Share Your Anti-Akrasia Tricks

Mine is a weird one: I started taking every other day off. Even as deadlines loom, I am committed to doing no work today. I can cook and read and surf the Internet and hang out on Less Wrong and chat with friends and take a nap and do art (but not art for my webcomic), but at all costs I will do no work. Tomorrow, I will do work (in my case, papers for school and art for my webcomic and editing some fiction), and unless something breaks the trend that's been working nicely for a week and a half now, I will do more work than I could have expected to do in three or four days before I started this. (I make exceptions for time-dependent things like class meetings.)

I have a few hypotheses for why this works for me:

• It prevents the low-level burnout that used to plague me. I can decompress from whatever heavy mental lifting I do regularly and for a large chunk of time.
• I actually enjoy most of my work when I actually do it, so obliging myself not to do it lets me get through the akratic aversion during my downtime. By the time I wake up on my work day, I've worked up a fair amount of antsiness about wanting to do something productive. Also, my creative ideas accumulate over time, not over effort; I have more interesting work-related ideas by the time I fire up Word when I've set the project aside for a day.
• I can goof off more efficiently. Instead of spending all day on Stumbleupon because I can keep telling myself "one more site and then really, I'll do something", I can read an entire novel or bake a cheesecake or watch half a season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. These things require significant time commitments, so if I feel like I ought to be working I don't do them, but when I do them, they are more relaxing than the same amount of time in two-minute bursts spent obsessively refreshing Google Reader or checking my website stats or bothering people on IM.

I read these tricks for avoiding procrastination and I find myself terrified at the idea of trying them at a gut level, because what if they work? What if I actually find myself playing fewer videogames and surfing the internet less? That doesn't actually sound better, now that I have to seriously consider the possibility of changing this state of affairs.

Based on this revelation, I have to say I am coming around to the point of view that a lot of what we call "akrasia" is just us not wanting to admit, to others or to ourselves, what our actual desires are, so we make up more socially acceptable desires and then when we pursue our actual desires instead we blame akrasia.

I use Adrafinil, which is a non-controlled version of Modafinil. Taking one pill makes me want to do intellectual work and gives me better focus. Taking two pills makes me so sharp I find it a bit difficult to "chill out", so I really feel like spending my energy on working.

The downside is it's difficult to wind down in the evening when I just want to relax, but that's what cannabis is for, I guess.

Just a personal observation that for me there seem to be two classes of akrasia.

1) Inertial akrasia: I should be doing task X, I could do task X well if I just got going, I just can't seem to make myself do task X.

2) Exhaustive akrasia: I want to do task X but I've exhausted my willpower reserve. It's hard to start task X and even when I start I generally drift off-task as I've expunged my willpower reserves.

Type 1) akrasia consists of things like getting out of bed and procrastinating, type 2) is more zoning out midday or being unproductive after getting home from work.

They have similar symptoms and a fair amount of overlap but different treatments. Type 1 seems to generally be tricks to get you started, ie counting to 10, setting deadlines, etc. For type 2 treatments are more removing distractions (don't challenge your depleted willpower reserves) and taking a real break to replenish (ie watch a movie or work every other day).

Personally I think a lot of my troubles come when I try treating type 2 as type 1 or vice versa.

For instance often in the morning I'll often take a while to get working despite the fact my willpower reserves should be near full. Instead of taking a break I should have a trick to start working. Conversely at the end of the day I'll sometimes spend the last half hour reading websites and intermittently poking at a project, unwilling to admit that I've run out of willpower and thinking I just need a trick to get going.

I suspect that my failure to correctly identify which kind of akrasia I'm experiencing so I can treat it accordingly is partially a form of akrasia itself.

Does anyone else have similar experiences?

My results:

1. Elimination of two my primary addictions -- PC gaming, mostly TF2 and WoW AH moneymaking (100% elimination for both so far), and aimless internet surfing (now reduced to about 10% of its former glory.)

2. Significant reduction of procrastination time in general (ironically, I'm procrastinating right now -- I'm posting at LessWrong :)

3. Being able to actually act according to my current better judgement, with verifiable results in the real world. This is an addiction in itself.

