PhilGoetz comments on Share Your Anti-Akrasia Tricks - Less Wrong

20 Post author: Vladimir_Golovin 15 May 2009 07:06PM

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Comment author: Alicorn 15 May 2009 08:11:24PM *  33 points [-]

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:

  • It prevents the low-level burnout that used to plague me. I can decompress from whatever heavy mental lifting I do regularly and for a large chunk of time.
  • I actually enjoy most of my work when I actually do it, so obliging myself not to do it lets me get through the akratic aversion during my downtime. By the time I wake up on my work day, I've worked up a fair amount of antsiness about wanting to do something productive. Also, my creative ideas accumulate over time, not over effort; I have more interesting work-related ideas by the time I fire up Word when I've set the project aside for a day.
  • I can goof off more efficiently. Instead of spending all day on Stumbleupon because I can keep telling myself "one more site and then really, I'll do something", I can read an entire novel or bake a cheesecake or watch half a season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. These things require significant time commitments, so if I feel like I ought to be working I don't do them, but when I do them, they are more relaxing than the same amount of time in two-minute bursts spent obsessively refreshing Google Reader or checking my website stats or bothering people on IM.
Comment author: PhilGoetz 17 May 2009 01:06:14AM 4 points [-]

Mine is a weird one: I started taking every other day off.

Can you tell my boss about that one?

Comment author: hrishimittal 17 May 2009 01:07:39PM *  4 points [-]

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!

Comment author: MrShaggy 18 May 2009 08:33:42PM 4 points [-]

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.

Comment author: hrishimittal 19 May 2009 11:28:11AM 0 points [-]

Thanks. I'll check it out.