Enter Wikipedia:
In chemistry, activation energy is a term introduced in 1889 by the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius, that is defined as the energy that must be overcome in order for a chemical reaction to occur.
In this article, I propose that:
- Every action you take has an activation cost (perhaps zero)
- These costs vary from person to person
- These costs can change over time
- Activation costs explain a lot of akrasia
After proposing that, I'd like to explore:
- Factors that increase activation costs
- Factors that decrease activation costs
Every action a person takes has an activation cost. The activation cost of a consistent, deeply embedded habit is zero. It happens almost automatically. The activation cost for most people in the United States to exercising is fairly high, and most people are inconsistent about exercising. However, there are people who - every single day - begin by putting their running shoes on and running. Their activation cost to running is effectively zero.
These costs vary from person to person. In the daily running example above, the activation cost to the runner is low. The runner simply starts running in the morning. For most people, it's higher for a variety of reasons we'll get to in a moment. The running example is fairly obvious, but you'll also see phenomenon like a neat person saying to a sloppy one, "Why don't you clean your desk? ... just f'ing do it, man." Assuming the messy person indeed wants to have a clean desk, then it's likely the messy person has a higher activation cost to cleaning his desk. (He could also have less energy/willpower)
These costs can change over time. If the every-morning-runner suffers from a prolonged illness or injury and ceases to run, restarting the program might have a much higher activation cost for a variety of reasons we'll cover in a moment.
Finally, I'd like to propose that activation costs explain a lot of akrasia and procrastination. Akrasia is defined as "acting against one's better judgment." I think it's possible that an action a person wishes to take has higher activation costs than they have available energy for activation at the moment. There is emerging literature on limited willpower and "ego depletion," here's Wikipedia on the topic:
Ego depletion refers to the idea that self-control or willpower is an exhaustible resource that can be used up. When that energy is low (rather than high), mental activity that requires self-control is impaired. In other words, using one's self-control impairs the ability to control one's self later on. In this sense, the idea of (limited) willpower is correct.
While this is anecdotal, I believe that starting a desired action is frequently the hardest part, and usually the part that requires the most ego/will/energy. Thus, the activation cost. Continuing in motion is not as difficult as starting - as activating.
This implies that there would be two effective ways to beat akrasia-based procrastination. The first would be to lower the activation cost; the second would be to increase energy/willpower/ego available for activation.
Both are valid approaches, but I think lowering activation costs is more sustainable. I think there's local maximums of energy that can be achieved, and it's likely that even the most successful and industrious people will go through low energy periods. Obviously, by lowering an activation cost to zero or near zero, it becomes trivial to do the action as much as is desired.
Some people have a zero activation cost to go running, and do it every day for the benefit of their health. Some people have zero activation cost to cleaning their desk, and do it whenever they realize its messy. Some people have a zero activation cost to self-promote/self-market, and thus they're frequently talking themselves up, promoting, and otherwise trying to get people to pay attention to their work. Most of us have higher activation costs to go running, clean a desk, or to market/promote something. Thus, it burns a lot more energy and is actually effectively impossible to complete the action sometimes.
The following factors seem to increase activation cost (not a complete list):
- Ugh fields
- Trivial inconveniences
- Poor quality compartmentalization
- Identity tied to an action to be taken that action-taker isn't skilled at
- Unclear or difficult instructions
- Prior failed attempts at the action or type of action
- Feeling like something is work or "has to be done"
The following factors seem to decrease activation cost (not a complete list):
- Deadline urgency
- Constraints (and thus, lack of opportunity cost)
- Momentum
- Grouping/batching tasks together
- Structured Procrastination
- Very clear, straightforward instructions
- Long term habits
- Cached-self effects
- Feeling like something is a game
Additionally, another way to go anti-akrasia is to increase energy levels through good diet, exercise, mental health, breathing, collaboration, good work environment, nature, adequate rest and relaxation. Some of these might additionally lower activation costs in addition to increasing energy.
I believe the most effective way to do activities you want to do is to decrease their activation cost to as close to zero as possible. This implies you should defeat ugh fields, reduce trivial inconveniences and barriers, de-compartmentalize (and get something to protect), untangle your identity from the action you're taking, and find as clear instructions as possible. Also, deadlines, constraints, momentum, grouping and batching tasks, structured procrastination, clear instructions, establishing habits, setting up helpful cached-self effects and reducing negative ones, and treating activities to be done as a game all seem to be of value.
I would be excited for more discussion on this topic. I believe activation costs are a large part of what causes procrastination akrasia, and reducing activation costs will help us get what we want.
I've thought in terms of activation energy for years (note: I'm not claiming priority, I'm sure I got it from somewhere else). It might not be falsifiable, and I strongly doubt that it's a grand unified theory of procrastination, but it seems to be a useful way of looking at things, and in some cases it is obviously perfectly accurate.
I have a couple of examples (filled with specifics; I've redacted nothing except company names).
Scheduling medical appointments isn't difficult, but its activation energy is nonzero (I have to call their office during normal working hours, which takes a few minutes), compared to the activation energy of doing nothing, which is zero. But going years without appointments isn't good. After I realized this, I set up a simple system. As I'm leaving my dentist or ophthalmologist, I'll go to their front desk and schedule my next appointment in 6 months (dentist) or 1 year (ophthalmologist). I'm already there, so the activation energy is epsilon, and this ensures that I schedule these appointments like clockwork. Later on, I'll call their office if I need to reschedule, which happens very rarely (and when it does, activation energy is not an issue; the penalty for not rescheduling a conflict is marked in my mind as "dire"; regardless of whether it actually is, that's a useful thing for me to think).
