Akrasia Tactics Review

After having suffered procrastination and possible ADD symptoms for a long while (I left revising for my Finals exams to the evening before each paper, two months after most others), I have recently begun to find some strategies that work for me. In fact, they work so well that I decided to quit my job for a year to capitalise on my new-found capacity for hard study and upgrade myself.

• Think it, do it: as soon as I become aware of something that needs to be done and can be done (without major disruption), then I do it right away. This frees up working memory, saves on paper and, to an extent, cuts down on guilt (as that process by which things to do come to my conscious awareness is not taken to be under my control) +7

• Monomania/monoidealism. If I want to learn something quickly, then I aim to do nothing but what needs to be done. Then it becomes very easy to spot off-task behaviour in myself. +8

• Create addiction: monomiacal focus on something can lead me to become dependent on it, usefully so. +4 (this seems to work better with some activities than with others)

• Create shame (of my lack of mastery). Can be stressful, but is useful for eliminating smugness and setting very high goals. I guess that this is a variation on being watched, except that I always imagine myself being observed by sneering experts. (it is always a pleasant surprise subsequently to meet the concrete instantiation of these experts and find that they are reasonably reasonable people) +6

• Be my own guinea pig ('being Seth Roberts'?): I refer to my brain in the third person and aloofly set and assess the effects of programs of protracted periods of study. I can quite easily drive myself to the edge of burnout doing this (and consequently can now identify those feelings that anticipate it (in my case, feeling tearful, oddly-located headaches, mild disorientation). +5, as is reasonably high risk.

• Perform like tasks. If I need to do slow, careful, focused work, then I avoid any work and play that is of unlike character. For instance, fast, careful, focused speed Scrabble is different enough to be deleterious. As for fast, haphazard, focused internet browsing, weeell... +6

• Know what it is to 'work well'. I find it easier to get work done if I focus on maintaining the experience of working hard ie. immersion in the matter at hand, high cognitive load, high novelty and rehearsal rates, rather than consider the completion of tasks (as the latter can lead to drops in intensity, which undermines monomania/addiction). +6

• Dual-n-back training. I can rely on this to drastically reduce anxiety, flightiness, improve concentration. It also seems to whet my appetite for intellectual work and increase purposefulness across the board. +8

Writing each step you do on paper, while doing it: +8. This helps me when I can't concentrate, when I'm distracted.

I simply write what I'm doing (the current step, or the next step), on paper. If for a step (which I have already written on paper), I find that I must first do a sub-step, then I write the sub-step. The result is a log of what I've done and what I'm doing.

The great advantage of this is that if I get distracted, I can return to just where I left off, by just reading the last line or the last few lines I written on paper.

There is a technique which I did not find in the above lists, but found most useful for myself (I'd give it a strong +7).

I will call it Leave some tasty bits for next morning meaning that at the end of the working day I leave some task very well prepared which I am excited about to start to work the next day, something which is:

• easy to start with (finished with bulk of the tedious details)
• gives instant gratification
• a good start to get into less pleasant tasks

The idea is that it is in general hard to get into the "work mode", but once one gets the right momentum it is much easier to continue. So often I found that it is better not to finish some easy but exciting stuff at the end of the day, but leave it for next morning in the hope of setting up my whole day.

The wrong tactic is to do the tasty bits first and leave the tedious details to start the next day with. That way, it is sure that I will spend the whole morning doing something unproductive instead.

Here's a review of some of my tactics I posted here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/fu/share_your_antiakrasia_tricks/cj0

• Begin Now: +8. An excellent tactic when used in a combo with two other sub-tactics: "Begin now by creating trivial impetuses and removing trivial inconveniences between yourself and the task". I didn't give it +10 because while it works great for tasks that can be broken down into simple steps, it doesn't work for big monolithic mental tasks.

• 80/20 Elimination: +8. This tactic is pure gold, especially when formulated as "concentrate on high-order bits".

• No Multitasking: +8. One, maximum two tasks per day. Another definite winner, best used together with 80/20 Elimination. I reduced the number of tasks per day to just one.

• Self-Affirmation: +6. It worked for me 10 years ago, it still works now. My self-affirmation mantras focus on specific actionable things, here's an actual example: "I want to design a color picker for HDR colors". I usually repeat them when walking.

• Allowing Myself to Procrastinate Up to a Certain Time: +3. I mostly use it to initiate some simple action or break a procrastination streak. Example: I look at the clock, it shows 10:47, and I say to myself: "At 11:00 I'll close the browser and begin working on the email to John". This technique looks similar to Eliezer’s Execute by Default.

• Scheduling Aggressively to Counter Parkinson's Law: +2. Having an externally-imposed short deadline can work wonders, but imposing such deadlines on myself requires willpower, and it doesn't work well for big mental tasks and important decisions.

• Just do it = Don't do Anything Else: +1. Haven't used this tactic much since my original post, because it requires too much willpower.

• Deliberate Self-Priming: +1. Requires quite a lot of willpower, and hard to practice when working in a group. I now think that removing trivial inconveniences and creating trivial impetuses for the task (see above) is a better way to prime myself for the task.

