Activation Costs

I've thought in terms of activation energy for years (note: I'm not claiming priority, I'm sure I got it from somewhere else). It might not be falsifiable, and I strongly doubt that it's a grand unified theory of procrastination, but it seems to be a useful way of looking at things, and in some cases it is obviously perfectly accurate.

I have a couple of examples (filled with specifics; I've redacted nothing except company names).

Scheduling medical appointments isn't difficult, but its activation energy is nonzero (I have to call their office during normal working hours, which takes a few minutes), compared to the activation energy of doing nothing, which is zero. But going years without appointments isn't good. After I realized this, I set up a simple system. As I'm leaving my dentist or ophthalmologist, I'll go to their front desk and schedule my next appointment in 6 months (dentist) or 1 year (ophthalmologist). I'm already there, so the activation energy is epsilon, and this ensures that I schedule these appointments like clockwork. Later on, I'll call their office if I need to reschedule, which happens very rarely (and when it does, activation energy is not an issue; the penalty for not rescheduling a conflict is marked in my mind as "dire"; regardless of whether it actually is, that's a useful thing for me to think).

I don't use this system for my primary care physician or ocularist, though, and predictably I don't see them as regularly as I probably should. (There are reasons for the asymmetry: I don't own a car, only a Segway, so to travel more than a few miles I rely on favors from friends or family. My dentist is within Segway distance, and my ophthalmologist is critically important so I could never think of missing an appointment. But I don't need to see my primary care physician more often than every 2 years, which is too long to schedule an appointment in advance, and I can get away with not seeing my ocularist very frequently.)

My second example is more technical, but even more relevant. When I was at [College Name], I hosted my website on their servers, and later (because I had Ethernet and a static IP) from a spare computer reformatted with Red Hat 9. I was new to Linux at the time, so I barely knew what I was doing, but I had boundless energy and I got it working the way I liked. Of course, I didn't write down what I did.

Then I graduated, and moved 1000 miles to work for [Employer Name]. Despite living just a couple of miles away from their bandwidth-rich buildings, the Verizon DSL available to me was terrible, 80 KB/sec down and 16 KB/sec up (I later got Comcast cable, and finally Verizon FiOS at 25 Mbps up/down became available to me, but only a few months ago). I left my server with a grad student acquaintance for a few months, but I needed a permanent solution, so I went with [Dedicated Server Company]. I was used to having root on a Linux box, and my website was completely custom, so shared hosting was unacceptable to me. [Dedicated Server Company] looked like my best option in 2004, and at 325 USD/mo it was expensive but I could afford it. I set up this server, running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, and it was even more complicated this time. I set up my own E-mail, not having my college address anymore, and figuring that out was horribly complicated (although this was in the dark ages of 2004, I wasn't an idiot, and demanded encryption to and from the server; Gmail didn't start doing this for everyone until Jan 2010). And of course, I didn't write down how I set up the server, since I was figuring it out as I went. This was also on top of [Dedicated Server Company]'s extensive and incomprehensible customizations. And I modified lots of stuff in the years that followed.

Fast forward to 2009. I noticed how much money I'd spent on this server (325 12 5 = 19,500 USD over 5 years, eek) and how old it was getting. But setting up a new server and reconfiguring my website and E-mail seemed like an impossibly difficult task (activation energy!) given that messing around with Linux servers was no longer on my list of endlessly fascinating things to do. I'd been meaning to find new hosting, but I was procrastinating despite the financial expense.

At this point, it'd be neat to say that I figured out how to lower my activation energy so I could switch servers. But no. Instead, something happened that pushed me over this huge potential barrier: due to a server misconfiguration, I started using a ton of bandwidth, and [Dedicated Server Company] didn't notify me, and I went about 300 GB over, at a cost of 1.25 USD/GB. INFINITE RAGE. I swore that I'd leave [Dedicated Server Company] if it killed me.