My tricks:

(Obligatory note of caution -- these are tricks, they are not supported by experimental results, I've been using them for just about 3 months, they aren't tested under serious stress / pressure, I have no deep theories to explain why they work, and the evidence I offer is purely anecdotal.)

• Determine what is your current better judgment. This is critical -- I noticed that I hesitate to trick myself into doing anything I don't consider to be relevant to my goal.

• Regularly asking yourself: "is what I'm doing at the moment advancing me toward the desired state of reality"? If the answer is "no", you're procrastinating. The danger here is the possibility of rationalizing yourself into believing that your current activity does advance you.

• 80/20 elimination, Tim Ferris / Pareto style (I'm skeptical about the rest of Tim's book, but his Elimination chapter is pure gold).

• Parkinson's law (work expands to fill the time allotted). Again, Tim Ferris has some advice on it -- basically, it boils down to scheduling the most important things (in the 80/20 sense) first, with aggressive deadlines.

• PJ Eby's hidden meaning of "just do it". He considers the article to be outdated, but its key paragraph worked wonders for me. Basically, "just do it" = "don't do anything else". In its pure form, "not doing anything else" is too macho for me, so I leave a line of retreat for myself -- I permit myself to eat, think about anything (not just the task), walk, have sex, but no Internet surfing unless it's on-topic, no doodling on paper unless it's on-topic, etc.

• Self-priming -- I try to expose myself to stimuli related to my current task, and to shield myself from irrelevant stimuli, no matter how pleasant (e.g. I run away from my toddler daughter, because prolonged exposure to cuteness tends to totally ruin my ability to work efficiently :)

• Begin now. For example, if you need to do some stuff in Excel, just open an empty spreadsheet and type in the table header. Just staring at this makes you better at spreadsheets and your task -- your mind pulls linked concepts to the fast-access cache, without your consent, and you don't need to do anything. Probably related to Joel Spolsky's Fire and Motion.

• Mindless repetition of things like "I want to make the best X in the world" (where X stands for my current goal). I always correct myself when I say "must' instead of "want". I've been doing this for at least a decade, and it seems to work (possibly it's related to cached selves, monoidealism and self-affirmation.)

• No multitasking. Tim Ferris advises not to assign more than two mission-critical items per day. Joel Spolsky has a good article on this -- Human Task Switches Considered Harmful.

• Allowing myself to procrastinate up to a certain time. For example, I look at the clock, it shows 10:24. I tell myself, "I'll procrastinate up to 10:30, and then open a spreadsheet and type the header into it". The technique seems to be similar to the willpower hax that Eliezer uses for getting out of bed.

Failures:

I've been using the most of these techniques for just 3 months, but I've already observed some cases when they cease working. The number one cause of my procrastination (and acting against my better judgment in general) turns out to be social pressure (my established relations with co-workers, friends, etc.)

Example: I determined that my current best judgment is to remain at my home office and spend the entire day researching X, but then I start to worry that my business partner will think that I don't dedicate enough time to our company, so I feel forced to go to the "work" office and spend all day there on less important stuff.

I first started to pay attention to the relationship of social factors and akrasia after PJ Eby mentioned it in our earlier discussion. His term (psychosomatic marker, if I remember correctly) didn't stick with me, but I noticed that when I procrastinate, I almost always find that a social pressure is involved.

Also, the tricks are far less effective when I'm tired, but this seems to be far less important than the social pressures.

Remains to be seen:

• I've been using most of the tricks for just 3 months. Will they continue working?
• I wasn't under serious stress. Will they continue to work when I'm under a serious pressure?
• And finally: will they continue to work if I install a copy of TF2 back and try to get that shiny new bat for my Scout? I uninstalled TF2 a week ago (it sat on my HDD untouched for 3 months), but perhaps I should reinstall it and test my techniques the hard way :)

This is probably a standard tactic, but maybe I phrase it in helpful words.

My akrasia problems have gotten significantly better since I stopped thinking so much in terms of discipline and more in terms of not-being-stupid. One imagines that a race of expected utility maximizers would use the same word for I should and I want. If I think that I ought to to X, then I can just---do X, because I've decided that X is the right thing to do. It's not a matter of forcing myself to do things that I don't want to do (that would just be stupid; the entire point of instrumental rationality is to get us more of what we want); it's a matter of wanting to do good things. Don't raise the pressure; lower the resistance! Cf. "Inner Goodness."

