Downvoted for proposing a poisonous idea. There IS an obvious and common dichotomy between being productive and experiencing positive emotions and pretending that it isn't there is bullshit that will only cause people to burn out and be even less productive AND less happy. Yours is the kind of attitude that leads people to say "I can never be as good as this amazing guy so I won't even try". Satisficing morality and happiness separately will get us far more of both.

You certainly can find productive tasks enjoyable, but it's common to find productive tasks unenjoyable. People don't hang out with each other because it's productive (except when networking), they hang out because it's fun. The fact that it's good for your health is a bonus, but isn't and shouldn't be the primary motivation.

Having fun is certainly something that you can do, but that doesn't mean that it is obviously morally optimal.

Not obviously morally optimal, but it is actually morally optimal, for a broad enough sense of "having fun". But I say this as an ethical egoist.

I find that doing fun things like web surfing makes unenjoyable work more bearable, even though it takes longer. And I do think that most productivity posts are about more than not spending time on the Internet - there's a lot about how to cut down on social time and "fun" so you can be as productive as possible.

Thanks very much for this. My primary motivation to be productive seems to come from seeing the stories of inspirational, productive people, so this is a big motivator to continue to work hard.

All the productivity posts on LW that I've read, I found mildly disturbing. They all give a sense of excessive regimentation, as well as giving up enjoyable activity - sacrificing a lot for a single goal (or a few goals). I'm sure it's good for getting work done, but there's more to life than work - there's actually enjoying life, having fun, etc.

I play it by feel. I tend to wake up feeling refreshed after 7.5h. If I grow tired during the day, I take a nap. In my experience, napping during the day leads to less need for sleep on the following night. I avoid alarms and I trust my body to know what it's doing. Perhaps I will do more experimentation in the future.

it would be more effective to get more sleep.

If you are sleep-deprived getting more sleep is very effective at raising your performance. If you already get enough sleep, sleeping more won't help and might even decrease it.

7.5h, my sleep schedule is quite regular. I tend to wake up naturally, and use a wake up light in the winter to wake up to a well-lit room.

What do these have to do with rationality?

Rationality includes instrumental rationality, and imaginary friends can be useful for e.g. people who are lonely.

deluding yourself into believing it has autonomy

Not sure of what exactly you mean by "autonomy" here, but there are plenty of processes going on in people's brains which are in some sense autonomous from one's conscious mind. Like the person-emulating circuitry that tulpas are likely born from: if I get a sudden feeling that my friend would disapprove of something I was doing, the process responsible for generating that feeling took autonomous action without me consciously prompting it. And I haven't noticed people suggesting that tulpas would necessarily need to be much more autonomous than that.

that if revealed to other people would make them concerned about your mental well-being

Someone might make his social circle concerned over his mental well-being if he revealed himself to be an atheist. Simply the fact that other people may be prejudiced against something is no strong reason for not doing said something, especially something that is trivial to hide. Also, the fact that tulpas are already a somewhat common mental quirk among a high-status subgroup (writers) can make it easier to calm people's concerns.

So, I have a tulpa, and she is willing to answer any questions people might have for her. She's not properly independent yet, so we can't do the more interesting stuff like parallel processing, etc, unfortunately (damned akrasia).