Useful tools and routines that I have found to increase reduce akrasia, increase productivity:

• Methylphenidate +8

Promotes willpower, focus and persistence;

Well it's on a prescription, so my experiences might not be transferable to you. I get a lot of mileage out of Ritalin. Methylphenidate makes me focused, but I need to be careful in order to to focus on the right things, or it would only make me a more tenacious procrastinator. No significant side-effects, except a slight reduction of appetite. Some might see this as a bonus.

• Melatonin +7

Prevents delayed sleep onset, keeps circadian rhythm in check.

I tend not to get very tired in the evenings. As a consequence I often sleep less than I should. 2mg of melatonin an hour or two before going to bed makes it effortless to wind down and hit the hay at a sensible time. No negative side-effects experienced.

• Leechblock +5

Increases productivity by killing Wikipedia, Less Wrong and other fun time-sinks.

No cost beyond the few minutes it takes to set up appropriate filters. Keeping more than one browser on the computer makes it possible to research something should the need arise. Saves a couple of minutes or hours every time it kicks in. The benefit isn't huge, but the cost is next to nothing.

• High intensity aerobic exercise +5

Four times four minutes of intense exercise per workout, three sessions per week.

Reduces stress, increases well-being, makes me less inclined to procrastinate. Positive effects on cognitive endurance. Said to decrease the level of cortisol in the bloodstream, reducing stress. Also said to up-regulate production of growth hormone, insulin-like growth factor, brain-derived neurotrophic growth factor, endorphins, and other beneficial hormones and neurotrophic proteins. Increased physical endurance come as a bonus, if you care about that sort of thing.

+7 for beneficial effects, -2 for the time and effort required.

• Meditation; +5

Mindfulness meditation, 30 minutes daily.

Promotes reflection and allows the things that really matter to float to the top of my mind, reduces cognitive stress.

+7 for effect, -2 for the cost in time and mental effort.

To me, the above strategies work better in sum than by themselves. Beneficial effects add up over time, and the pay-off makes each well worth the cost.

Nothing really new here, but my experiences seem to fall in line with those of others.

Here goes for myself, on the tactics that I've tried most seriously:

• Utility Function Experiment; +7; sustained success (short of goal, but much better than status quo) over 6 months.

I've had the best success with the points system I invented after the fashion of taw's Utility Function Experiment. (It differs from the original in that I'm rewarding myself for good results, and trying to meet certain fixed goals as well as trying to maximize on an absolute scale.) It's dramatically improved my productivity over the past six months, and hasn't stopped working yet, though it's required some tweaking. The main side effect is a tendency to subconsciously try and game the system, which makes the tweaks necessary. I should note that a few of my friends were intrigued enough to start their own versions, and have had generally positive results as well.

• LeechBlock; +5; moderate success over 2 months.

It's helped to use LeechBlock to deactivate my preferred timewasting sites when I should be working or sleeping (12:30 AM to 5 PM, Mon-Fri), though I find I need to install it on my secondary browser as well. I've changed my time zone a few times to dodge it, but usually doing so is enough of an inconvenience that I stop wasting my time.

• Applied Picoeconomics; -2; total work ethic collapse for the month I tried it.

Resolutions of this seem to be a feast-or-famine kind of thing. After making a hard-and-fast resolution to do 3 hours of math each weekday for a month, I crashed and burned early and ended up demoralized for the rest of a wasted month. It wasn't much worse than the previous month, but it was worse.

• Melatonin; +3; some success but hard to distinguish from placebo effect.

Intrigued by gwern's article, I gave it a try. It did help me push my sleep schedule back a half hour a day in preparation for a conference that required me to be up at 6; I was tired during the days, but felt less tired than I expected to. For steady-state use, I haven't been able to see as much of a difference as gwern testified to.

Melatonin: Average +2.2 (3 reviews) (SD 6.6); works well for some, others feel groggy the next day

An observation for anyone using Melatonin: the effective dose is reported to vary between individuals by literally a factor of 100. If it produces grogginess the next day then halve your dose and repeat as necessary. Some find that the dose that works for them is as low as 0.1 mg. In my case I tend to experience next-day grogginess at approximately 6mg, and it also reduces the duration of sleep. 0.5 mg to 3 mg seems to work with no noticeable side effects except that I am less likely to have procrastinated away sleep until 3am.

Here's my method: (+8 for me)

I have a 45 minute sand glass timer and a simple abacus on my desk. Each row on the abacus corresponds to one type of activity that I could be doing, e.g. writing, studying, coding, emails and surfing,... First, I decide what type of activity I'd like to do and then start the 45 minute sand glass. I then do that kind of activity until it ends. At which point I count it on my abacus and have at least a 5 minute break. There are no rules about what I have to do, I do what ever I want. But I always do it in focused 45 minute units.

If you try this, do it exactly as I describe, at least to start with, as there are reasons for each of the elements. Let me explain some of them. Firstly the use of a physical timer and abacus. Having them sitting on your desk in view makes them a lot more effective than using something like a digital timer and spreadsheet on your computer. When you look up you see the sand running out. When you take a break you see a colourful physical bar graph of your time allocation -- it's there looking at you.