Of course I'm a human and it doesn't really work that way, but I am doing ever so much better than I was this time last year. Because of this community, I've just been continually obsessing about rationality for the last year and a half, and I think I've finally just passed the threshold where it starts to yield practical benefits. However, I'm an unusual person along several dimensions and I've faced very strange personal circumstances in the past year and a half, so I don't expect my experiences to generalize too much, in this domain or others.

Really really simple procrastination trick that works wonders for me: don't just minimise the browser when trying to work, close it. If I need to use it for something work-related, one tab only and close it again immediately afterwards. The trick here, I think, is that flipping to the browser window is an automatic reaction when I get stuck on my work. If my mouse goes to the taskbar and it isn't there, the extra moment required to think: "Oh, I'll have to relaunch it" is just about enough to override the automatic reaction with: "No, I'm working".

I imagine this is a pretty well-known trick, I think I took it from an essay by Paul Halmos, but might be mistaken. It was originally suggested in the context of writing a mathematics paper, but would probably apply a lot more generally as well.

The trick is: always stop writing for the day in the middle of a sentence; preferably an important one.

For many people, the hardest part of writing is starting to write - if you've stopped in the middle of a sentence, you have an obvious starting point, and you can find it relatively easy to get into the rhythm.

Well, from reading the comments it seems the most popular type of akrasia that hinders this group is procrastination. I'm sure other weaknesses of will are common, but procrastination seems to be an overwhelmingly common nuisance. This paper http://www.uni-konstanz.de/FuF/SozWiss/fg-psy/gollwitzer/PUBLICATIONS/McCreaetal.PsychSci09.pdf might hint at why this is so. The gist is that the more abstract the tasks/projects/goals are, the more you will procrastinate. As the tasks become more concrete, the procrastination is eliminated. An example is the abstract concept of 'write that essay' vs. 'pick up pen & paper and begin mind-mapping' or whatever.

It is probably fair to assume that most people here are more abstract thinkers compared with the average population and thus might be extra sensitive to procrastination.

I'm not sure if this strategy is too straightforward to bother mentioning here, but it has made a signficant difference to my productivity in the time since I decided to employ it.

I'm attempting to write up some awkward-to-write-up technical stuff to go in my PhD thesis, and have been putting off getting to the hard part for weeks. About a week ago, I decided on the insanely straightforward hack 'start writing at 10.00 every day, and write until 12.00, during that time, do nothing else'. This has had massive effects. I've written more than I had managed in nearly a month previously - despite that fact that I thought I had spent most of most days attempting to write for the whole of the past month.

I think this is probably related to much of the stuff already posted - it's a less extreme version of Alicorn's suggestion, and it's implied by some of PJEby's earlier writing - it's probably also completely useless to people who have some outside pressure/deadlines which make this sort of 'I really can't even be bothered to start' motivation problem unthinkable, but it is an anti-akrasia tactic that I have been using successfully for at least a short amount of time: tell yourself you're going to do X during a certain time period, and completely ban yourself from doing anything else. Seems silly/obvious, but it appears to work.

Tried at least once when I had something important to do:

Go to the bathroom, stare at the wall and don't let anythig distract you until you muster the willpower to start the task you are procrastinating on. Then go and do it.

The key is not to let yourself become distracted with anything, that's why I went to the bathroom and stared at the wall(yes, my face was literally one inch away from it), any tactic with the same effect should work also.

For my personal programming projects, I keep a small text file of "Next Action" - small, concrete tasks that can be done in little time. That means I don't spend much time agonizing over what to do next, and can start get back to work relatively quickly after a pause. I regularly purge the list of stuff I don't really want to do, or of stuff that's too complex.

I also avoid IM, and turn off email notifications.

The best motivator for me is meeting other people's expectations, or trying to impress them.

Anecdote 1: A few summers ago, my friend paid me $100 to make a website for his babysitting business. I started working on it at his house and he saw me and realized it was going to take significantly more than the 8 hours I predicted. So every day he would come over to my house to watch me work on the site. It went at a steady pace and I finished after 25 hours of work. Meanwhile I had another, more important programming project that I was being unproductive at.

