There are many things I would like to do, or even to make a habit of doing… and yet I procrastinate a lot.
Yeah, I know, pretty uncommon, right?
It’s pretty easy to find, either here or elsewhere, a lot of methods to fight procrastination, that work more or less well. Most of those will involve, at least as part of the process, things like making to-do lists, or generally some kind of writing down that [some specific thing] is what you want to be productive about, what you want to get done. Similarly (and sometimes even more so) with things that aren’t obviously to-do lists, like Beeminder, where you have to commit to having a look at your goal page every day and keep a log of how you’ve been doing.
In my case, it seems like most of what these things do is to create aversion and defeat their own purpose.
I’ve tried Beeminder, failed to keep up with my commitment once, read that post about how it was no reason to give up entirely… and gave up anyway. Beeminder was now something I could fail, so I started to avoid thinking of it, to avoid thinking of that commitment. I still have that goal there on the app, and have been dutifully adding a data point every day, but at this point I’m just making them up. I’ve similarly tried making to-do lists, but they just seem to drift away from me like stereotypical New Year resolutions, which I assume is again some kind of avoidance: do I want to be reminded every day that I won’t have the time to do everything I’ve got to do, after all? Do I want to see yesterday’s tasks pile up at the top of this morning’s list? No! And so, it starts with ‘finally, a convenient system to keep track of my goals!’, and I do it for a day, two days, a week… and then two weeks later I’ve forgotten about it entirely. (me suddenly remembering a cool new tool for making to-do list I was supposedly using may or may not have been what sparked the writing of this question…).
As I’m writing this, I realise I’m talking about the phenomenon of avoidance in general much more than about to-do list and similar tools specifically. Maybe I’m just worse at avoidance than other people, and the goal-tracking systems at my disposal are already as good as those get? That’s very much a possibility. Yet, productivity issues and issues with achieving goals similar to what I’m describing seem both common and likely to be often caused by the same sort of avoidance mechanisms I’m talking about, so maybe people who design productivity and goal-tracking systems did find a way to solve that problem?
Hence my question: is there a better way? Are there good goal-tracking systems that won’t create that kind of avoidance? Or other advice on how to minimise avoidance in goal-tracking?
If we define when you usually wake up as 06:00 (regardless of what time everyone else thinks it is) getting light in your eyes between 23:00 and 05:00 tends to sap motivation (the next day and the days after that) via a mechanism well-explored by neuroscientists involving signals sent from the eye to the habenula and then on to the "motivational circuits" -- especially blue light and especially especially UV light, which incandescents and fluorescents emit a little of, but LED lights emit none of (so if you might shine a light in the middle of the night, make sure it is an LED light, preferably a yellowish or orange-ish one).
The same exposure to light also makes it harder to get to sleep at normal or healthy hour the next night, which tempts you to keep a light on because lying awake in the dark when you should be sleeping but cannot is boring, which of course perpetuates the cycle.
Avoiding superstimuli and avoiding light in the middle of the night are the first interventions most people should try for increasing "dopamine and consequently motivation and drive", but there are many other levers you could pull, and Andrew Huberman seems to be an expert on the subject.