It took me several more months, but I finally found [Virtual Server Company] through my best friend's recommendation. While visiting my place, he made me get out my credit card and set up an account with them. During the next couple of months, I despaired about how much work I'd have to do, and how busy I was with other stuff, while he cajoled me into permanently switching, and convinced me to use Google Apps for my mail (instead of running postfix on my own server). Finally, in December 2009, I broke the work of switching servers into a handful of tasks (transfer bash configuration, transfer Apache configuration, set up Google Apps, set up DNS, etc.) and completed one every couple of days. I was soon finished, with a fresh Ubuntu server, and once I was satisfied that I'd never have to look at my old yucky server again, I sent a wonderful mail to [Dedicated Server Company] canceling my account, and excoriating them for (a) their high cost (probably reasonable for a corporation; not for an individual - I was partially insane in 2004 though), (b) their bandwidth overuse charge (at 1.25 USD/GB, an order of magnitude greater than [Virtual Server Company]'s 0.15 USD/GB - being virtualized doesn't lower their bandwidth costs so a buck per gig in 2010 is definitely highway robbery), and (c) their utter inability to send an automated notification when I went over my bandwidth limit, despite the fact that it'd take a drunken teenager about 10 minutes to code that in Python.

Best of all, [Virtual Server Company] costs me only 18 USD/mo. My friend saved me 3684 USD/yr. (And reduced the necessary size of my retirement fund by about 74k USD, the way that I calculate it. That is a lot of money.) Procrastinating for so many months, if not years, was one of the most irrational things I've ever done (and I pride myself on my rationality), but the activation energy of maybe a day's worth of work in total seemed more expensive to me than thousands of dollars.

I did learn something to reduce my future activation energy, though. This time, I wrote down every single thing that I did while setting up my Ubuntu server, so that I could replicate the process on demand (to upgrade Ubuntu - I don't yet trust the process for doing so in place - or to switch companies, not that I'll be doing the latter, since I love [Virtual Server Company]). That's already come in handy as I've upgraded versions once. Whenever I modify my configuration (like when I discovered the magic trick to get "cls" working in PuTTY as it does in Windows), I'm careful to update my notes, so I don't lose anything.

I would add "writing it down" to the decreasing activation cost list, or at least working it into "Very clear, straightforward instructions". For me, things generally get done much faster when I put them in my planner, or even just in a text file on my desktop, than when they're left to float around in my head. Whether that's because the task is made into clear and straightforward instructions, or because it creates a sense of urgency ("Oh man, it's written down, I gotta do it"), or just because it exists as a thing in the world rather than an idea, I don't know, but it's definitely a result.

Also, this article convinced me to finally stop procrastinating on setting up a LW account after a few months of readership. Hello!

I usually refer to this effect by noting that "context switching is expensive." I got it from CPU scheduling but it's also famously true of light bulbs: turning it off and then on again costs more energy than leaving it on for a short time. (I forget what the actual time threshold is offhand.) This is why grouping/batching tasks works--if you can do three things in a row in the same place, you don't have to switch contexts for each one. It's also a case against multitasking.

I would add to your hurts/help lists "having an overwhelming quantity of work" and "setting yourself clear, modest goals," respectively. I've been discussing elsewhere the task system I've been using for myself lately; the relevant part is that most of the time I only see my short "today" list of about 5-6 items. I don't even look at the long list of tasks to-do-ever, except when I'm adding something or picking out a few tasks to go on the next day's list.

Another suggestion for the helpful list: "novelty." That's what pulls your attention to google reader, but it's also what makes you feel more organized and productive when you're trying out a new organization system. I wonder if one could use this effect deliberately--change the format or style of your organization/task list periodically, to keep it fresh and interesting.

Just for the record, 'akrasia' is a stupid word. It fails to carve reality at its joints. It's dangerous to reify the lack of something, mostly because it's hard to catch subtle lack of reflectivity about that lack of something in the midst of more complex lines of reasoning. I'm reflective enough at the moment to know that my previous sentence was not an ironic example, but I can't trust myself to always be reflective enough when e.g. my thoughts are bent by affective bias, so in general I avoid 'stupid' words like 'akrasia' unless I am making conscious effort to be careful about reflectivity over concept clarification. Also, rationalists who are less experienced than me would probably still do it wrong even if they were being consciously reflective about it, so they should never use words like 'akrasia'.

• Every action you take has an activation cost (perhaps zero)
• These costs vary from person to person
• These costs can change over time

Wow, is there anything your theory can't explain? Seriously, I think "activation costs" are so broad as to be useless.

