Abuse of Productivity Systems

I actually did the thing with Anki, three languages at the same time, and it failed just like you described.

I suspect that it was an instance of a more general harmful pattern in my life, how I unconsciously turn my successes into future punishments. A pattern that I learned at childhood, and it's difficult to overcome, because at the moment it feels like a virtue.

Here is the pattern: I notice myself doing something right, and instead of just enjoying the situation and rewarding myself mentally, I feel the impulse to increase the burden until I break, which then provides me an opportunity to punish myself mentally (feel disappointed with myself). Which means that in long term, I am punishing myself for doing things right.

At the moment it feels like the right thing to do: I have finally found something that "works" for me; why not use it more? Just think about all the opportunities!

But the problem is that things don't scale linearly. I have a limited amount of time / energy / attention / whatever, and maybe the method already consumes as much of some resource as is sustainable. Another problem is that there is a difference between approaching a "#1 problem" and "yet another thing that should be done"; the former motivates to creatively expore solutions, the latter just creates an ugh-field around anything you use to push yourself.

Sometimes it is necessary to accept that there are many things I would want to do, but maybe at the moment I only have enough resources to do one of them properly. And I should look at the bright side and be happy that it is one thing instead of zero.

With the examples from article, in (1) I would recommend staying with French, and perhaps when the Anki workload is smaller, do something else in the remaining time, such as read a book or watch a movie in French. Switch from learning to using, without increasing time. Until it becomes a part of life (e.g. Bob would start regularly reading some French web pages) so it doesn't require conscious maintenance. If he isn't equally passionate about German, maybe he shouldn't learn it at all; maybe he just doesn't have enough time and energy for all that. In (2), Sally could use a weekend or take a day of vacation to look for the new job.

Meta: I like this initiative to try a new style of post.

Rot13:

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What video does youtube want me to watch after watching your video? "Don't abuse your dogs."

"Don't abuse X" is not very useful advise because it is a tautology because "abuse" is a negative word. It is not entirely useless because the existence of the statement warns you that it is common for people to abuse X (if you trust the author). And I guess that is your first message. Your second message is the symptom of a common form of abuse of productivity systems: ceasing to use them. But your main message is how to think about and thus prevent a common form of abuse. Perhaps it would be better if the title made that clearer. For example: "What does it mean to abuse a productivity system?" Or even just "Abuse of Productivity Systems."

Bob has replaced a concrete goal (live in France) with a vague abstract one (be cool?). Near motivation trumps far, every time.

Sally assumed that "procrastination" is one thing, rather than a wide variety of things we lump under one name.

(Even though an identity element is implied by the presentation, it's not clear this is directly related to either person's mistake.)

To correct his mistake, Bob needs to consider whether he actually has any concrete reason for learning any other languages: what actual concrete result is desired? Sally's mistake would be resolved by getting clearer on the nature of her specific procrastination and then choosing a more suitable approach for dealing with it.

What mistakes are Bob and Sally making?

Trying to use time-management tools to solve a motivational problem. System-1-wanting to do something, having pleasant emotions attached to it, feeling motivated etc is a separate issue to efficiently executing that thing. Anki Cards and pomos are not tools which will make your system-1 want to do something.

What would you change, so turn those mistakes into successes?

"How to make your system-1 want to do something." is a million dollar question. The specific case of "How to make your system-1 want to look for jobs" is something that I am currently (somewhat) struggling with, though I definitely find that focussing on just getting started at a task and removing distractions really helps.

You probably also need to do some soul-searching about where you see your life going, what you will achieve with the money from that job, etc. I think that has been a reasonably good motivator for me.

What mistakes are Bob and Sally making?

I would call it "identity-wide generalization". They both suppose from something that is true of a particular situation (that is, learning a specific language or completing some projects) something more general at identity level (I can learn any language) that simply isn't true.

What would you change, so turn those mistakes into successes?

I don't know if anything can be changed to fix the mistakes. Take the first example: if Bob had the motivation to study French only because he felt the pressure of going to live in France, it's not said that there could be anything he can do to learn German, if he stays there.

Is there something in your life, that has failed in a similar manner?

I'll skip this since there's nothing that currently is failing for this reason.

To what other domains does this generalize?

I guess everything that touches upon betting on self-identity: "I had a lot of fun swimming at the sea, surely I'll be good at my local swimming contest", "Learning C# was really easy, I bet I can conquer F# even faster", etc.

Is “time management” even a meaningful term?

Yes, insofar what makes a term meaningful is its uselfulness for communication :-) But your point is valid, "time management" is basically the management of your own attention and effort.

Found this in SSC Open Thread:

Any discussion of time management which acts like time is the actual limiting factor has already missed the point, at least for me personally.

Oh indeed! All the time management advice starts from a position of “you have things you want/need to do but are too busy to fit everything in”, when for me it’s “you have things you need to do and time to do them in but can’t be motivated to get off your lazy backside to do them” :-)

I would guess that the real problem here is the fear of not choosing correctly. (Which ironically leads to choosing even worse.) Fear indeed is the mind-killer, or at least a motivation-killer for mental tasks.

I imagine that a possible approach could be to limit the time when you are making the choice. For example, on Sunday you would decide what are you going to do the following week, and precommit that you will not change your decision during the week. Then, during the week it would be obvious what to do. And if you remember something else, just write it into a diary and review it on the next Sunday.

The idea is that you would only commit to the direction of your work, not the amount of the work you want to do. If you feel tired, take a rest. Don't push yourself into anything. It's just, don't longer ask yourself "Haskell or type theory", because you have already answered that for the whole week.

Is this acutally a bad thing? In both cases, Bob and Sally not only succeeded in their initial goals, but also made some extra progress.

Also, fictional evidence. It is not implausible to imagine a scenario when Bob does all the same things and learns French, German and then fails on e.g. Spanish. The same thing for Sally.

In general, if you have tried some strategy and succeeded, it does make sense to go ahead and try it on other problems (until it finally stops working). If you have invented e.g. a new machine learning method to solve a specific practical problem, the obvious next step is to try to apply it to other problems. If you found a very interesting article in a blog it makes sense to take a look at other articles in it. And so on. A method being successful is an evidence for it being successful in the future / on other sets of problems / etc.

So, I wouldn't change to change those mistakes into successes, because they weren't mistakes in the first place. An optimal strategy is not guaranteed to succeed every single time; rather it should have the maximal success probability.