Thoughts on designing policies for oneself

It has helped me to realize that the policies I implement to govern my behavior are implicit hypotheses about my behavior. The general form is "I predict that installing policy X will produce behavior Y." In the past when my imposed self-regulatory policies have failed I have viewed it as a personal failure, a failure of the will, my failure to adhere to the policy. It helped a lot to realize that my hypothesis was merely wrong. I became free to update. I started learning from my failures.

Reading this, I had a brilliant idea. Similar to taking a break from dieting one day a week, I could take a break from working (or from having to work - I can still be productive if I feel like it) one day a week. This seemed like an excellent hack to conserve willpower and reduce procrastination or, at the very lest, make my procrastination more fun because I didn't have to feel bad about not working during it.

Then I realized that I had reinvented the weekend or, more prosaically, Shabat.

Thank you for writing this.

This is a brilliant post–thank you so much for writing it!

The idea here is to have a constant reinforcer instead of a variable one, and it seems to work as far as avoiding addiction is concerned.

This is so obviously true from a behavioural-psychology point of view, yet I had never thought of applying it to my own addiction behaviours. Clever!

For me, there seems to be a very strong effect where if I make a policy when I'm not feeling very high-willpower, I won't take it seriously and will ignore it later on. So I recommend just noting down policy ideas if you're feeling tired. Then you can refine them and commit to actually following them later on.

I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but my tired/low willpower self doesn't actually agree with my energetic self as to what I want to change.

A trivial example: when I'm feeling tired, grumpy, or physically sluggish, I usually dislike my body and think I'm too fat. I think it's almost an automatic thing for girls from Western cultures. When I'm well rested and cheerful, I like my body perfectly well. Objectively speaking, I definitely don't need to lose weight for health reasons–my BMI is well within normal range even though I have higher-than-average muscle mass for a female. My tired self thinks that's stupid and wants to look like a magazine model, but lacks the energy to do anything about it.

A more significant example: my biggest prioritization issue is that I try to fit too many activities into my life, and end up tired. I like all of these activities–in fact, they're all the things that make me happiest. School takes up about 35 hours a week just of classroom time, not including homework, but I wouldn't give up school. Taekwondo takes up severals hours per class, on average three days a week, not including transportation time. I would never give up taekwondo. I go swimming one to three times a week–I wouldn't give that up either. Lack of exercise makes me cranky. I work 12 hours as a lifeguard and swim instructor on Sundays–it's a job I love. I also work part time as an orderly at the hospital, most nights shifts at the ER, which is fun (and pays well). And I volunteer. And I try to have a social life and hang out with friends at least once a week. And see family maybe once a week...

All these things are awesome. On the whole I don't like relaxed days at home–they make me feel sluggish. I like all the things I do–but I do too many things, and then I'm tired, and that reduces the amount of pleasure I get from doing them. However, choosing to do less means I have to give up Activity X, and that sucks! Not only that, in exchange I get to spend more time sitting around at home not getting stuff done.

My energetic self thinks my life is perfect–I get to do so many things I love doing! My tired self wants to murder my energetic self for betraying me and making me pre-commit to doing something when I'm so exhausted I can't focus or experience pleasure. (Fortunately or unfortunately, the context tends to determine my mood, and I'm fairly good at hacking my moods, too–I arrived at clinical this morning wanting to murder someone, after having been up for 30 hours straight the day(s) before and sleeping 7 hours that night. By 10 am I was Supernurse and having a blast.)

I also want to be and stay as healthy as possible–exercise is good, but lack of sleep is bad, and I would be able to eat healthier if I had more time to cook and didn't have to cram enough food for 16 hour days into a lunch bag. However, the only time I succeeded in having a less packed schedule was when I was in a long-term relationship, and that was a deliberate sacrifice towards the relationship itself. I probably slept less during that time period, and may have done more things that I endorsed myself doing but didn't actually have an urge to do ever (i.e. sex).

Has anyone successfully hacked this type of problem?

This overlaps with Einstein's Superpowers-- it's important to stop believing that people who do things you can't are unanalysably magical or superior.

I like your analogy to programming a computer and I would take it a step further. In "The Mythical Man-Month," the author points out that computer programmers have a tendency to believe that the bug they just fixed is the last bug. i.e. "This time it will surely run." In other words, they are overly optimistic.

So too with self-improvement. It's easy to fool yourself into thinking that you've finally figured it out and that the diet you started is the sure path to permanent weight loss or whatever.

To make matters worse, it's very tempting to evangelize your new-found self-improvement technique. To proudly announce to the world that you've got the True Path to weight loss, quitting smoking, or whatever. And urge people to follow your plan.

As a consequence, the internet is full of diet and other self-improvement advice that doesn't work all that well. Not to mention that it's condescending and annoying.

A reputable company would not ship untested software, and I would propose a similar rule for any kind of self-improvement plan or advice:

1. Do not evangelize it until you've used it successfully for at least a year, preferably a year involving normal human experiences.

2. If you feel you must push your ideas before that, make it clear that you are doing so and commit to following up a year or two down the road to honestly let people know if things are still working.

3. In any event, commit at the beginning to honestly following up at the 2, 3, 4, and 5 year marks.

Love this.

How do you feel about using rituals to reinforce habits and create momentum for new policies? It's basically outsourcing willpower to past selves.

For instance, I've always had a hard time regulating my sleep schedule. It's not always that I can't sleep, but that I seldom want to go to sleep and lack the willpower to not do whatever I want to do instead, no matter how sleepy I am. What finally worked was a ritual that served as both positive reinforcement and physiological manipulation. I love bubble baths, and they put me in a relaxed mindspace where much less willpower is required to go to sleep. Bubble baths are now my bedtime ritual. Between 9 and 11PM, I shut off my laptop, don my robe, light scented candles, and draw a bath. Exactly like that, every single time.