Anecdote 2: At work, when I'm feeling unmotivated, I think "What's the quickest way I can show my boss a demo of something to prove I've been working?"

Anecdote 3: If I work out at the gym by myself, I never do the exercises that feel awkward unless someone is watching, and I don't make quite the impossible effort to strain my muscle more after it already feels dead.

Side note: When I'm at work, I always think "This is so tedious. I'm looking forward to getting on with my workout later." Then when I'm working out, I think "This is so damn painful. I'm looking forward to just sitting at work and writing code."

Having someone watch me. Works four out of five times. From talking to other people it has a much higher success rate, but I'm still trying to figure out what's akrasia and what's an executive functioning deficit resulting from minor frontal lobe damage.

I have a friend who hires people to sit across from her at work. Pays for itself with the extra work she can get done.

Stepping back and watching the meat-I-am start to do stuff helps too, but not nearly as often, and I only learned that trick a few weeks ago -- from this site.

{This is actually a reply to this comment, but for some reason it doesn't have a Reply button.}

I first started to pay attention to the relationship of social factors and akrasia after PJ Eby mentioned it in our earlier discussion. His term (psychosomatic marker, if I remember correctly) didn't stick with me, but I noticed that when I procrastinate, I almost always find that a social pressure is involved.

The term is "somatic marker" as in the "somatic marker hypothesis". The somatic marker hypothesis in neurobiology basically says that our brains use remembered body states as markers (think XML tags) to categorize and rank our thoughts, as a decision-making shortcut. (This idea is supported by such things as microexpressions, tics, and the like.)

I don't consider procrastination to be chronic if it's something you could easily get yourself to do if you decided to/wanted to, but just never get around to. That might be akrasia, but it's not procrastination in my book.

To me, procrastination is when you have something you know you ought to be doing, but you find yourself doing other things in a specific effort to avoid thinking about the thing you're procrastinating.

In such cases, there is always an aversive somatic marker associated with the task, and the critical one is nearly always associated with the social consequences of task failure.

It's actually pretty rare for the aversive marker to be associated with the difficulty or time involved in task performance itself. And even then, it's likely to be social in nature. For example, a belief that working hard means you're dumb, because if you're really good at something it should be easy. In other words, an unconscious emotional concern about one's social image, rather than a practical concern about the task.

My use of the term "somatic markers" is just referring to the idea that our aversive responses can be observed as bodily reflexes. If you think about something you don't like, you may unconsciously frown, flinch, tense, or otherwise physically respond without any conscious intent to do so.

The relevance to fixing problems such as procrastination, then, is that the repeatable evocation of a somatic marker can be used as the basis for testing an attempt at changing your response. If you reliably flinch every time you think of the thing, and then after applying a belief-change or deconditioning technique, you no longer flinch, then it's a good indication that the intervention has been successful.

I use this approach because traditional self-help techniques don't have any way for you to know (for example) whether you've said an affirmation enough times or adequately visualized, or whatever the heck else the technique is supposed to be. And people routinely assume that just because they intellectually understand that nothing bad is going to happen or that they have to do something, this somehow should update the unconscious bit where the somatic markers are stored... and that's mostly not the case.

It also doesn't hurt that somatic markers are part of the mechanism by which our unconscious desires take effect: the physical response of flinching or other aversive behaviors are just the outward effect of whatever neuropeptide or other reactions are actually changing our inner states. So if we change the mental representations that trigger the outer markers, it's an excellent bet that the neurochemical changes in between aren't happening anymore, either.

And in practice, the usual result of realizing you no longer have an automatic aversive response in a certain context, is to laugh with surprise as you realize you could actually just do something else in that situation... something that didn't occur to you before, because the aversive response kept you from even thinking that far ahead.

A wide variety of self-help techniques out there will work for removing various types of somatic markers; The Work of Byron Katie, Sedona, and the Decision-Maker Process are among the ones I've used with myself or clients, but all are far more effective when you add in testing based on somatic markers. Otherwise, there is no real way to know whether you are doing a technique correctly, or just "thinking" you've fixed something.

