Akrasia Tactics Review 3: The Return of the Akrasia

Cool, I like these sorts of lists! Here's mine:

1. (Mostly) giving up caffeine. 7 points, ~5 years. Much easier to get up in the morning. I have a single cup of tea maybe once or twice a month if I feel like I need waking up more, and that's enough to do the job now. Best used in combination with another elite lifehack, highly recommended if you can manage it:

2. Getting enough sleep. 7 points, ~5 years.

3. Pomodoros. 8 points, ~9 months. Really excellent and not sure why I resisted the idea so long. Turns out lots of half hour blocks really add up, and it's significantly changed how I work. This is a relatively recent thing so probably still overexcited about it.

4. Keeping my desk clear of paper. 6 points, ~2 years. I used to be awful at having stuff piled up everywhere, which would put me off working at home and convince me that I had to go to a library or something. This works by having box files so that the paper never ends up there in the first place.

5. Lot of calendar reminder email alerts. 4 points, ~3 years. Not exactly life-changing but I have fewer birthday present buying panics.

6. Todoist. 3 points, ~9 months. It has Gmail integration so I do check it, and it sort of works, but gets clogged with stale stuff too easily. I generally find todo lists hard though so this is good by my standards.

7. Beeminder. 5 points (but hard to attach a single number to), used for ~4 months 2 years ago and then stopped. Extremely effective way to simulate the stress of having a lot of external deadlines. It worked brilliantly on a time-sensitive project I had, but too stress-inducing for me to want to use permanently. It did do an excellent job of reminding me what being a productive person felt like, and I'd use it again if I really needed to, but mostly it just made me realise I needed to get my internal motivation working better.

8. Leechblock type browser extensions. 4 points, used them on and off for ~4 years up to about two years ago. I think the one I liked most was called Crackbook, which added a delay to the page load time instead of outright blocking it. They tend to work OK until they don't. There's no particular reason I stopped using them, except that the problem doesn't seem so urgent now I have a normal full time job and value my free time a bit more.

• Mini Habits, 10 points, ~2 months. Still early to say but this seems so effective it puts it in a league of it's own. This helped me to exercise every day, eat healthy, and do mindfulness meditation each day (among other things) for the past few months.

• Stoicism, 7 points, 1 year. Nothing can ruin your productivity as negative emotions can. Stoicism in the form of Daily Stoic proved effective for me in reducing negative emotions. Now I have a habit of reading one page of Daily Stoic per day.

• Mindfulness meditation, 7 points, 4 years. It has been on and off for me few months at a time. While on, seems like it improves my ability to concentrate and I notice I'm procrastinating easier. Also helps to reduce negative emotions.

• ZTD (or simply a TODO list), 4 points, 5 years. A simplified form of GTD.

• Reducing alcohol consumption, 4 points, 1 year.

• Nicorette gum, 2 points, 1 year. It works better than caffeine for me.

• Modafinil, 1 point, 2 years. It makes me irritable so I use it only when I know I have the whole day for myself.

New one I invented: one-day personhood. Has similar effects as stoicism and mindfulness. Still too early to say the strength of the effects.

• Daily journaling, -2 points, consistently for stints of a month or so with large gaps. I tried to keep up a morning journaling practice of gratitude journaling, priming myself on a number of important meta-level questions, and keeping track of what I was planning to do that day in pursuit of my high-level goals. In the end, all this really did was take up a lot of time every morning and leave me with a sort of scattered and unsatisfied mentality about how there's so much to do.

• Monthly journaling, +7 points, pretty consistently for 3 years. At the start of each month I open up a new Evernote document and write in it whenever I feel like it. Some of my journal entries are ten thousand word essays. Some of them are just aggregations of links that I thought were interesting that month. Usually the entries are divided by topic, with some of the topics usually being physical health, mental/"spiritual" development, and progress on long-term projects or life events. At the end of each month, I share the journal entry with a handful of very close friends. The journal provides a nice long-term record of my thought processes regarding my life and my projects, it's really nice to be able to look back over it, and it never at any time feels like a chore. It keeps me focused and excited about my long-term projects because I like to have progress that I can write about and share with my friends.