45 minutes is important because it's long enough to get a reasonable amount done if you work in a focused way, but it's short enough not to be discouraging, unlike an hour. Even with something I don't particularly want to do, sitting down and doing just 45 minutes of it is a bearable concept, knowing that at the end I'll have a break and then do something else if I want to. Also if you look at human mental performance, it doesn't make much sense trying to do more than 45 minutes hard work at a time. Better to have a break for 5 to 15 minutes and then start again. As I think 15 minute breaks are essential, at the end of the week the total number of units counted on my abacus are my total number of at-work-activity hours for the week.

Having no rule about what you have to do is also important. If you put rules in place you will start avoiding using the system. The only thing is that when you start a unit of 45 minutes you have to go through with it. But you're free not to start one if you don't want to. You might then think that you'd always just do the kind of work that you like doing, rather than units of the stuff you avoid but should be doing. Interestingly, no, indeed often I find that the reverse starts to happen, even though I'm not really aiming for that. The reason is the principle that what you measure and keep in mind you naturally tend to control. Thus you don't actually need any rules, in fact they are harmful as they make you dislike and avoid the system.

Another force at work is that momentum often builds enthusiasm. Thus you think that you'll just do 45 minutes on some project due in a week that you'd rather not be doing at all, and after that unit of time you actually feel like doing another one just to finish some part of it off.

So yeah, the only real rule is that when the sand glass is running you have to stay hard at work on the task, which isn't too bad as it's only so many minutes more before you're taking a break and once again free.

UPDATE: So it seems that what I'm doing is a variant on the "Pomodoro technique" (and probably quite a few others). The differences being that I prefer 45 minutes, I think that's a better chunk of time to get things moving, and I like a physical aspects of a sand glass timer and an abacus. I perhaps should add that when I was doing intense memorisation study before an exam I'd use a 20 minutes on 10-20 minutes off cycle as that matches human memory performance better. But for general tasks 45 minutes seems good to me.

I suggest adding PJ Eby's Irresistible Instant Motivation trick to the list. I'll give it a +3. There are a lot of situations where it does help me, and a lot of others where it doesn't. It seems to be especially good for relatively small and predictable but normally unmotivating tasks, such as the example in the video of cleaning your desk.

Personally, I've had most success with applying PJ Eby's 'Multiple Self' philosophy. I still haven't been using it long enough to rule out the placebo effect with confidence, but so far I'm rating it between +4 and +6: I've gotten considerably better at motivating myself to do the things I should be doing.

Unfortunately, the technique I'm actually employing is broader than the one I describe in that comment, as I've been picking up lots of different tidbits from Eby's different writings and applying them. Stumbling on Success is another article of his that I credit as very important in helping me, as are some of the writings of his that you can get by signing up on his e-mail list. I can't provide a comprehensive list here, as there's too much of it and I don't have the time to review what thoughts came from where. Eby's gotten some bad flak here, but his techniques and philosophies really do seem startlingly powerful.

I've also noticed that adopting the "multiple self" mindset has made it easier for me to apply anti-akrasia techniques from entirely other sources, such as making a to-do list with the least time-consuming things as the first ones and then just working your way through it.

Getting Back to the Music seems to be causing a stable lifting of paralysis, even if I'm not taking on anything very challenging yet.

The essay is a vey careful examination of how efforts to do better can actually make things worse. Learning Methods (the system being demonstrated) consists of finding out exactly what you're thinking while you're doing something you'd like to do better, and then examining your thoughts to see whether they make sense. I'm giving the essay a +5. It's something like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, but with much more precision.

Also, I think my life coach, Robin Simons contributed by helping me get at my habit of blocking my emotions, especially the positive ones. (No, I don't know why I do that.) She gets a +5, too. (I'm just going to give a +5 to things that help significantly without being complete solutions. Trying to fine tune my ratings seems a great deal like cat-vacuuming..)

I'm a little surprised that no one else has mentioned any form of therapy. No one's tried it, or it hasn't helped?

Execute by Default: +3 in limited circumstances. I used this (without realizing it) when bungee jumping, and when learning to do drops in aerial silks. I should try it other cases.

Resolutions: -3. Ineffective, and made me feel like a failure.

Utility Function Experiment: +1 -- briefly effective but not long-term (context: using ChoreWars for exercise motivation).

Structured Procrastination: + 2 -- when I remember to do it, and when I have a good long todo list. Especially helps get cleaning done.

Every Other Day Off: +1 -- my variant is to have a lot of vacation relative to most Americans. This does seem make me more productive at work. I would probably be even more productive if I took more time off.

Being Watched: +4 -- for me, that's not general watching, but pair programming. You can't check time-wasting sites if you're at one machine with someone else who is expecting you to actually work. On the other hand, I am extremely introverted, so it uses a lot of energy for me even with a very low-impedance person like my present partner.