I don't use this system for my primary care physician or ocularist, though, and predictably I don't see them as regularly as I probably should. (There are reasons for the asymmetry: I don't own a car, only a Segway, so to travel more than a few miles I rely on favors from friends or family. My dentist is within Segway distance, and my ophthalmologist is critically important so I could never think of missing an appointment. But I don't need to see my primary care physician more often than every 2 years, which is too long to schedule an appointment in advance, and I can get away with not seeing my ocularist very frequently.)
My second example is more technical, but even more relevant. When I was at [College Name], I hosted my website on their servers, and later (because I had Ethernet and a static IP) from a spare computer reformatted with Red Hat 9. I was new to Linux at the time, so I barely knew what I was doing, but I had boundless energy and I got it working the way I liked. Of course, I didn't write down what I did.
Then I graduated, and moved 1000 miles to work for [Employer Name]. Despite living just a couple of miles away from their bandwidth-rich buildings, the Verizon DSL available to me was terrible, 80 KB/sec down and 16 KB/sec up (I later got Comcast cable, and finally Verizon FiOS at 25 Mbps up/down became available to me, but only a few months ago). I left my server with a grad student acquaintance for a few months, but I needed a permanent solution, so I went with [Dedicated Server Company]. I was used to having root on a Linux box, and my website was completely custom, so shared hosting was unacceptable to me. [Dedicated Server Company] looked like my best option in 2004, and at 325 USD/mo it was expensive but I could afford it. I set up this server, running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, and it was even more complicated this time. I set up my own E-mail, not having my college address anymore, and figuring that out was horribly complicated (although this was in the dark ages of 2004, I wasn't an idiot, and demanded encryption to and from the server; Gmail didn't start doing this for everyone until Jan 2010). And of course, I didn't write down how I set up the server, since I was figuring it out as I went. This was also on top of [Dedicated Server Company]'s extensive and incomprehensible customizations. And I modified lots of stuff in the years that followed.
Fast forward to 2009. I noticed how much money I'd spent on this server (325 12 5 = 19,500 USD over 5 years, eek) and how old it was getting. But setting up a new server and reconfiguring my website and E-mail seemed like an impossibly difficult task (activation energy!) given that messing around with Linux servers was no longer on my list of endlessly fascinating things to do. I'd been meaning to find new hosting, but I was procrastinating despite the financial expense.
At this point, it'd be neat to say that I figured out how to lower my activation energy so I could switch servers. But no. Instead, something happened that pushed me over this huge potential barrier: due to a server misconfiguration, I started using a ton of bandwidth, and [Dedicated Server Company] didn't notify me, and I went about 300 GB over, at a cost of 1.25 USD/GB. INFINITE RAGE. I swore that I'd leave [Dedicated Server Company] if it killed me.
It took me several more months, but I finally found [Virtual Server Company] through my best friend's recommendation. While visiting my place, he made me get out my credit card and set up an account with them. During the next couple of months, I despaired about how much work I'd have to do, and how busy I was with other stuff, while he cajoled me into permanently switching, and convinced me to use Google Apps for my mail (instead of running postfix on my own server). Finally, in December 2009, I broke the work of switching servers into a handful of tasks (transfer bash configuration, transfer Apache configuration, set up Google Apps, set up DNS, etc.) and completed one every couple of days. I was soon finished, with a fresh Ubuntu server, and once I was satisfied that I'd never have to look at my old yucky server again, I sent a wonderful mail to [Dedicated Server Company] canceling my account, and excoriating them for (a) their high cost (probably reasonable for a corporation; not for an individual - I was partially insane in 2004 though), (b) their bandwidth overuse charge (at 1.25 USD/GB, an order of magnitude greater than [Virtual Server Company]'s 0.15 USD/GB - being virtualized doesn't lower their bandwidth costs so a buck per gig in 2010 is definitely highway robbery), and (c) their utter inability to send an automated notification when I went over my bandwidth limit, despite the fact that it'd take a drunken teenager about 10 minutes to code that in Python.
Best of all, [Virtual Server Company] costs me only 18 USD/mo. My friend saved me 3684 USD/yr. (And reduced the necessary size of my retirement fund by about 74k USD, the way that I calculate it. That is a lot of money.) Procrastinating for so many months, if not years, was one of the most irrational things I've ever done (and I pride myself on my rationality), but the activation energy of maybe a day's worth of work in total seemed more expensive to me than thousands of dollars.
I did learn something to reduce my future activation energy, though. This time, I wrote down every single thing that I did while setting up my Ubuntu server, so that I could replicate the process on demand (to upgrade Ubuntu - I don't yet trust the process for doing so in place - or to switch companies, not that I'll be doing the latter, since I love [Virtual Server Company]). That's already come in handy as I've upgraded versions once. Whenever I modify my configuration (like when I discovered the magic trick to get "cls" working in PuTTY as it does in Windows), I'm careful to update my notes, so I don't lose anything.
That was really interesting to read, thanks. It sounds like you are or at least were at one point on the way to becoming a (semi)competent sysadmin. Any advice on how one does that for those who think it'd be nice to have a marketable skill that can be learned to employable levels in 3-6 months?