• Beeminder, +3 points, off and on for over 3 years. That point score might drop lower if I fully accounted for all the time I put into thinking through Beeminder goals, and for all the money I've lost by failing at them. Some Beeminder goals turn out to be good, some turn out to just make you hate Beeminder and not do what you wanted to do anyway. Just making sure your goals are SMART goals does not seem to be an adequate criterion.

• Getting Things Done, +1 points, off and on for over 4 years. A system which sucks up a large amount of time and rarely provides a return on that investment, relative to just mentally keeping track of things. I can't really say that I drop the ball more frequently when I'm not actively using GTD.

• Meditation, +3 points, off and on for 3 years. The utility of meditation depends very much on what's going on in my life.

• Exercise, +4 points, random stints. While I'm consistently working out, my energy and emotional-endocrine-whatever balance seems much better and I get more done. I'm just in a better mood overall.

• Children, +10 points, 4.5 years. You can't really not do things when you have children. That "I'll do it later" voice just kind of shrivels up and dies eventually, at least regarding kid-related stuff.

• Following obsession energy, +10 points, 3 years. I've written a book and an iPhone app just by noticing that I was really excited about those projects and feeding those obsessions, riding those waves until they ran out. They always run out eventually, but I accomplish so much more for having let just let myself loose and not trying to constrain myself to working on what I "should" be working on.

Ways I Fight Akrasia:

Precommitments: Positive Peer Pressure: Doing work with a friend, LW study hall, etc. +5 This is a consistent way to get work done.

Removing FB News Feed: Helps remove a large chunk of browsing time. +2

Site-blockers: Remove access to sites like Reddit, YouTube, etc. Also removed web browser on my tablet. +5 This has reduced many poor browsing habits on my end.

GTD system: Emailing tasks to myself, in addition to having “unread first” has helped me see at a glance what things I need to do. Workflowy for larger tasks. +3

Mental Tools: Internal Double Crux: Used in situations where I need to figure out my aversion towards a task. Used somewhat sparingly, but fairly effective. +3 (Search for Quick Focusing on the link.)

Reference Class Forecasting / Murphyjitsu: Used to remove bias from my planning and problem-proof them. +2

I used the app "HabitRPG" on my phone. It's an app where you basically set a series of tasks you want to do every day or every week, and it basically "gamifies" them; a little RPG character earns experience and gold when you do the task and check it off and loses hitpoints if you don't.

https://habitica.com/static/front

Overall I'd give it about a +5. I used it for about two months when I was starting a new job, and I think it did help me create good habits for my new situation, although I can't say for sure since I don't have a control or a baseline to compare it to. After about 2 months I felt like I didn't need it anymore and stopped, and the good habits more or less persisted. Downside is probably that it's a little time consuming and can itself be a distraction sometimes, and you still need some degree of self motivation for it to work.

I seem to have gotten a lot better lately at getting things done, so here's my attempt at breaking it down.

• Consistency effects from being responsible for other people/groups: +8, 6 months or so. I am responsible for membership admittance of a private group on Habitica (see below), for reminding a friend to take their meds, and for helping other friends debug their productivity. The overall effect is that a) I get practice at productivity techniques, b) It primes me to be a productive person.

• Habitica (formerly known as HabitRPG): +4, on and off for 3 years. I'm a member of an active party in this gamification of productivity, which means that if I don't do my dailies, my teammates take damage. Being responsible for membership of a private group means I have to log on regularly anyway, so I might as well use the system. And the combination of daily and to-do lists is good enough for me to track all my tasks and make sure I stay on track (one of my daily tasks is to do at least 1 to-do item).

• Working from home: +3, 10 months. This might come across as counterintuitive, but when I started working from home I floundered around for the first few months, and then money became an issue and I got better at consistently putting in the work. I'm still not perfect (witness me here instead of working), but I feel like I've improved my ability to get things done in less structured environments and with little to no oversight.

