I think the question depends a lot of the social support that you have. I don't think that an internet forum is enough social support to expect to be really productive while being completely alone.

Well if your parents won't tolerate your unschooling, the lack of support network is likely going to make it an ineffective route.

Keep in mind that the value of formal schooling in the case of individuals such as yourself who're capable of learning valuable skills under their own direction is not necessarily that it provides the best possible instruction in the skills you'd want to learn, but that it signals conscientiousness in a way that most people understand, and may offer practice in valuable skills you might not otherwise take the time to learn, like how to devote yourself to a task which is largely pointless in its own right in order to meet others' expectations.

Do both. Stay in high school, and use that time to study and perfect the skills you care about. High school doesn't take all that much attention to do well, you have LOTS of free time both during and after class. If you're disciplined enough to unschool, you're disciplined enough to make the effort to learn and improve in spite of school. If you're not, then that's an even better reason to not drop out.

I went to an online high school. Without going to an online high school, I would not have graduated at all. Here are some intermediate steps and questions that suggest alternative options that may be more palatable to both you and your parents:

• Would your interests best be served by a school, or schooling, that is designed to get you through the minimum requirements with as little and as flexible work as possible, or a school, or schooling, that is designed specifically to challenge your intelligence to the very limit of its ability?
• Would your interests be better served by an online high school program? How difficult is it to get in once you apply? Is the school you want to go to accredited? (Read about national and regional accreditation for both high schools and colleges.) If the school requires you to pay tuition, can you and your parents afford it?
• What kind of paperwork would you need to complete to convince people who are supposed to keep you in school that you're still going to be learning? How difficult/tedious is the paperwork to complete? If you withdraw and "homeschool", will you still need to take the standardized state tests (US)? Will you have to make alternate arrangements for things like AP tests and the SAT tests because you are no longer going to your "neighborhood high school"?
• Are you old enough to get a GED and skip straight to community college classes? How about Bard College At Simon's Rock? Are you exceptional enough that a college's admissions board would overlook your (presumed not very good) academic record and admit you anyway?
• Can you take community college classes in place of some of your high school classes and get a dual high school diploma and Associate's degree, or get an Associate's degree in less than two years because of the credit you have already accrued in high school?
• Would your interests better be served by psychiatric treatment, including but not limited to depression or ADHD medication?

Good luck, whatever you end up doing.

I noticed a correlation between homework-related and personal project-related akrasia starting toward the end of high school and seriously picking up in college. I haven't really untangled the mechanisms involved, but they do seem to feed off one another (most people screamed about priorities and refused to listen when I tried to point this out). I have not noticed that removing academic obligations has had a significant effect on my productivity (if anything, I feel like my output has slowed down since leaving college, but this may or may not be true; I could be shooting for constant productivity due to the lack of anything to fill my time, and levels could be close to normal but feel underwhelming without school to fill in the gaps.)

The main thing about the education system is not the learning; it's setting up entry into the workforce. There are useful skills to be gained from attending college, but if you don't establish connections and/or credentials for a job you have decent odds of getting, the cost might be a bit high. You could very well hone your world-impacting skills at college, but financial stability is the part you need to worry about. Especially the cost of attending college; student loans tend to last a long time if you're attending an expensive school and don't have some other means of paying.

A college degree is becoming the new high school diploma, from the sounds of it, so I'd be wary of avoiding college entirely, but cost/benefit analysis is crucial.

Just as a social and economic matter, it seems to me to be overwhelmingly likely that dropping out of high school will do long term and maybe permanent damage to your ability acquire significant money and free time. Dropping out of high school is very likely to be the worst thing you can do with your life right now. On the other hand, getting straight A's (which is not an intellectually challenging task) is likely to pay off more than anything else you can invest your time in. I'm not saying that that's the way it should be, I'm just saying that that's the way it is.

An hour spent on maximizing your grades in high school is for almost everyone one of the most financially efficient hours you will ever get an opportunity to spend. And you'll need money if you want the independence necessary to make a difference.

