pjeby comments on Share Your Anti-Akrasia Tricks - Less Wrong
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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:
I've effectively used a variation of this: setting a daily deadline for when all work must be finished, following which I will do something (specifically planned in advance) that I enjoy. It's like being about to go on vacation.
These ideas could both be considered variations on Neil Fiore's concept of the "unschedule", and there are other authors/speakers who've promoted the idea of clearly separating work/non-work days, e.g. Eben Pagan's "Altitude" and "Wake Up Productive" programs.
For some reason, I find it hard to negotiate with myself over chunks of time shorter than a day. If I tell myself I'll goof off after dinner, I'll have dinner early; if I tell myself I'll goof off after six p.m., I'll dither until six p.m. But a day begins when I wake up and ends when I go to bed. Conveniently, my desire to stay up late persists even if I'm staying up late doing work.
Two important distinctions:
I frame it as, "I have to stop working at X pm", not "I'll goof off at X pm". This presupposes that I'm going to be working and what's more, that I don't want to stop working (otherwise, I wouldn't "have to").
I don't "goof off" (an unspecified activity), I have a book that I've planned to read, a show to watch, etc. -- thus it is a specific thing that I "have to stop work" for at that time.
This is a good example, btw, of how self-help techniques easily go awry, as there are often many subtleties to why/how something works.
That's not to say that these changes will definitely make it work for you; as I've commented before, it's trivial to defeat a technique simply by expecting something else to happen or thinking that it's probably not going to work!
But you'll notice that what makes it work (or not work) in both our cases has a lot to do with what we expect our behavior to be, and how we frame those expectations. And those expectations tend to hinge on fine details, rather than abstract concepts.
These techniques seem to be related to the idea of an "unschedule".