Close the Dang Browser: +1 (works occasionally) -- but perhaps will work better now that I have removed the icons too. I think I should also try bookmarking sets of tabs so that I can more easily close without losing state.

Cripple your Internet (editing /etc/hosts, for me): +2 but I need to keep adding sites, including, embarrassingly, the coral cache version that I have used to get around my crippling.

Execute by Default

+5 This little habit is amazing. Most things to do just really aren't that much big of a deal. I have a trigger 'do it now' that pops up when something catches my (often somewhat flippant) attention and it works. It doesn't even seem like an aggressive taskmaster is heckling me, it's more like a sneaky reminder of an available 'cheat mode' and I tend to take pleasure in the thing getting done without burning up my willpower.

Resolutions (Applied Picoeconomics)

-8 The opposite of what works for me. A recipe for shame and aversive reaction to a task that I may otherwise be enthusiastic about.

Structured Procrastination

-6 Much like the previous option this just isn't for me. I've got limited reserves of structure implementation and I'm spending them on making my procrastination less fun.

Self-Affirmation

2 Yeah, whatever. It's an ok toy to play with. I would rate it higher for other goals than anti-akrasia. I actually find a similar tip from PJEby useful. I would butcher the insight somewhat by trying to describe it but it's on this site as well as PJ's webpage. Basically it's like self-affirmations only it works.

Every Other Day Off

0 I will not rate this <0 because I kind of enjoy this and also advocate it as a healthy life choice. Nevertheless I do end up doing less net work, if working is my goal.

Stare at the Wall

Don't have enough experience to give a rating. I will say that the generalised idea of doing something that takes less willpower instead of the thing that takes more willpower is a useful way to get around a mental block. But I must say I prefer "Take a small amount of modafinil, some piracetam, aniracetam and a choline source then stare at a wall".

Strict Scheduling

Are you going to limit me to -10 here? I've tried it time and again. But I hate it. And I don't do things that I hate so it doesn't work. Besides, when I work I enjoy work and just procrastinate on taking breaks. Then the work is done and I go do other fun stuff.

Being Watched

-2 No, but having company gets an 8, bringing the total up to a 6.

Create Trivial Inconveniences to Procrastination

6 Trivial cost, big pay off. Unfortunately they are a medium term solution for me.

Close the Dang Browser

Similar to above.

Cripple your Internet:

8 I've had some really productive days due to hardware faults. software helps a lot too. Does overlap with 'trivial inconveniences' though.

Melatonin

8 Great stuff. Going sleep seems, well, boring and I don't tend to get tired until about the 20 hour mark. But going and taking a melatonin at 6 is no big deal. Sleep follows.

Getting Things Done

0 yawn Like a fantasy story without the cute elves who can launch fireballs.

Modafinil +7

I used it regularly for a year with clearly positives results. Alertness and motivation were the big improvements, without the (too?) intense focus that comes with more typical CNS stimulants (amphetamines). It also operates on a completely different mechanism to caffeine. Rather than masking tiredness (caffeine) or making you stay awake out of raw baddassery (amphetamine) it actually makes you require less sleep. See, for example, military testing and other studies focussing on REM rebound.

Warning. Use with care. You are turning off some of your natural 'safety mechanisms'. Giving yourself extra stamina and reducing the (some of the most significant) need for sleep allows you to life a less sustainable lifestyle. Most people push themselves to the approximate limits that they can handle whatever that may be. With extra stamina in a pill you can run yourself down without noticing some of the more obvious side effects. Not always a good thing.

I now have a CPAP machine so I no longer (kinda) wake up every 2 minutes for the entire night. This means I no longer get quite the benefit I once did from modafinil, which is great. I still use it but less regularly. Motivation and alertness are not typically limiting factors for me so I'll take the extra sleep, have the extra physical recovery and increase my gym workload.

• Getting Things Done: +4. Makes a big difference, but the problem is that it requires the complete system. It works well when everything is included, but eventually I end up skipping a weekly review and the usefulness drops fast. Another thing is that I have to include everything I'm going to do in it. Including "for-fun" activities. If I don't, it's going to turn into a list of things I don't want to do and I'll resist looking at the whole list. Up-to-date it's worth more than +4, but since it doesn't usually stay that way...
• Meditation: +3. Calmer, less stressful emotional state.Makes it easier to hold a wider perspective. Doesn't help with akrasia directly, but is a significant indirect support and is good for for my general outlook on life.
• Regular exercise: +8. Essential. I don't see this as much as a positive thing as I'll get depressed soon if I don't get this.
• Monoidealism: +6. Works every time I actually execute it correctly, but thinking about nothing else is hard. This trick interacts well with meditation because it increases my ability to execute it.

Edit: Fix some typos.

Some things I've tried:

1. Private Resolutions: -4 Going off by myself, talking through the seriousness of the situation, and promising myself to do better / work harder. Usually has brief positive impact, but eventually I backslide. The next time around, the resolution has to be even more emphatic, because I know the previous level of seriousness wasn't enough. This is a ratchet of self-blame that I really can't take anymore.

