I noticed recently that the tradeoff you have to make to be more dependable in that way is to be less open. Less open to new projects, new information, new people. You have to be less malleable, and more definite. It is largely about being able to knowingly cut the majority of the world from your attention, to ignore what isn't important. I don't think that's a bad thing -- there's much more joy in being focused and determined than in shifting your attention and commitment around. But it is something that comes more naturally to people once they figure out what seems to them to be the right path, once they figure out a task or project that deserves their undivided attention and commitment, once they don't feel like they're getting stuck in a local maximum in an avoidable way.

I also don't have much of this skill and made it through life without needing to have it; I was able to coast on raw intelligence for quite a long time, up through my 2nd year of grad school or so. Welp.

Except in romantic relationships; I've historically consistently found it easy to have commitment, follow-through, reliability, focused attention, etc. in that context (although it was kinda being fueled by neediness so there were other things going on there).

It feels like I have not yet found e.g. a job that I deeply value enough to commit to in the same way that I valued my relationships enough to commit to them, and that I can take my lack of commitment to various things I've attempted to do so far as evidence that at least some part of me didn't find them worth committing to. I think I'm okay with having high standards for what I commit to in this way, although I might be out of practice committing as a result.

I'm curious how you would contrast this with the personality trait of conscientiousness. Grit was another term that was being used to point to something very similar to here. When tested, it was found that Grit couldn't be functionally differentiated from conscientiousness. I wouldn't be surprised if you're pointing to the same cluster of traits.

Another interesting thing is that it actually seems quite hard to shift your conscientiousness. I had a project trying to shift a particular subset of my conscientiousness and the first part was to see if anyone had found any interventions that could reliably make someone more conscientious - I couldn't find any. This doesn't mean I don't think it's possible, I've made huge strides in my life in being conscientious, and more since I started that project - but it does mean that you should recognize you've taken on a hard task, and perhaps make some plans for how to be virtuous without an abundance of conscientiousness.

I think if anything can train conscientiousness, it's probably living in an environment that encourages meditating all day like MAPLE. However, another equally plausible explanation is the type of people who are drawn to and survive in that environment are those with high conscientiousness.

Some things that have helped me:

• Noticing the things that hold my attention, and trying to build my life around doing good through those things (instead of learning to focus my attention on things I don't enjoy.
• Creating and finding cultures that have accountability and structure built into them, instead of trying to create the structure by myself
• Taking psychedelics.
• Self- help. Particularly seven habits of highly effective people, Atomic habits, The Now Habit.
• Allowing frequent breaks - Daily with pomodoros, weekly rest day, quarterly recovery weeks.

When Caplan's "case against education" came out, I thought for a while why we need schools, and came to the conclusion that schools train reliability. The ability to sit there and do the task even if you don't like it. It's not a natural human skill: kids are flaky and hate learning to be less flaky. School has to change the kid's personality by force and make it stick. That's why it takes ten years.

If you want to learn that skill as an adult, the bad news is it will take a while and it will feel bad, like any forced personality change. Like training a dog, but the dog is you. The only way is to commit to doing specific things on a daily or weekly basis, and stick with them for a long time (years). And if you fall of the wagon, you must start over, not tell yourself you've made "progress". The kid who skips a day of school every month on a whim isn't 5% less reliable than his classmates, he's years behind.

I'm struggling with closely related problems, mostly related to the ability of  managing to do what I decided I'd want to do for long term reason, rather than doing whatever it is that I am doing now. 

I'm kinda getting better at forming useful habits related to things that I'd better off be doing every day, but what you ask is related to a lot of different situations. 

The three broadest classes of strategies that I found to be effective for myself (and have been proved as effective by research) are:

Pre-commitment tactics and devices.

These are a class of actions you have to manage to do only once to increase the probabilities you'll do something  later. A large part of the difficulty in doing many things you mentioned is that we aren't really held accountable to do them by anyone, or don't have strong negative consequences we'll get if we don't do them by a certain date. You can increase your chances of success by creating them.

Example for the work: Find a friend who you know will go through with this. Choose the first clear target you have to do to get the job (which can even be the competence and target analysis). Say to your friend that if you haven't done that target by date x, you'll give him 50$. It's important to go with the kind of people you know will actually ask you the money and take them without any hesitation if you fail.

Other strategies are to create sunk costs and to state your goals to people. When I wanted to quit smoking I told everyone I'd do so and they'd had to give me a lot of shit if I ended up smoking again. I also throw away in front of them my cigarettes, lighter and everything related (I hate throwing away things without a reason). It ended up working. 

There are many sites and apps that help with this kind of things, so I'd suggest you to search on the web for pre-commitment devices and tactics, also for a better explanation on how they work.

Environmental/circumstances Alterations

Try to manipulate the environment so it will make easier for you to do as you want.

If you have an appointment and fear being late, and you usually are late, you likely start preparing to go out too late. Put an alarm on your phone that will start ringing when you should getting ready.

If you have to work on something and fear being distracted, switch off all distractions that aren't related to your task. When I was stuck on my thesis and needed a way to get unstuck fast I switched off the modem, the phone, got away from my computer and sit with only pencil and a piece of paper. 

I've managed to get a friend unstuck about writing a novel to insist on having her go to the local library each day and work there with her laptop.

Again, a google search should provide a lot of ideas related to that.

Celebration

A huge part of what we do or don't is determined on how we feel about it at the moment we're supposed to do it or not do it. 

Try to find out what you do when you genuinely cheer. Think of what you do when you win a hard boss battle on a game, see your team score, solve a hard question or whatever it is. For me it's either a smug smile or a whispered "yes!" with a fist motion. 