I can't buy this as anything but a fairly superficial metaphor.

Activation energy for chemical reactions is a useful model because it uses measurable units on the same scale as output energy, and because it's very repeatable from one experiment to the next. You can make very good predictions about how to start (or fail to start) reactions using this theory.

I'm not sure what units of energy are used to measure the activation cost you're talking about, and it seems that the costs vary across time, individual, and situation to the point that this theory can't make any good testable predictions.

It would go a long way to make some testable predictions based on this, or some evidence that this model can be used to do something.

Oh, God, yes. Sometimes it feels like I have to haul myself over a threshold to get myself to do things.

The single most useful tactic I have for lowering activation costs is playing podcasts and audiobooks on my iPod. It lowers the activation cost for household chores like dishes significantly, and it is particularly effective in lowering activation costs for outdoor exercise. Impending boredom is the highest part of the activation cost for tasks that involve leaving my computer.

One minor hack to lower activation costs is to just resolve to do the easiest possible thing to start a project when you're procrastinating. So if I'm web-surfing and I know I should start that report, I'll just open up a text file, give it a name, and create the title page, and leave a shortcut on the desktop. It makes it much easier when I decide to go back to the project.

Actually, the same day you posted your article, Jess_Riedel posted this article on Willpower..

As a frequent procrastinator, I can affirm that to start is often the most difficult part (but not always). However, I would like to see your theory stated in less vague fashion. It would be helpful to know whether one can measure the activation costs (in approximation at least) or whether the hypothesis can be formally included into a utilitarian decision theory, or most generally, whether there is a testable prediction that follows from the existence of activation costs.

This implies that there would be two effective ways to beat akrasia-based procrastination. The first would be to lower the activation cost; the second would be to increase energy/willpower/ego available for activation.

Let's say I want to do some work W and I tend to procrastinate. In order to make it easier, I apply the technique T. In retrospect, T proves to be successful. It is either because T lowers the activation cost of W, or because T increases my willpower. How do I recognise which was the case?

I like this metaphor a lot (though I agree with critical replies that question its value as a theory.)

Speaking of reducing activation costs, breaking big tasks down into atomic physical doable actions and figuring out the 'next action', GTD-style, can greatly reduce activation cost. GTD's concept of "next action" was extremely useful to me -- it was the missing key piece of my own productivity system (which, as it turned out, is pretty similar to Allen's GTD in many areas).

Wow, amazing post! I actually thought of the EXACT same idea too - I'm surprised that someone came up with it independently of me

Anyways, my idea is listed here: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-confidential-cafe/391872-model-activation-energy-applied-motivation-theory.html (not intended to compete, but some may find it interesting). It might have some more analogies that might be interesting. (e.g., as a person with ADD, I'm especially constrained by activation energy, so I frequently try to find ways to lower it). Automating one's behavior is a way to lower it.

In short, anxiety, fatigue, and ADD can easily increase activation energy. Stimulants (like ADD drugs), automation, and stress-reducing tactics decrease activation energy.

Or in Robin Hanson's terms, "near" and "far". Things that are "near" require less activation energy than things that are "far".

I like this analogy. I'd like to add that activation energy is required, but often not spent, and some activities (such as exercise) leave you with more energy than you started with; having a high activation energy is not at all the same as being draining.

What do you intend by the analogy? That the instantaneous effort it takes to sustain a course is less than it takes to commit to and begin it?

I agree that where possible it makes sense to order your life so that what you should do is in fact easy and even pleasurable. I'm not worried that, if I become too comfortable, my willpower or desire for novelty will atrophy, but if I were, I would set up a metaphorical alarm clock to wake me from my too-comfortable routine.

All discussion on this post is very welcome - I hope we can build more on this topic.

Re: my last post, it suffered from three points - it could have used more editing to make my key points more clearly, it should have included practical alternatives, and the examples should've been more generic. I tried to spend more time with this one and not repeat those errors. I appreciate all the feedback and replies on the last post, and I might try to write a follow-on post about deontological ethics, consequentalism, and how context matters for choosing actions. Thanks for all that feedback and discussion, I'll go through all of it very closely when I have a little more time, and might try to write that post on ethics and context if I think there's a way I could do it at a high standard.