It's not difficult, in part because a ritual doesn't really feel like my decision. It feels more like an external way the world is, something it would take effort to change, like the lunch meeting scheduled for Wednesday. Taking a bath is the last thing I'm allowed to do before sleeping, and it's something I always look forward to. Sleeping is simply the conclusion of the ritual.

Obviously, rituals are dangerous, especially in group contexts. But they're dangerous because they really are powerful. We can delude ourselves with rituals, but we can also use them as cheat codes for winning. We just have to use them judiciously.

I've read the article a few times, but found myself getting confused. After some thinking, I think I've narrowed it down to working better with examples rather than general universals. The above seems like good material, but is there any way I could convince anyone to give an example or two, maybe walk through the process step by step?

1. Rules should achieve their goals.
2. Rules should have positive or neutral affect*
3. Rules should be as simple as possible.**
4. Rules should have exceptions.*

*This is the most important and the list should work as Asimov's laws do, ie you should implement parts 2 and three only as long as implementing part one works. Any rule you set for yourself that you hate will make you unhappier as you follow it and has a great chance of not being followed.

**This is the rule that allows you to follow the rule in a large variety of circumstances, without needing to waste cognitive effort or emotional strength on decisions. For example: An extremely simple rule for dieting is : "eat no carbohydrates". This rule is pretty hard to enforce in that it constrains what you eat A LOT. If you find yourself regretting this decision, you need to follow rule 1 and modify the rule, while remembering rule 2. At the moment I go with: Eat few carbohydrates, except on Saturdays, where I may eat as many as I feel like. This leaves me happy to follow the rule, still keeps it pretty simple, and lets me lose weight.

*This is basically a way to say that you shouldn't get fucked by really weird events, and that your rule probably doesn't ALWAYS have plus ev consequences. EG, never eat carbs on weekdays is simple and easy to follow, but metarules about once in a lifetime events or things like weddings mean I won't regret the rule. This is more of an elaboration on the "possible" part of rule 3 than anything else.

I look at it in terms of efficiency; sites like reddit are simply inefficient ways to communicate. They are good at making random connections and exploring new subject areas, and that is what I use them for: if I have heard of a subject, but don't know about it, I find a subreddit on the topic and subscribe.

As a tool for discourse, however, there is much to be desired; communication is lossy (many posts are simply not upvoted enough to be seen) and interspersed with noise (unrelated but "viral" posts). Google Reader is almost lossless; it maintains a buffer of all messages for 30 days and then archives them so that they are available in search results but not as unread items. If one reads every feed to its end at least once a month, then no data is lost.

Google Reader thus has the odd effect of making one commit; either you are subscribed to a feed, and read every post of it, or you are not, and never see it anywhere. I have not used Reader for more than a few years, and furthermore haven't conducted a survey of its users, but I would theorize that Reader users as a whole are more productive/active than non-users as a result. Perhaps it could be a question on the next LessWrong survey.

My solution is to design policies that evaluate to real numbers rather than binary choices (i.e., rather than asking "did I break policy X," I ask "to what extent did I fulfill policy X"). I aim to have "policies" (though I call them "metrics") that range from 0 to 1, update in real time, and are easy to compose with other metrics.

I have a program that calculates these metrics in real time, and embed the output of that program into my desktop on my primary viewport. Since I'm usually working on my secondary viewport (a large external monitor) this allows me to have an eye on my metrics most of the time.

If I start feeling bad about the state of my metrics, I can usually do something to fix that. If I can't (if there isn't enough time in the day) I can just resign myself to having a bad day, and go back to whatever I was doing.

I prefer this because it allows me to see how fast I'm improving and how far I've improved. It also lets me 'fail' some days without much penalty.

Additional suggestion to follow after you created a policy: print it out, read it out loud in a solemn voice, sign it.

instead of working on important stuff.

Having important things to do appears to be correlated with all kinds of problems. It should come with a warning label or something.

upvoted mainly for some of the cool links you included...

I have exactly this problem and this is a good solution. So just to make it concrete if you want to block reddit as above I used the following..

Get Leechblock Add these into the specify site section +reddit.com/r reddit.com

So far this works well, I am not sure yet whether reddit puts anything in a different subdirectory.

Usually I strongly dislike reading articles on motivation. (Primarily due to an Ugh Field) This article did not have that property.

This seems like it should be in Main.

Keeping willpower low and modifying your environment are related and extremely important. It's often easier to prevent future you from doing something than it is to make present you do something. It's really quite easy for me to not buy fruit or candy at the grocery store, but it's much harder not to eat them if they're mine and in the house. It's easy to order food in a restaurant that fits what you can eat, it's a lot harder to not eat part of what's on the plate. Telling someone you're going to be somewhere (EG, a martial arts class or a meetup or something) is really easy(for me), and makes the decision at the moment as to whether you should go a lot easier.

Very relevant video to the topic; I've found it amazing! I'm aware of the fact that it probably was discussed here before, but I'll link to it for people who haven't seen it: Authors@Google: Kelly McGonigal.

Just read this yesterday (July 31st 2014), and let it sink in before I commented.

In the past I've attempted to do self-improvement checklists (like this, but better organized), and haven't gone further than 2 weeks with them. With this post I think I have much improvement to make on my list design (and designing policies in general).

Question: what are good rewards/punishments that could be implemented in not finishing a set goal?

Thanks, John. I will try some of the above.