PhilGoetz 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:
Can you tell my boss about that one?
I'm seriously thinking about asking my boss about that one. With a pro-rata decrease in salary, of course.
The extra money just doesn't seem to be worth the constant struggle with myself. Plus I think it would be good to start at a level I'm comfortable with and build on that. By forcing myself to work at a rate I'm clearly incapable of, I'm losing out on all the positive feedback that comes from small successes.
To draw a crude analogy, air pollution modelling is as hard a problem for me as say, AI is for EY. And if he needed to take every other day off once upon a time,...
EDIT: PS I have been reading OB/LW for a while but have started commenting here only recently. Hello everyone!
You would probably like Ferris's Four hour workweek, has an example of how to get your boss to let you work from home and stuff like that. Not the same as above, but similar enough to help you.
Thanks. I'll check it out.