On each day that the clocks go forward or backward:

• change my master passwords
• pour a carton of bleach down the external drains

As I said elsewhere, learning a language is likely to make it easier to learn another one later on; also, some languages are more influential than others, so if you choose to learn German or French (if you're in Europe) or Spanish (in America) you have a non-negligible probability of finding the very language you chose useful in the future.

If you plan to never, ever live in a non-English-speaking place, yeah, learning languages other than English is not terribly useful. Anyway, the utility function is not up for grabs, so if the reason I'm learning Irish is because I want to considerations of usefulness are not too relevant.

Perhaps the only way to train yourself to achieve long-term goals is to use short-term motivation to improve your automatic behaviours, instead of trying to train ourselves to have motivational systems that work on long-term multi-step plans.

What if we broke down the action steps of your algorithm into:

• ask yourself what kind of person achieves goals like this by habit
• ask yourself how you could change yourself into that kind of person, perhaps by establishing new habits
• evaluate whether your new habits are effectively causing you to do things that work towards your goal.

So, forget about long-term plans. Instead select and implement short-term plans that:

• incrementally improve your position, so more opportunities that you can act on occur.
• change bad habits into more goal-directed habits
• put you into situations where you are likely to take actions that further your goals, automatically
• increase your intrinsic enjoyment of things that are directed towards your goals

So, for example, starting a startup is less Step 1 of a Grand Plan to become a millionaire, and more a way to put yourself in a situation where you will have to do things that you think help towards becoming a millionaire, and will change you into more the kind of person who does things that make you a millionaire.

Of course, this whole thing is just one big long-term plan after all :) But it's a more specific one.

Cylons

People who choose torture, if the question was instead framed as the following would you still choose torture?

"Assuming you know your lifespan will be at least 3^^^3 days, would you choose to experience 50 years worth of torture, inflicted a day at a time at intervals spread evenly across your life span starting tomorrow, or one dust speck a day for the next 3^^^3 days of your life?"

This year I've quadrupled the amount of structured meta thinking I do, compared to last year, and I have seen a big improvement in my ability to make and stick to goals. So I think more meta-thinking can help you get more done, if you have a problem with sticking to resolutions, as I do. Probably the meta-thinking has to have a point to it, though.

But I've also been amused at just how much meta-thinking it takes for me to achieve a goal. Like, currently, achieving brushing my teeth more would take hours and hours of thinking about brushing my teeth, considering adopting the goal of brushing my teeth more, motivating myself to brush more, expressing "brushing more" as a pithy phrase, tracking my brushing daily, reviewing my brushing track record weekly etc etc.

So, in future I'd definitely like to reduce the ratio of meta-thinking to goal-achieving, by a lot, but still, I'm getting more done with more meta-thinking at the moment.

Edit: come to think of it, I could stand to brush my teeth more.

See 'How to Beat Procrastination' for details on that and the other subskills mentioned here.

You mention trying techniques for getting more energy. Can you elaborate?

Good stuff! My algorithm is essentially identical. I also made a poster that summarizes the key advice/methods for defeating procrastination. It's my version of Step 2, 3 and 4, but visually displayed. I put it up on my wall so I don't have to rely on my memory of the equation or the various anti-procrastination methods. I circle or note the things that tend to work well and focus on using those. When I notice I'm procrastinating, the solution is usually staring me right in the face.

In case anyone else finds it useful, here is the graphic I made from the advice in Steel's The Procrastination Equation and Luke's How to Beat Procrastination. Any suggestions of things to add/modify/remove are welcome. Update: the graphic (plus a pdf version) is explained in more detail here.