Surprised no one's mentioned it before. Structured Procrastination is a great productivity trick.

Basically, you can get lots of useful but secondary tasks done as a way of avoiding an undesirable primary task.

just some quick thoughts on some general principles...

Build habits. Habits have momentum, and they can suck you into a task without you trying.

Associating a place with a task (if you can). That's one good way to build a habit. I go to a local coffeeshop to do PhD writing. That's all I do there, and I don't go there otherwise. I find it quite useful. If it's a place you don't do any other tasks at, it's less likely to trigger habits associated with them.

Make the habits generic, so you can always invoke them. If you make the initial task "start writing" (start writing /anything/ - it doesn't matter what), then this applies regardless of what you are writing or what you are writing it for.

Minimised the (perceived) next task. Make it easy to start.

/Doing/ has momentum. Make the initial task very simple. Simply by continuing to work on it, it can gather momentum and snowball and if that happens you don't have to even think about trying to do next thing.

Impose non-negotiable constraints (where possible). The coffeeshop I do my PhD writing at doesn't have any internet access, so I can't stuff around on the net even if I wanted to. (I understand that many tasks require internet access - this is just an example of the general principle). I also don't have Freecell or Solitare etc installed on my computer.

Have other's around who can see you (as has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread). That's another thing I suspect is an benefit of writing in a public place... it feels harder to slack off.

Here is something that I want to try:

Whenever I want to work on something, I'm just burdened by the fact that all my efforts will be useless, that the stuff won't be done and that I'll toil and toil and toil without accomplishing anything. Now, this sort of thing is pretty common for me -- worries about my confidence and intelligence not withstanding.

Sometimes this pressure is really discouraging and overburdening that I want to avoid work just to avoid that horrible feeling of having made no progress.

So I want to have "work" days in which I'll specifically experiment fruitlessly - I'll just do what I want without any pressure about productivity.

Maybe I might have an explicit rule about not being productive.

This hopefully will allow me to experiment more and enjoy my work more...

But with strict deadlines looming, it seems difficult but we'll see...

I'm quite a good morning-worker, but I tend to have a major slump after I've accomplished my first one or two tasks of the day. I need to take a break at this point, but sometimes this break turns into never actually managing to get started again that day at all.

So on days when I can, I trick myself into getting two morning-fresh-starts by doing my first task or two before my usual morning routine (shower, get dressed, etc. Breakfast is exempt from this because I don't work well at all when I'm hungry). When I run out of steam, I go and have the shower etc. That's a nice bit of a break, and when I come back my mind seems to be tricked into thinking it's just beginning the morning again. I can get at least a couple more hours' work done before the slump kicks in again.

Now I need another trick that I can use to get re-started after that... and I also need to work out how I can apply a similar trick on days when I have to go out somewhere first thing and therefore can't use the not-showering trick...

Very few tricks have worked for me for the long term. Exercise helps, as does eating well. Most tricks I've tried, including scheduling tasks, taking days off, changes of location and taskcard systems, have only given me the benefit of any change -- a few days of productivity, followed by return of akrasia.

Tricks aren't "proven" by experiment; they're supported or explained by experiment. The lack of this support and explanation makes a difference, but it's not proof we're talking about.

I try to determine if my means have failed in some unexpected way, or whether my means aren't capable of producing the desired outcome.

If neither applies, I conclude that I didn't really want the outcome in the first place and that my desires are rejecting the imposition that my consciousness is trying to force on them. I update my understanding of what I want and move on.

I don't know if I'm facing the same problem as most people. I'm usually working, but I spread my effort out among so many tasks that most go unfinished. I read so many books that I forget 99% of what I read before I ever get a chance to use it. It's ludicrous; when I have an hour to read, I find it difficult to take less than 4 books with me even though I know I can read only 1 of them. I keep buying more books even though I have literally hundreds of books in my stack of books-waiting-to-be-read.

I think my problem is too much curiousity, and too much ambition, and too much trying to do everything myself instead of hiring or allying with other people to get things done.

I tried hiring a guy to do some of my programming for me, but he could never give a firm answer as to whether he would get around to doing something today / this week / next week / never.

