Anti-Akrasia Tactics Discussion

Over the last 9 months I've been steadily spending more and more of my time on things I want to have done. Here's what I'm doing. All the usual caveats apply.

In March, on a whim, I started going to strength workouts twice a week. (We have a gym at the office that's open 24/7, so I asked the coach to show me the correct form and then just started coming there all by myself. This may or may not be relevant.) At first it was a constant struggle to avoid skipping workouts, but after a month-long successful streak, an interesting thing happened: my fear of skipping and ruining the streak became stronger than my fear of the workout itself. Going to workouts became effortless, and skipping them became an act of willpower instead. It has stayed this way since. I haven't yet missed a workout.

After a couple months I said to myself, hey, let's add another habit and see how it goes. I decided to try cold showers every morning. The first time was unbelievably scary and difficult, standing there and shivering, unable to turn on the cold water, but I fought through it and then it became easy.

Skipping ahead, now I have five daily habits that I never deviate from, plus one twice-weekly habit (workouts) and one weekly. I'm spending a little willpower on the newest habit which I added a week ago, but it's steadily getting easier, and the rest are pretty much zero-maintenance.

This approach seems to require a lot of patience and time. Looking back, I couldn't have added the second habit immediately after the first. I would have just blown the engine. I really needed these first months of following one simple habit without failing even once, all the while still being unhappy about my akrasia in other areas.

The main thing that's worked for me has been a bunch of 5-second level skills generalised over from cognitive behaviour therapy. Oh and making sure I get enough sleep at roughly the same time each night. When that one goes wrong I usually lose most of the next day.

Skill 1: Notice that I am being akrasic. This usually involves noticing that I'm actively looking for distractions, such as trying to remember sites that I haven't visited in a while or thinking about unrelated things such as what I'm going to have for lunch. I can also sometimes catch myself flinching whenever I finish the current thread/site/game that I was using to procrastinate.

Skill 2: Ask myself "why am I not working?". List the answers out, mentally if they're simple and relatively emotion-free, in writing if it's complicated and/or bound up with anxiety, feelings of failure, etc.

Skill 3: Immediately address the reasons why I'm not working. eg. if I'm not working because of trivial inconveniences such as not having a glass of water to hand or not being dressed appropriately then I'll go do those things and return to Skill 2 when I'm sitting in front of my computer again. If it's more complex I'll work out a general plan of attack and the first task I need to do and then start on that. If my reason for being akrasic is mostly emotional such as "I'm afraid to work on this because I think I'll fail" then I'll do things like read the Litany of Gendlin or break it down into sub-tasks that don't cause a flinch and then immediately start working on the first one of those.

I've kept this up with a moderate degree of success for the past 6 months, and have seen a marked improvement in the amount of time I've spent being productive. I've also recently been experimenting with allowing myself timed procrastination breaks, where as soon as the timer goes off I have to stop what I'm doing and get back on task, with initial promising results.

I can also contrast these skills with all the unsuccessful anti-akrasia measures I've tried in the past such as guilting myself into working, installing time-tracking software on my laptop, making to-do lists, meditation, and probably a bunch of others that I don't remember.

Edited for formatting

Increase the N!