2. LeechBlock: short term +2, long term +0 I tried this for about six months. It helped for most of that time. Toward the end, I just ended up using another browser.

3. Getting Things Done: +4 This one has been a big and lasting help, especially in areas of my life outside of schoolwork. Where I don't have complicated psychology of fear and habit driving procrastination, I'm limited mainly by keeping track of things. The GTD system has worked very well for me on that. Biggest benefit comes from forcing me to decide what I actually intend to do.

4. Mild accountability: +2 My thesis work is very individual, but I can give high-level reports on how things are going to friends and family, folks I'm not willing to lie to. The desire to give positive reports keeps things moving, but hasn't been a big drive.

5. Expose myself to hard-working friends: +5 When I see my friends working hard for any reason (against their will or out of internal motivation), it puts my procrastination in perspective and makes it seem silly to me. This helps me just get over it and get work done.

6. Getting enough sleep: +2 I learned years ago that sleep is necessary for willpower. It's not sufficient for productivity, but if I'm tired, it's very easy to give in to distraction.

Thanks for the work on this. I look forward to reviewing both the list of techniques and people's aggregated experiences.

Being Watched is a -5 for me. I have an office to myself (and at home, a home to myself), and that's how I prefer it. Company is an unpleasant distraction. However, something that does work for me is:

Collaboration +8

Working with at least one other person on a project does wonders for getting me to get things done. When it's just me on my own working on something with no short-term interaction with anyone else, I find it a lot more difficult to maintain momentum.

one of the top comments in the execute by default topic involved something the commenter called "monoidealism" which involved filling up your thoughts entirely with what you need to do. then its easy to do it because you're already doing the annoying part (having to think about it, the physical is rarely an issue).

i stand by my response to that comment: it has changed my life. +10. I can now trivially overcome procrastination that before was seriously crippling my productivity (going weeks without getting anything accomplished, including basic tasks like laundry and cooking food).

modafinil is a +5 i guess. I use it for focused study sessions in math and science and it works well for that. I haven't tried using it regularly.

ordered some melatonin recently, blue blockers, and full spectrum lights recently. will be testing.

My most extreme Anti-Akrasia tactic. Somewhat on the crude but extremely effective the couple of times I have used it:

timecave.com is a service that sends emails with time delay, scheduling them at some time in the future. My use for it is to generate a random password for a forum that is a time sink and have it emailed to me at a specified time in the future. In this case lesswrong.com until 1 Jan. I've duplicated the email in emailalibi.com in case timecave goes down.

I have real learning to do and have more or less mastered 'one boxing' in counterfactuals (although come to think of it even decision theory hasn't been cropping up much of late). I'll take the chance to remove a procrastination temptation. This way I can save my limited reserves of willpower for areas that don't have such a neat technical solution.

Here's some data on myself:

• Getting Things Done +6: Ended a lot of my problems, mostly because I'm no longer forgetting about things. Now I at least know what I'm not doing when I don't do it, although I still don't do everything I intend to.
• Regular Exercise +2: Helped some, but the amount of time involved in exercising seemed to negate the advantage if I wanted to do some other fun activity rather than work later. Generally find I'm happier and do more if I just don't make time for exercise, since it inevitably pushes out work rather than family and fun.
• Meditation -2: Didn't do anything for me. In nearly a year of practicing meditation for about 1 hour every day, I only ever once reached that special meditative state where you cease to experience your brain and just let it do its thing. In all, I just lost a years worth of hours sitting outside in the grass trying to sit still.
• Being Watched +4: Although if this goes on for too long I find I get stressed because I feel like I can't take a break and my quality of work starts to suffer because my mind hasn't had a chance to rest, I find it helpful, especially when a deadline is a long way out and I'm tempted to procrastinate until I really have to get down to work.
• Take every other 20 to 40 minutes off -4: I have a certain temptation to do this anyway, but it seems like forcing myself to take a break too often damages my productivity, taking me away from work when I'm enjoying it. I guess I don't need help to know when to take a break, and forcing myself to take breaks is just less effective.
• Strict Scheduling -8: Staying on a strict schedule is, for me, one of the worst possibilities. I get stressed, feel like I have to do things I don't want to do, and in the end spend even more time playing around rather than working because I feel like I need to do something to get back the time I was forced to give up to the schedule.
• No multitasking + 4: Only really useful if you're currently over multitasking. Some multitasking can be good, such as working on a secondary project while waiting for something to happen with the primary project (code to compile, report to run, numbers to crunch, etc.). Other times it can be bad, like trying to answer e-mail, write code, and have a meeting at the same time, because you simply don't have enough attention to do all that.

I almost used this post as a way of procrastinating on some writing that I need to do today, because it seemed so short, but it has links. And those links have links. And before you know it, you've queued up five more tabs and you won't escape for hours.

Also known as the problem with Wikipedia, or the reason why TV Tropes links should come with warnings on them.. If this article is about akrasia-defeating patterns, then here's an anti-pattern: seductive reading-holes that are deeper than they look.

Followup: http://lesswrong.com/lw/i0e/akrasia_tactics_review_2_the_akrasia_strikes_back/

Straight akrasia hacks:

• Getting Things Done: +8. Note that GTD includes variants of some of the other techniques here.