The firefox addon LeechBlock works pretty well for me and I often turn it on when I have a lot of work to do. It lets you set time limits for certain websites (or sets of websites). I usually like having access to the internet when I work (I often need the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, dictionary/thesaurus and a citation generator) but LeechBlock does a good job limiting the time I spend on procrastination sites. Now you can always deactivate it by restarting firefox but usually I can catch myself before I do that. The key is just setting up little barriers that keep me from clicking without thinking.

This trick, which I have been using for about 8 weeks now, was my way of borrowing from the motivational iPhone app, Epic Win, which rewards you for getting things done. Since I haven't jumped on the smart phone bandwagon just yet, I decided to take a plain old notebook and write down bullet points of the things that I have done. On days where I feel accomplished, I might only jot down the big ticket items (installed dishwasher); on the less satisfying days, I will include more mundane tasks (brushed teeth).

The point is, in contrast with the techniques that capitalize on cognitive dissonance and anxiety, to raise awareness of your actual accomplishments so as to reduce the activation cost of doing the things you want to get done. For me, the sheer magnitude of my To Do lists have on many occasion crippled my motivation to actually do anything. I might go so far as to say that it helped keep drinking booze as my #1 hobby for most of my 20s.

But having this pen-and-paper game of filling out as many entries in a day as possible has given me a tactile understanding of all the things I actually do get done, and allows me to move past my oft-crippling anxieties. It has also provided a good media for certain types of info-logging, like cataloging my sleep schedule (oh to have a stable schedule, like Rationalist Harry Potter), and noting the effects of caffeine, exercise and booze on the quality and duration of sleep.

I write a time journal of what I am doing throughout the day, counting productive times. Whenever I start doing something not productive (reading a not-strictly-work-related website, say), I write down that I stopped working. When I reach 5 hours of work, I go home (I often go home before that, though).

I thought I could accustom myself to being productive and drop the journal after a couple of months, but I never managed to. Whenever I try, I go back to procrastination.

Long time reader, first time poster.

What I want to know is just what such important tasks and projects everyone here believes they should be working on, which causes them to probe so deeply into the concept of Akrasia.

I'm assuming that most of us have steady sources of income, respectable (if humble) careers, and no shortage of curiosity to read books and enjoy sport/entertainment in our free times. So where does the Akrasia anxiety fit in? Looking at productivity-seekers from the outside it just seems like they're fantasising about a completely different life from the one they live, and weave increasing elaborate theories about how to generate a function taking them from reality to fantasy.

I'd like to think I'm wrong, and everyone weighing in about how they're spending their free time curing AIDs, running charity events to buy books for orphans, and building robots to help old ladies cross the street would clarify this. If it's just "boo hoo, I'm so useless, I can't find the willpower to finish writing that SuDoku solver I started in C++ and I still haven't got all the stars on Mario Galaxy" then who really gives the square root of a toss?

I'm posting this separately from my other trick because they aren't related. I recently found a Mac shareware app called Freedom which turns off the Internet. In an Internet-needing emergency, you can reboot, but otherwise, it's off until the time is up.

I appear to be unable to delete my comment.

Is there a program for Win XP that counts down a specified time, freezes the computer for a further specified time, then sets it to hibernate or sleep? I use a laptop, so I can sometimes use the battery as a timer, but it's not ideal.

Hi everyone. I'm reading the productivity articles and suggestions on this site with some fascination.

I can understand anti-akrasia tricks being applied to certain things like health-related goals, or maybe even just finishing university.

What I'm not sure about is using tricks like these for other purposes, especially career or art-related goals. I guess my question is, if you've got to use tricks like these, maybe its a good sign you're in the wrong field, and you need to reevaluate what to pursue? I mean maybe, just maybe, you really, really don't find any intrinsic enjoyment in your chosen field, and its time to move on to something else?

I have several procrastination techniques as well as some meta-techniques I apply to other forms of akrasia as well.

First, I use flexibility to deal with procrastination, for example I maintain multiple different to-do lists to avoid the natural tendency to over-hierarchialize the tasks I need to do. I find my procrastination tends to be focused, so being able to out-flank that particular akrasia can be very helpful.