Each time you manage to do something that's positively related to dependability, do your celebration immediately after you manage to start doing it, and immediately after you finish. (well, assuming you can do so without another person looking at you very oddly. If so do it in your head, visualise it as clear as you can).

If you are alone, do the whole thing, even if you feel silly at first. Your brain decides how you feel about stuff largely by looking at what you do. If you celebrate, you tell your brain what you did is a good thing, and that it has to keep doing that. 

The biggest problem with training dependability is that you have to keep doing stuff you don't like doing. This is a trick to make that stuff somewhat pleasant, so doing it will be a lot easier.

Again, I tried this and it worked pretty fine, though you have to make a habit out of it. Use this also every time you manage to use one of the techniques in the categories I explained above, to further increase efficiency.

https://ideas.ted.com/how-you-can-use-the-power-of-celebration-to-make-new-habits-stick/ 

All of these things are clutches that help you train dependability. As you do dependable things more and more, the brain will start to change its habits about those kind of things, making it a spontaneous habit that doesn't have to rely on the clutches (though I'd advice against quitting them completely; procrastinating is a sweet poison and you could easily drift back into it over time).

Fourth personal technique: The Evil Master Plan File

I feel pretty silly explaining it to others, and I can say this works only based on my experience.

I keep a file that has my Master Plan to "take over the world" in it (basically your end goal, what you want to obtain in the real long term). 

I go look at it once in a while, to remember what I'm trying to do and sticking with it. I keep it as organised as possible, with partial objectives and the steps I need to do to succeed in these objectives. If I find that a strategy I tried didn't worked, or I find a better one, I update the master plan with these findings.

I aIso write the priority I assign to these steps, updating on it as I need, and have a section of it where I just take note of useful resources I could investigate later or that I'm using right now.

I find it's really useful to 

1) actually managing to stick through and coordinate with myself on stuff that requires a lot of steps and improving different abilities, avoiding to just drift from a plan to the next as months pass by as I used to do before this and 

2) measuring my progresses. I cross every objective and task I succeeded at, and when I feel down and lacking motivation, I go look at it to as reminder I'm still moving forward.

I might occasionally try to gloat and laugh evilly as I work on it. I find super villain mentality to be highly motivating, which is why I refer to as "my Master Plan to take over the world" rather than using a more realistic and precise name. I feel that without the super villain related stuff I wouldn't find updating and working on it as interesting or amusing, and I'd risk losing track of it.

If you don't find much amusement in super villain mentality, I'd advice on finding what could work for you and going with it. 

Also, on LessWrong there seems to be a lot of material on fighting akrasia, self help and productivity. I'd suggest a search to see what you find, if you didn't tried that already. 

The only 1 of the big 5 I have found not to be positively affected by meditation has been conscientiousness. Shinzen Young also reports needing to utilize traditional behavioral therapy techniques to defeat procrastination. So this area is definitely not solved and further exploration is highly beneficial.

One useful frame for me has been that this sort of failure is actually a prioritization failure. Organizational systems improve it by offloading more prioritization into a trusted structure.

All of this, and particularly the section on "reliability", reminds me of Werner Erhard's (founder of EST, which turned into Landmark) explication of integrity, outlined in Appendix 2 of this paper: http://www.wernererhard.com/integrity_paper.html

One key is that expectations of you include not just explicit things you tell people to expect but any you allow to be present.

This isn't a moral obligation, just the reality that "if you let people expect things of you and don't fulfill those expectations, there will be a breakdown in the workability of the relationship".

I have screenshots of the relevant sections in these tweets: https://twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1100775171676389377

First thought I had when I read the title and the bit about MAPLE is this piece by Tasshin (one of the monks at OAK, the California node of MAPLE)

The Power of DWYSYWD (Doing What You Said You Would Do)

I hadn't read the article until just now (just had it bookmarked) and it seems that it's almost entirely about GTD and zero about monastic life, but it still seems mildly interesting that it was written by a monk and is pointing at the same thing.

I disapprove of the lesswrongy tendency to try to coin new words or new meanings for old words for concepts that already exist and are useful.

There is another aspect of this for me that seems related when I think about the word 'responsibility', that if I don't follow through, or don't commit, or am not reliable, then there are consequences of this. If I don't learn to dance, then I'll probably have slightly less fun dancing. If I am not a reliable person, then that means my friends have one less person they can rely on, if my house is not clean, that is one less place other people have that they can feel clean, if I am not working towards meaningful things, then the world and the people in it are in a sense 'missing out' on this. Responsibility seems to be something like recognizing these consequences.

When I am working on a group project, there seems to be a big jump between when I feel the responsibility and not. When I am not taking responsibility, then I feel very free to contribute as little or as much as I feel like. I float in and out of doing other things and setting intentions for big things and small, but there doesn't seem to be much of a difference between when I succeed at what I intended to do or not, and I don't feel much desire to track this. If I commit to something, this seems to go hand in hand with a recognition of negative outcome, or lost positive outcome if I fail, which is the responsibility.

That feels like a burden, like I am constantly aware of a scary thing, and it tugs at my attention until it feels certain I will succeed. It also can feel like a debt, where I want to make sure that I have 'done my part'.

There seems to be a thing like 'managing responsibility levels', where taking on too much responsibility compared to your perception of your ability to succeed at tasks leads can lead to anxiety or other mental health problems, or at least lots of pain from failing.

CFAR has a lot of material adjacent and connected to this. If you are interested in building up the skill, you may find them worth your time.

I expect that when you actually have the skill of dependability, you're going to be thinking about yourself a lot less and about your responsibilities a lot more.