• Collaboration with Others: +7. Pair programming in particular, but pairing on any non-trivial tasks. It's really tempting to think that you're wasting time when pairing, but the available evidence supports my considered opinion that more time is saved than lost.

• No Multitasking (variant): +6. Vladimir Golovin's "One, maximum two tasks per day" would break me (too many small tasks required by my job). I mean breaking tasks up until they're small enough that I have a good chance of getting them done before the next unpostponable interruption arrives and working on only one task until it's done.

• The Caffein Nap: +8. This is awesome when you're struggling to stay awake to get through a less engaging task.

General effectiveness hacks that make it easier to resist akrasia:

• Meditation: +5. (With low confidence) Mindfullness meditation helps train my ability to concentrate.

• Dual-n-back training: +5. As Meditation (also with low confidence), dual-n-back improves focus after training. (I'm in awe of erm and > dual-9-back).

• Get More Sleep: +4. This is a terrible waste. I'd love to experiment with polyphasic sleep but am unwilling to pay the social cost.

• Regular Exercise: +3.

I have little experience with most of these, and I should gain more. Generally I work to improve my motivation, and indirectly have that carry me through. This obviously depends to a great extent on how well you can motivate yourself. I'm not sure this is exactly an anti-akrasia technique, but I would give it somewhat positive ratings.

If curious, my techniques for motivation are very diverse, and examples include reminding myself what is at stake, and recalling motivational ideals and imagery, largely derived from games, movies, and other media. One classic image of mine that was recently useful is that of a character that, if their legs are broken, they will crawl to their objective. John McClane of the Die Hard films somewhat embodies this idea. Useful for adversity and setbacks.

Sometimes I have great motivation for a task but when it comes to the actual execution, hesitation and procrastination persists. Regardless of my motivation, Execution by Default is often what works for me in getting over this, in the situations in which I do. I would give it +7, with a slight variation. The counting does not work well for me as I keep leaving myself a choice at the end of the countdown, whether I will actually follow through. What seems to work is expecting myself to do the task, and watch it from a sort of third-person perspective. Commonly this comes up for intimidating social tasks, and the thoughts are something like "Huh, I'm going to do that. Weird. Oh, here I go". In this way the decision is somewhat distanced, and I'm hardly even making it: I'm just watching myself make it. Somehow this often works, and if I really expect to see myself do something, at some point my body just starts moving. Gauging the effectiveness is difficult, as sometimes I try to set this system in motion but don't really put belief/will into it, and can tell I am doing so. From memory this system actually works, which means if I implement it I'm going to actually do it, and the hesitation is moved forward. An advantage might lie in just doing that, through hyperbolic discounting.

Here's one that doesn't exactly fit on your scale-- it broke a massive fit of paralysis, but has made only a minor long-term contribution so far--Acedia and Me by Kathleen Norris.

When I heard about the premise, I knew it was something I needed-- the idea was that the collapse of motivation is a current disposition of mind rather than a deep psychological flaw. This was enough to break some of the self-hatred (I'm fucking up, so I'm defective, so it's too much work to bother with anything important) which I think drives akrasia in my case.

The book is a Catholic take on the problem of acedia--what's sometimes called sloth, and reading it has done more to offer me clues than a solution. It's got a historical overview of what people have written on it through the centuries-- it's kind of nice to know that looking for grudges as a distraction from getting work done predates the internet.

I think there's something about time and impatience which leads to paralysis, but I don't quite have it pinned down. It's partly about believing that the work should be done already which makes the process of getting it done seem like an intolerable burden.

Modafinil: -10. I had a very negative experience with this drug. It did not help me focus or concentrate at all, it just made me unable to sleep and I felt very sick after a day or two. Unlike normal stimulants like caffeine or theobromine, it didn't make me feel more awake or alert at all. I took it in the morning for three days, when I had a paper to write, got almost no sleep, and was barely able to function (though I never felt like falling asleep). I actually had to take caffeine to counteract the effects of Modafinil.

Melatonin: -5. This also did not help me sleep or feel well rested, though apparently it does for many people. It just made me feel tired and groggy when I woke up.

LeechBlock: +8. This add-on is amazing. I installed it at work and it's made me much more productive. I blocked four or five different sites that I usually go to at work, and just knowing that they were blocked helped me focus. I do substitute random Google searches or news articles sometimes, but overall I spend a lot less time reading webpages at work.

Utility Function Experiement: +1 For the first couple of days I got a lot more done, but I also had a lot of deadlines to meet. I'm in school and have a stressed-out roommate that I have to take care of a lot of the time, which means I have strict deadlines and inescapable distractions; I need to do things more effectively rather than get more things done.

Learning to Say No: +8 aka figuring out what you really want and going after that instead of sticking to your default choices for fear of rocking the boat. Every other trick is just that, a trick.

The book which really changed my outlook, not just on procrastination but on work organization and ultimately my entire life was Mark Forster's Get Everything Done (and Still Have Time to Play). The money quote from that book is the following: "The danger is that better techniques will lead to a bigger and better overwhelm."