Barring some extreme mitigating circumstances, top colleges will throw your application in the trash the moment they see anything but a high school diploma littered with A's. They won't read your writing sample, or your personal statement, and so they won't know about any of your efforts to educate yourself. They do things this way because they get thousands of applications and they need a way to screen out ~70% of them without doing any real work. And if you're white, male, and not attending a well-respected high school, it will take more than good grades, but that will at least get your foot in the door.

Unschooling is great, but if it comes at the expense of the kind of schooling where you get a piece of paper at the end with a bunch of A's on it, then it's very likely to be an economic and social disaster.

So here's my advice: Don't drop out of high school. Get nothing but A's from now on. And spend the rest of your free time learning about what you find most interesting and valuable or hanging out with friends. Learning how to deal with people, both instrumentally and morally, is not a low priority.

Each day, finish your homework before you work "on projects that would make [you] more effective."

The best way for you to have a large impact on the world is probably to do well at school, get a high paying job, find worthy high impact charities, and donate money to these charities.

My solution to a similar problem: deliberately put off your school assignments until their deadlines are fairly close, then work on them then. Deadlines are great at increasing your motivation and helping you work in a more efficient way. If something increases your effectiveness so much, why not deliberately take advantage of it?

Do it carefully though... taken to an extreme, this idea can be hard on your mental health & cause burnout. I'd suggest staying very aware of all the stuff you need to do and scheduling a reasonably decent amount of time in your calendar to do it--just right before it's due.

Unless you're fairly unusual, you'll probably need the papers that employers care about. Since you spend a lot of time at the school, that's the time you need to learn to use more effectively. Here's how I survive through mandatory lectures at university level:

• wake up early
• do all the fun and/or useful learning in the morning with a fresh brain before school, make anki cards
• do all the useless assignments I'd hate anyways after and during school just before the deadline
• study all the school topics beforehand, so I don't have to fully concentrate during the lectures (listening stuff you can read is a gigantic waste of time)
• review anki cards on my smartphone/laptop during the lectures, roughly listen to the lecturer so you don't miss anything important

Obviously this might not be something that you can specifically do, but you get the idea. They still think I go there for their useless lectures. Can you utilize your commutes or some other time you think is part of your school day?

Leaving school may be detrimental to your social life.

I'd vote for #1, with a side of, "...learn as much useful stuff as you can on the side".

Given the way our current society functions, a person who lacks a college graduation certificate is at a severe economical disadvantage; and a person who lacks the high school graduation certificate is practically economically crippled. Yes, world-saving skills are great, but they don't pay the bills.

In addition, some colleges do indeed teach you important and useful skills, and thus getting into them and staying for 4-6 years is not a waste of time. Merely living in an academic environment can expand your horizons, exposing you to areas of study that it wouldn't even occur to you to consider otherwise. On top of that, if your college major does match your interests, high-quality structured instruction will improve your skill level faster than you can accomplish on your own.

That said, typical high school workloads are usually fairly light, so I'd use the spare time to rack up some extracurricular activities (to improve your chances of getting into a good college), as well as to brush up on whatever it is you are actually interested in learning (because high school won't teach you much of anything useful).

I vote unschool, because lots of the time you spend at school is apt to be wasted on marginally low-impact social interactions, bureaucratic rules required to govern large bodies of people but useless to the individual, and so forth.

A high school diploma is essentially equivalent to a GED. So my advice is to get some GED prep books, take some practice tests, and see if you can get a good score with your current knowledge. If so, you can basically test out of high school early. If not, you can use the prep books to figure out where you are coming up short and fill in the gaps.

Curiosity-driven learning tends to be fastest and least boring. Look for reasons to be curious, e.g. about math and science stuff slightly above your current level. Try to write compelling essays. Less Wrong is a great place for both of these things. So are various online forums like Stack Exchange.

You can also get cheap college credit by AP, CLEP, and other standardized tests. Most people pay quite a bit more for college credit, and spend a lot more time in class than they really need to.

If you have boring homework to do that can't compete against video games and such for your attention (e.g. brushing up on some topic that you notice you are not testing well on), you will need to either become more interested or put yourself in an environment without distractions. You can get away with resisting distractions directly for a while, but eventually that tends to cause willpower depletion, so think of that as something that has to be budgeted carefully. Simple trivial inconveniences like putting games on the top shelf or protecting them with a long password that's a pain to type can reduce the willpower required to resist.