I extend this idea to anti-akrasia techniques, as a meta-technique, keeping a variety available at any time and being willing to jump between them - based on observation, and in the moment experimentation. Sometimes a focusing technique may be very helpful, sometimes a relaxation technique, sometimes a forced multi-task will shove the akrasic loop out of my mind, and sometimes nothing else will do except an extreme expenditure of will and adrenaline (in an emergency).

The point is our minds easily turn any consistently applied method into a habit, and as a habit it can become the impression of the method rather than what works. Of course the other side of the sword is that part of akrasia is that sometimes what you need won't even occur to you, habitual or otherwise. Remember, some crises of will happen not in decisions but in awareness.

A second technique I use in procrastination is to be a good loser. Procrastination can be an excellent opportunity if exploited appropriately. I can refresh my mental reserves. I can tap unused mental "cycles" to work on long term projects (even, if I'm careful, the very projects that I put off). I can even foreshorten my replacement task by embracing it, which if I'm are clever can be replaced by something else I've been procrastinating on.

This idea also generalizes to a meta-technique, I should gain some advantage even when I give in to akrasia. Even if its just the ability to overcome it better at a later time.

I do not always agree with Kant, but his advice re (loose translation) "Act as if you were the leader of the world and everyone would copy their actions based on yours" has seemed to me to be good advice over the years.

Plus I get to pretend I run the world, instead of that cabal of unseen shadow-puppeteers secretly manipulating things from behind the scenes - I HATE them. HATE THEM HATE THEM HATE THEM . . . umm, have you read my resume yet?

Jonnan

Here's a bit I wrote for my school paper:

In my opinion, the best way to combat akrasia is to put yourself in situations where the willpower necessary is minimized. Below, I've made a list of tricks you can use that allow you to minimize the willpower necessary to start doing schoolwork you're not motivated to do.

Give yourself artificial time pressure. Make plans to do something fun with friends about an hour from the time you want to start working. This way, your deadline is brought closer in time and you'll need less willpower to get started. Worst case, if you don't finish your work before your artificial deadline, you can cancel your plans with your friends: a better alternative than missing the real deadline.

Have your ego work for you. If you have a big ego, this tip is a good one for you. Tell your roommates or family that you're going to start studying by a certain time. You'll be pressured to act consistently with your word because now you will face looking like a liar or just lazy.

Drive somewhere far away to do work. Muster the willpower to drive somewhere far away to do work. Once you get there, you'll feel obligated to start working.

Eat almonds. Almonds give you energy, reduce your appetite and are healthy. Getting started with your work will be easier when your willpower isn't fighting hunger or sleepiness.

Study with hard-working friends. Many people get this one wrong. They study with people who are easily distracted and always want to play. If your willpower can barely get you working, it won't help if it's preoccupied suppressing desires to play. Instead, find friends that work hard in groups. They'll peer pressure you into focusing on your work.

Make a 5-minute commitment. Force yourself to commit to doing just 5 minutes of work and that's it. You may not have the willpower to complete the assignment, but maybe enough for 5 minutes. Even though you only commit to 5 minutes, it is better than nothing and plus there is a chance you'll surpass the 5-minute mark on your own.

Pay the price of procrastination. This one is for those who are chronic procrastinators. Give your trusted friend some amount of money and have him incrementally pay it back to you as you accomplish your goals. For instance, once you finish a page of your essay by a certain time, he'll give you a quarter of your money back. Being productive will never seem easier.

The best motivator for me is meeting other people's expectations, or trying to impress them.

Anecdode 1: A few summers ago, my friend paid me $100 to make a website for his babysitting business. I started working on it at his house and he saw me and realized it was going to take significantly more than the 8 hours I predicted. So every day he would come over to my house to watch me work on the site. It went at a steady pace and I finished after 25 hours of work. Meanwhile I had another, more important programming project that I was being unproductive at.

Anecdote 2: If I work out at the gym by myself, I never do the exercises that feel awkward unless someone is watching, and I don't make quite the impossible effort to strain my muscle more after it already feels dead.

Side note: When I'm at work, I always think "This is so tedious. I'm looking forward to getting on with my workout later." Then when I'm working out, I think "This is so damn painful. I'm looking forward to just sitting at work and writing code."