Share Your Anti-Akrasia Tricks

Vladimir_Golovin

Share Your Anti-Akrasia Tricks — LessWrong

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My post didn't come out quite how I intended. It reads like an angry rhetorical question, when it's supposed to be a sincere request for context. I'm baffled by the depth that people go into probing self-help ideas, talking in abstract vaguenesses of "getting things done" without revealing and explaining the personal goals that the techniques are supposed to help them achieve.

Given your profession and obsessive interest in the field PJ, perhaps you can give some examples of the sorts of objectives people need Akrasia-fighting techniques to accomplish? The examples I gave were humorous and the tone provocative, designed to draw out real goals from real practitioners. It was misjudged and looks like MPF, but that wasn't the intention.

I realise my request for examples of people's goals isn't exactly on-topic, but I find it almost impossible to understand the "tricks" and "secrets" people talk about on this topic when it's so divorced from the context of their specific goals. Let's have some examples to help those like me get what you're talking about. You first.

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olimay17y50

Here's my context:

I failed out of a prestigious university (rather, I threw myself out before they could) because I just couldn't get work done. (Underachieving, chronically disorganized, call me whatever.) In the process I also ran myself into a huge amount of debt (did I mention I'd been in and out of there for six years before I quit?)

I run into repeated difficulty doing things most people find easy: sitting down and getting work done, waking up in the morning, estimating the amount of time it will take to get somewhere. I want to change the present cou... (read more)

2glenra17y

I'll bite. "Get (back) in shape" is one of my big specific goals. If I can significantly improve (and then maintain!) my physical condition this year there is a good chance I will have the opportunity to perform in an off-Broadway show. Which would be a significant-to-me artistic achievement - and there's a looming deadline. One difficulty there is forcing myself to exercise as much as is appropriate to the situation. "Create and publish my first iPhone application" is another goal. That one really tends to gets off track since it involves using a computer, which means it's easy to get sidetracked by email or reddit or stackoverflow or lesswrong. I know once I get "in the zone" on that sort of task it's hard to stop, but I'm not there yet - I'm at the early, frustrating stage of the project. Also: keeping up and/or improving various artistic skills that might or might not culminate in future public performance... reading technical texts to keep up in my field...that's probably enough for a start.

4Z_M_Davis17y

P. J. Eby nailed it: anything worth doing, is worth doing better. All the activities you mention in your first post qualify as examples, as does any other activity. If you've pledged your life towards curing AIDS, then you should strive to do ever better at that until the menace of the syndrome is utterly rid from this world. Or you mention having the curiosity to read books. But it is not enough simply that one reads books. We want to read more books, and the right books in the right order! A human life is so ridiculously short compared to the possibilities existence has to offer. I say it is a horrible tragedy that a person should die without finishing that sudoku solver, or getting all the stars in Super Mario Galaxy---if that's what she would have truly cared about on reflection. And if it isn't, then it's a horrible tragedy that she had spent time on the sudoku solver or the video game instead of working on what she would have cared most desperately about on reflection.

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Share Your Anti-Akrasia Tricks

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Share Your Anti-Akrasia Tricks

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