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SarahC comments on How I Lost 100 Pounds Using TDT - Less Wrong
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It seems to me that one needs to place a large amount of trust in one's future self to implement such a strategy. It also requires that you be able to predict your future self's utility function. If you have a difficult time predicting what you will want and how you will feel, it becomes difficult to calculate the utility of any given precomittment. For example, I would be unconvinced that deciding to eat a donut now means that I will eat a donut every day and that not eating a donut now means I will not eat a donut every day. Knowing that I want a donut now and will be satisfied with that seems like an immediate win, while I do not know that I will be fat later. To me this seems like trading a definite win for a definite loss + potential bigger win. Also, it is not clear that there wouldn't be other effects. Not eating the donut now might make me dissatisfied and want to eat twice as much later in the day to compensate. If I knew exactly what the effects of action EAT DONUT vs NOT EAT DONUT were (including mental duress, alternative pitfalls to avoid, etc), then I would be better able to pick a strategy. The more predictable you are, the more you can plan a strategy that makes sense in the long term. In the absence of this information, most of just 'wing it' and do what seems best at the given moment. It would seem that deciding to be a TDT agent is deciding to always be predictable in certain ways. But that also requires trusting that future you will want to stick to that decision.
This is exactly right, which is why I suggest documenting how you respond to different behaviors. I think that it's only partly deciding to be predictable; it's also noticing in which ways you already ARE predictable. In a lot of aspects of life, there are patterns in your behavior, you just haven't noticed them yet.
I pretty much know how little I can eat before it becomes unsustainable/distracting. This is the advantage of actually keeping a record. (I might be able to push below that threshold but at the moment it doesn't seem worthwhile.) I also have noticed that I eat better when constrained by rules than when trying to follow "good judgment." EAT DONUT, in particular, is bad for me.
I've also made observations about how I feel on different amounts of sleep, and how many hours of work I can maintain before going crazy. (It's much easier for me to "push" on my work capacity than to "push" on food past a certain point.)
In other words: it's worth it to try to know yourself better so that you know what "EAT DONUT" will do to you.
What methods do you usually use to keep track of stuff like this? I can well believe that documenting my calories, sleep, exercise, work, etc. would more than pay for itself in terms of hours and dollars, but I'm a little concerned about the upfront willpower/morale investment...I'd feel a little crazy keeping such rigorous track of what I'm doing, and it would help me overcome that feeling if I knew, in detail, what somebody else had done and why/how it worked for her.
I'm especially curious as to whether and how you make any effort to measure the quality of your hours/calories...if you work an hour while distracted, do you count that the same as if you were focused? If you sleep an hour from 10 am to 11 am, do you count that the same as if you sleep an hour from 2 am to 3 am? And so on.
I'm less quantified than I could be, but enough that it makes a big difference over "nothing." I log hours on Joe's Goals; I have to count distracted hours the same as focused ones (what else would I do?) but I make up for it by also counting tasks completed.
Sleep I don't log regularly, except that now I notice what time I go to bed (I didn't before!) so that I'm actually aware of how many hours I sleep a night.
At least a partial answer is here.