A year and a half ago I wrote a LessWrong post on anti-akrasia that generated some great discussion. Here's an extended version of that post: messymatters.com/akrasia
And here's an abstract:
The key to beating akrasia (i.e., procrastination, addiction, and other self-defeating behavior) is constraining your future self -- removing your ability to make decisions under the influence of immediate consequences. When a decision involves some consequences that are immediate and some that are distant, humans irrationally (no amount of future discounting can account for it) over-weight the immediate consequences. To be rational you need to make the decision at a time when all the consequences are distant. And to make your future self actually stick to that decision, you need to enter into a binding commitment. Ironically, you can do that by imposing an immediate penalty, by making the distant consequences immediate. Now your impulsive future self will make the decision with all the consequences immediate and presumably make the same decision as your dispassionate current self who makes the decision when all the consequences are distant. I argue that real-world commitment devices, even the popular stickK.com, don't fully achieve this and I introduce Beeminder as a tool that does.
(Also related is this LessWrong post from last month, though I disagree with the second half of it.)
My new claim is that akrasia is simply irrationality in the face of immediate consequences. It's not about willpower nor is it about a compromise between multiple selves. Your true self is the one that is deciding what to do when all the consequences are distant. To beat akrasia, make sure that's the self that's calling the shots.
And although I'm using the multiple selves / sub-agents terminology, I think it's really just a rhetorical device. There are not multiple selves in any real sense. It's just the one true you whose decision-making is sometimes distorted in the presence of immediate consequences, which act like a drug.
Thing is, I don't think this actually happens. When I'm being productive and not procrastinating, and I try to sit back and analyze why I'm "on" that day, I might attribute it to something like "hmm, long-term desires seem to be overriding short-term desires today, clearly this is the key". As if, for whatever reason, my short-term self was on vacation that day. My belief is that what's happening is something much more fundamental, and something that we actually have much less control over than we think; the conditions for not-procrastinating were already in place, and I later added on justifications like, "man, I really need to listen to far mode!". This is why, when I'm having a day where I am procrastinating, those same thoughts just don't move me. It's not the thought that's actually determining your actions ("My desire to make an A in this class SHOULD BE stronger than my desire to comment on Less Wrong, so therefore I am going to override my desire to play on the internet to do work instead"), but the conditions that allow for the generation of those thoughts. I think that's why telling myself "I don't want to do this problem set, but I know I need to" doesn't actually move me....until it does.
YMMV, of course. Others might be able to induce mental states of productivity by thinking really hard that they want to be productive, but I sure can't. It's either there or it isn't. I can't explain why it's there sometimes, but if you ask me in a productive mode why I'm able to get so much more done, well, it's just obvious that far mode is more important.
This reminds me a lot of Experiential Pica.
I agree with you that the issue for most people is motivation management, not time management- say I have 30-40 hours a week during which I could sit down to do homework, but I only have 10 hours a week during which if I sit down to do homework, homework will actually be completed. Once I acknowledge that, I can spend those other 20-30 hours a week doing things more valuable than looking at my homework and not doing it.
But I think we have more control over that than we think. Within this model, if I spend 20 of th... (read more)