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

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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (117)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: JamesCole 17 May 2009 10:54:43AM 3 points [-]

For instance often in the morning I'll often take a while to get working despite the fact my willpower reserves should be near full.

If you do a lot of work during the day you may end up getting exhausted and having little willpower left. But that in itself doesn't mean that you start off with a full tank in the morning and it gets slowly depleted as time goes on or as you do more work.

I suspect that you probably start off with a bit less willpower in the morning, and that it can go up and down in range throughout the day in response to what happens. For example, if you have a lot of frustration, that may make it go down, whereas if you have some wins that might make it go up. I'm not denying that eventually the work will start draining your willpower, though.

I also think that getting things done is less a matter of having sufficient willpower, and more one of structuring tasks so as to remove, as much as possible, the need for willpower.

I think that our bodies/brains are designed to take on smaller, more concrete tasks that are familiar to us, and of a sort that work towards the sorts of goals our brains are wired (by evolution) to work towards. The more a task (or our perception of a task, actually) grates with this, the more willpower is required to undertake it.

So the trick is to structure things so that they're more like what our brains are suited to.