Getting Things Done (partial implementation): +6 It takes a little effort and thinking to really grasp the principles behind GTD, which is about more than "having a to-do list". What really worked for me was the "Do, Defer, Delegate or Delete" mantra, and sorting my work stream into a small number of contexts. The most important context distinction is "how much focus/energy do I have right now".

Cripple Your Internet: -1 I tried this once to break my addiction to blitz games on KGS. It had zero effect, and may even have had the perverse effect of making me crave the games more. Ultimately, what proved effective was simply to let the addiction run its course.

Pomodoro Technique: +2 This has gotten me out of one or two spots of trouble with "better overwhelm", I recommend it but it's more a crisis technique. The funny story is that the technique is popularized by Francesco Cirillo who I met at an Extreme Programming conference in 2002, and was originally formulated as a team discipline rather than a personal productivity technique.

Removing trivial inconveniences: +4 This is an everyday keeper. I used to have huge difficulties dealing with postal mail, for some reason. I still don't look forward to it, at all. But it became a lot easier when I thought about why it would always take me (literally) weeks to send off a single letter, and resolved to take steps against it when it had become a matter of financial survival (when my income started to depend on sending out invoices).

I typically took a long time because buying the envelopes was a task in one context, buying stamps a task in another, and actually labeling the damn envelope a task in yet another. This all added up to multiple occasions for akrasia. So I bought a large stock of envelopes and stamps, and an inkpad with my name and address on it, and kept all this within hand's reach on my desk. This drastically reduced the number of context switches needed to send postal mail, consequently the time and energy. Now I'm finding it easy. (For a while I considered buying a small label printer, but it turned out I never really needed that extra reduction of inconvenience.)

Does anyone here have experience with piracetam?

• Melatonin: 7
• Modafinil: 4
• Leechblock: 3 (I wanted to give it a 4, but I bypass it too often for me to kid myself. Still useful technique though.)
• Execute By Default: 0.
• Structured Procrastination: 1. Hurts nearly as often as it helps.
• Stare at the Wall: 3. I'm reading this one as 'meditation'.

Here's my list:

Modafinil: -10 all the mental energy loss of sleep deprivation without feeling sleepy, worst thing I ever tried

Resolutions: +1 I promise myself to do X regularly; then due to external circumstances I cannot for a few days and resolution dies even when external circumstances cease

Utility Function Experiment: +2

Messing with Internet via /etc/hosts hacks etc.: +2 unfortunately my work requires me being on Internet all the time, might work better for people who don't have this

Regular physical exercise: +4 - time and energy lost on it seem to be more than balanced by increased productivity for the next few days after

GTD 2 minute rule / execute by default: +6

GTD getting things off my mind / making lists of everything / reviewing them regularity etc.: +6

In both cases not by high efficiency of doing that, but by how my productivity collapses when I don't do that. My baseline productivity seems very low without GTD.

Being Watched +4-7 - This can depend on who the other person is and the situation. I don't like paired programming since I'm an introverted thinker, and I find it really distracting. When there is someone else in the room doing work, it motivates me to do more work. I find the reverse can be true as well. If I'm around a bunch of people who are slacking off, I become less motivated.

Cripple your Internet +5 - This is a pretty effective technique, but I have a hard time being consistent with this at all.

One thing I've noticed is that my akrasia, as well as productivity, seem to have an inertia. Its not necessarily that I always have an urge to procrastinate, but if I am not being productive, it is always easier to open a browser and start procrastinating than to start working.

I try to arrange my tasks in a way that I can keep a productive inertia. Make sure all tasks are well defined with clear starting points and goals. Try to break a task up into smaller tasks that can be completed in less than a day. Arrange tasks so they build off of the work I just completed, I try not to switch between unrelated work more than a few times in a single day. When starting a project, I start with a few easy tasks that I know can be completed quickly. This helps frame my mind for work.

Similarly, before I stop working for the night, I try to set leave myself an easy problem to solve than would lead into something larger. When I know exactly how to accomplish something, there is less resistance to starting the task. A lot of times it is easier to continue working than to start working.

By far, what I've found to be most motivating is to be working with people who themselves are very motivated about the work. I am a very competitive person. This can be a good thing with the right group.

Leechblock +8. Execute by Default +2

Autofocus and the Pomodoro Technique are both 0s; I gave up on them but I plan to try them again some time in the future.

The thing that's helped me the most is to realize that my productivity is related to my morale and that I should do things that are good for my morale and avoid things that are bad for my morale. Also, working out lots of little bugs like criticizing myself internally if I was working on the right problem in a suboptimal way but not criticizing myself at all if I was working on the wrong problem. I figure if I want cooperation from my inner chimpanzee I should try to provide him with positive reinforcement when I'm doing better than average (but maybe not negative reinforcement when I'm doing worse than average; I don't think negative reinforcement works well for getting myself to do things that require thinking.)

Great post! when was it last updated?

