simply to have a to-do list, and the trivial impetus is the joy I find in ticking off an item. The impetus is so strong that I would sometimes almost add an unlisted item did I already finished, just to be able to tick it off.

Another one is to specify some time (say, Sunday evening) where all your inboxes (physical ones, e-mail etc.) should be empty and dealt with -- that means, things are answered, bills are paid and so on. Full-blown GTD may not be necessary, but just keeping all your inboxes organized like that is very useful. And of course, make clearing-inboxes a off-tickable item in your to-do list.

Note: Dan Ariely describes (and did) some of the interesting research in the way the presentation of foods determine how much people like them.

Does anyone have any other ideas for trivial impetuses that could be helpful in fighting small-scale akrasia (or large-scale)?

I set an alarm in my phone and stash stimulants on top of it. That usually reminds me that there is something that I needed to do that I thought was important. :)

I guess a significant difficulty with these little anti-akrasia tricks [*] is that they have to make the activity fun. You can't bail yourself out with repetitive routine, because routine isn't fun, no matter what the routine is. Which is why another person is often a good influence on getting little things done: a person isn't repetitive.

[*] I assume eirenicon's point.

If you're setting up the trivial impetus yourself and your brain has had enough time to connect the dots, I'd guess the akrasic difficulty of setting up the impetus will tend to equal the akrasic difficulty of doing the damn thing in the first place. So the impetus has to spontaneously come from outside, and the advice turns into this: physically move to a long-term environment that spurs you to be productive, e.g. if you're a procrastinator, change jobs to find a strict boss.

is childhood aversion to green foods common?

I use simple food impetus for most tasks. Take a partitioned snack, say several cupcakes, and place one in front of me. I can snack on it at whatever rate I want, but I can only replace it with the next partition after reaching a point in my work.

My trivial impetus is driving.

Some background is needed first. I grew up in a large family in the far North whose members were prone to loud talk and occasional hysterical theater. Scenery chewing, worse than James Blish on a bad day hysterical theater. So as soon as I hit sixteen if I was thinking on something deeply and one of these bouts came upon someone I would immediately hop in the car and go driving so I could continue thinking without the large scale distraction. So driving and thinking are somewhat paired with me by habit but as I've aged I don't like to drive anymore.
There are two things I do to encourage the habit - the first is to pick a new destination with some small reward for every "thinking road trip" (bookstore, candy store, etc.,) and the second is to occasionally random drive. This makes for interesting scenery that you usually haven't seen before, and sometimes even getting lost. How do you random drive? With coin flips at every intersection - left is heads, right is tails. It's akrasia btw to do something dangerous like drive while deeply thinking, but... the long established habit's unbreakable in my case.

I've had some short term success using a timer with an hourly or 15 minute chime to keep me on task for a period. I didn't keep up with it but it might work better for others.