• Pomodoros: 0, on and off for the last 3 years. I still find them useful occasionally when I'm having major issues getting started on something, but the enforced on/off pattern drives me bonkers. If I'm not getting into the task, 25 minutes on feels like an eternity and 5 minutes off feels much too short of a break. If I am getting into the task, I'll just ignore it altogether. Giving them a zero because I feel like the pros and cons cancel out.

• Asking people to tell me to work: +1. Another way to convince myself to get started when I just don't wanna, by utilizing peer pressure.

I don't know a shorthand name for what to call this, so here's a cluster of things pointing at the mindset that makes akrasia unthinkable:

• seeing yourself as making preference tradeoffs
• seeing yourself as a single agent
• not seeing yourself as composed of 2 or more subagents
• every choice is a regret (a strange formulation of the idea that resonates for some people)
• giving up hope (one I like but confuses most people)
• having preferences not expectations/assumptions/motivated reasoning
• ontology is not metaphysics (the map really really fucking does not describe the territory)

Essentially I solved akrasia completely (as in it just evaporated from my way of thinking) once I stopped expecting the world to come into particular states despite what I believe to be true. In some ways this over solves the problem, but does it because the source of akrasia, expectations about your own future state as caused by current actions, cannot hold if you don't hold on to expectations or assumptions that are not weighted to the available evidence.

Put in more woo-terms, I achieved enough Buddha-nature to free myself from this kind of self-created suffering. Through wuwei I admit only what is ziran and achieve harmonious flow with the way of the world.

+10 solved akrasia forever with no unwanted side effects.

ETA: been like this for about 4 years now.

META: Put discussion about the format etc in response to this comment

Since one month I do some sort of productivity gamification: I rate my mornings on a 1-5 scale with regard to

1) time spend doing something useful and

2) degree of distraction.

Plus if I get out of bed immediately after waking up, I get a plus point.

For every point that I don't achieve on these scales, I pay 50 cents to a charity.

A random morning of mine:

1) time was well spent, I started working early and kept at it until lunch -> 5/5

2) I had some problems focussing while reading -> 3/5

+1 because I got out of bed immediately

The major noticeable impact it has so far is that I get out of bed in the morning. Plus it gives me a chance to review, e.g. one hypotheses I made on the basis of the example: coffee decreases ability to focus.

Possibly useful: http://lesswrong.com/lw/hgd/10step_antiprocrastination_checklist/, and http://lesswrong.com/lw/1fe/antiakrasia_technique_structured_procrastination/

Go to work outside, like in a cafe. +5, but not everyday. Typically I work from home.

Put one task for a day, and promise myself, that I will not end sitting on computer, util it will be finished +7. This task should be first thing in the day, as my brain is much brighter in the morning.

Create a map of a problem I am working on now. It tremendously helps understanding but also it is a form of gamification. +9

Choose the way to procrastinate: reed useful things. +5 (Procrastination is natural need of the brain to rest, I should not fight it).

Giving myself balls for task. Good idea, but can't implement.

Slowly become immersed in the problem until it become really interesting. E.g.: In the beginning it is difficult to read an article on a new topic, but as I do it longer, a get more momentum, and can't stop. In the past I sometimes have been writing my thesis after presentation, as was not able to stop improving it. +7

Cycling nootropics and antidepressants. All of them work for me for a short time. The more I depressed the more I procrastinate. +7

Leechblock type browser extensions: 7 points

I simply use an app called Hosts Editor on my phone to map reddit.com to localhost. This instantly broke a habit I had of wasting time on reddit (an activity I generally regret after the fact, but that I still tended to do whenever I had a few spare minutes) and increased the time I spent on reading more interesting content (instapaper, or books). No downsides I have noticed.

[A comment that used to be here has been moved to the "meta thread" at OP's request. Please ignore this now. Thank you.]