Missing techniques:

• caching your identity
• goal factoring
• solutions for the human memory problem sets in the comments
• insight into procrastination, which is spread over several posts including this link
• Preempting excuses

both missing reviews and missing a write up on Lesswrong

• SOBER technique

Techniques I've tried and will put up a review for soon hopefully:

• check cosequentialism

pickup akrasia

I aim to improve my game right now, and stop watching porn cold turkey right now to that end. So the follow akrasia techniques specifically relate to that. Here's what I'm doing to overcome my addiction to porn:

preparedness

• learning about addiction more generally with entertainment and informative documentaries

• learning about tactics that work amongst the most urgent populations like prisoners

normative social influence

It's taboo to talk about porn with people I know IRL in many cases, so I'm on my own here except for what I can get online

• Listening to advice from the pickup community, part of which like RSD(motivation) is very antiaddiction and prohealth and will tell you about it in a digestable way

• Counteracting the advice from that community about social interaction with more realistic advice sections of the community, which don't hypervalue pickup. Honest Signals is a channel about a guy who does pickup for comedy and entertainment and he shows rejections and boring realistic stuff

• participating in the RSD community of practice

classical conditioning

• reconditioning myself with PG porn

• daygame. Remember, be an alpha.

Nice Guys™ regard women as being moral guardians: that women should choose the nicest men for sex in order to reward them for doing the right thing.

• I plan to visit either the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo or Sexpo to humanise pornstars and hopefully give me closure from all the distortions cumulative weeks of pornography have done to me.

• creating associative value for softcore and educational videos that teach useful skills like CPR (anyone got other examples?)

peak shift alternative

• going to clubs and other (unfortunately loud venues, wearing the highest protection discreet earplugs I can find) venues to meet women (cause it's normative to go to those places to meet other single people)

• use the lesswrong study hall to do one thing at a time, after one another - and keep focussed on that thing.

improve my mental functioning

• reconciling deas on Lesswrong with ideas from mainsteam philosophy so that I can discuss them sans jargon with my social groups more easily. Probably with the help of idea and argument mapping and organising tools which I'd like to use for data and management jobs anyhow

• I audited my diet and I have no current source of vitamin b12. Maybe I'll become significantly smarter in the near future as I plan to have a minimum of 4 eggs a day to meet my NHMRC minimum dietary intake of b12

edit: I hate eggs, but apparently eating 2 yoghurts a day will take care of the b12 issue anyway.

decrease access

• Use a squat toilet when in the CBD on weekdays and you're not timepoor

• Use cheesy pickup lines to get you used to escalation.

• Show off muscles (esp. abs), with an animal, and do something interesting while having fun with friends in OkCupid display pics (and presumably in facebook display pictures and when signalling IRL.

• Perhaps I can make some cash on the side advertising a erotic masseur business...maybe if I'm desperate enough bringing a callgirl to a swinger joint to meet potential partners...

I have recently started transferring money to my friends with instructions to only return the money if I accomplish a task by a certain time. I have the deadline be far enough away that I should theoretically be able to accomplish the task without difficulty, but close enough to create a sense of real urgency. In this I am actually USING loss-aversion to my advantage, because damned if I'm going to let him have MY money. I've only used this a couple of times, but so far it has been very successful. Problems: If I schedule the deadline too far out, I don't feel its urgency until it is close, so accurately estimating how long I need to do something needs to be developed. Also, I am still figuring out how to break down big projects into goals that I can give short-term deadlines. Overall I would give this a +5, but I'm still experimenting with it.

See many other comments about the goodness of Leechblock and the idea of "reading holes" that are deeper than they look I looked into the three tools listed for crippling one's internet. I found that page addict appears to be unreliable and ended up not installing it.

Freedom is for Macs and therefore not usable by me.

I skimmed through many Leechblock reviews checking to see if a competitor was ever mentioned that might be better. I saw no mention of competition but there were a lot of rave reviews and few complaints so I'm installing and testing it.

No input to integrate back into the OP here, but I write up this comment in case others wanted to piggyback on my due diligence :-)

I'll be curious to hear if anyone has had positive experiences with Modafinil, especially people for whom the more traditional stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall were ineffective. That's the category I find myself in (I have a moderate–severe case of ADD which has resisted attempts to treat it so far).

I've found that drinking plenty of water makes me less lazy. Has anyone found the same? (I'd rate that at +3.)

For some reason noone seems to have mentioned 'the now habit' by Neil Fiore on this blog so far. Or Barbara Sher:'refuse to choose'. Both make a nice addition to the GTD concept, and deal with issues on a different layer.

Did somebody mention f.lux?

This program changes the color of the screen to be more orange/yellow towards the later hours. I'll give it +2 for now, since I've just started using it.

I should really start taking fish oil supplements again. I would especially encourage anyone with children to make sure they get sufficient fish oil while their brains are growing.

http://cognitivefun.net/talk/post/18427

As I mentioned before, the thing that works for me is

• Every other 20-40 minutes off

(doesn't seem to be listed in the post)

Reading this article today, together with the comments and links, has a rating of -10, on account of all the time I lost reading it!